Agents of Change: Shaping a Resilient Democracy
Q&A with Maryfrances Metrick and Rex VanMiddlesworth
Both Maryfrances Metrick and Rex VanMiddlesworth are Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellows, leveraging their extensive professional backgrounds to address critical challenges and create positive societal change. Metrick achieved professional success in alternative investments, focusing on Investor Relations and Business Development at Blackstone and Centerbridge. She is a board member of Foward Party. VanMiddlesworth practiced law at O’Melveny & Myers, specializing in constitutional litigation, energy law, and administrative litigation. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he served as a teaching fellow in constitutional law under Archibald Cox. He serves on the national board of Keep Our Republic, a non-partisan civic education organization.
In the following Q&A, these leaders discuss the opportunities and challenges to our democracy.
Q: In an era of increasing political polarization and democratic strain, can you describe your approach and unique strategy to strengthening democratic infrastructure?
Maryfrances Metrick: As we evaluate the election and our ability to solve serious problems confronting us, we need to consider if structural changes in our system are needed, including whether the existing two-party system serves our national interest. According to a Gallup Poll, the majority of voters do not consider themselves to be a member of either party. In business, we would view such a situation as ripe for a new competitor. I am a Board Member and Co-Chair of the Finance Committee for the Forward Party. The Forward Party provides the infrastructure for principled individuals to run for office as candidates who seek — pragmatic, data-driven, collaborative solutions without regard to ideology while affirming a commitment to democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law. For those unfamiliar with the Forward Party, we formed in July 2022, a merger of groups from across the ideological spectrum: the Renew America Movement (RAM), represented by former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; Serve America Movement (SAM), represented by business leader Michael Willner from the center; and the original Forward Party, represented by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
In 2024, we evaluated 500 candidates, endorsed 125, and 25% of them won office. Together with the election wins we achieved in 2024, our list of elected Forward or Forward-affiliated candidates now numbers 70. We were not involved in the presidential race, yet we continue to develop party infrastructure and recruit candidates for office.
Rex VanMiddlesworth: I am co-chair of the Anti-Subversion Task Force for the organization Keep Our Republic. The Task Force is a bipartisan team of more than 30 election lawyers, legal scholars, and former judges and elected officials. We are dedicated to identifying vulnerabilities in our presidential election system and preparing responses to ensure that the will of the voters is respected. We were focused on preventing and, if necessary, responding to attacks on the electoral system and ensuring that the choice of the voters was respected.
The 2020 election exposed serious vulnerabilities in our presidential election system. For almost 150 years, losing candidates from both parties had conceded defeat in presidential elections and declined to exploit mechanisms for overturning the result. But those mechanisms existed, and they were ticking time bombs, ready to be weaponized by any candidate willing to break the norms that traditionally held our presidential election system together.
As the 2024 elections approached, there was a real possibility that the president and vice president would be chosen not by the voters but by lawyers, judges, politicians, and political operatives who could game the system. We focused on identifying and guarding against more than a dozen vulnerabilities in our election system, from local officials refusing to certify results to members of Congress seeking to disallow electoral votes from key states.
Q: What do you identify as the underlying causes of the challenges you are addressing, and what opportunities do you see for creating meaningful change?
Metrick: Americans are losing trust in all institutions, including the two legacy political parties. As Harvard Kennedy School Professor Dr. Archon Fung has put it, the loss of trust “may stem from perceptions that politicians and parties have lost touch, that these actors are beholden to some, unresponsive to many, corrupt, or simply ineffective.” This same sentiment has been called out by pollster Frank Luntz, who adds that voters feel “ignored,” “forgotten,” and “betrayed,” and as Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter have written, the two parties, in fact, have become power sources unto themselves. To see this lack of trust demonstrated, look no further than the 40-45% of Americans who don’t affiliate with either party, representing a significant plurality of the electorate.
We can even question whether we have a competitive electoral system, when in 39 states one party controls all three branches of government. What’s more, in the 500,000-plus state and local races across the US, 70% are uncontested and 10% have no one running for office.
To have a healthy democracy, voters need competitive elections in which new ideas are tested. The two-party system is not responsive to the voters; hence nearly half of voters no longer identify with either party and party efforts to achieve loyalty drives polarization.
Candidates running for election without the benefit of a party structure are at a competitive disadvantage because parties provide a built-in base of support (brand value, donors, and volunteers); a pipeline of candidates; and operational infrastructure (consultants, voter data, and economies of scale). Indeed, a 2018 study found that of 431 candidates who ran without the benefit of a party structure, only 14 (or 3%) won.
Forward exists to provide the party infrastructure for qualified, data-driven, pragmatic candidates to run for office and win.
VanMiddlesworth: There are two major causes, one human and one systemic.
The human cause is that some political actors have adopted a win-at-all-costs approach, abandoning the norms that held our system together for so many years. Both Richard Nixon and Al Gore, for example, lost close elections that they believed they would have won but for irregularities in vote counting. Yet both conceded, directed their followers to accept the result as legitimate, and supported the peaceful transfer of power to their political opponents. We can no longer be assured that candidates and their supporters will follow that path.
The systemic cause lies in our decentralized and idiosyncratic system for selecting the president — a system that has numerous potential points of failure. The legitimacy of our presidential election depends on the election laws and procedures of fifty states and the District of Columbia, each of which has the authority to appoint its own electors. Within each state, there are hundreds of state and local officials who have authority over some aspect of the election, and any one of those officials could disrupt the proper counting of votes or the certification of results. After the counting and certification process, we depend on fifty governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C., to faithfully certify presidential electors, often for a candidate from the other party. In many states, electors are not legally bound to support the winning candidate from their state, so there is a risk that the election could be determined by “faithless electors.” Finally, the determination of the winner of the presidential election is in the hands of Congress, which may by simple majority reject any state’s electoral votes, as it was urged to do by the President and some Senators and House Members in January 2021.
There are three high-level solutions. First, defenders of democratic elections must prepare for attempts to subvert the will of the voters. That requires identifying potential threats well before election day and preparing appropriate legal responses to ensure that eligible voters are permitted to vote, that votes are properly counted, that local and state officials certify results, that the votes of electors in a state reflect the will of that state’s voters, and that Congress respects those results at its January 6 Joint Session. The potential threats to election results are numerous, and the timeline for responding to them is exceedingly short, so anticipation and preparation are essential.
Second, we must earn and build trust in our election system. The fuel for election subversion is the belief that the system is rigged or that an election was stolen. The response requires not only ensuring that our system is secure but countering rampant misinformation about our elections, often propagated by foreign adversaries seeking to weaken our democracy.
Third, states must amend their election laws to minimize the potential for a few bad actors to threaten a state’s electoral votes. In many states, election laws have not been updated in fifty years or more. Those election laws are vulnerable to attempts to prevent a state’s electoral votes from being counted by “running out the clock” with challenges and recounts. In some cases, they make it possible for a few determined state officials to jeopardize a state’s electoral votes.
Q: Can you outline both short-term actions and strategic, systemic approaches that you believe are critical for our democracy?
Metrick: It has been quite a while since most Americans have felt that the parties were effective in governing or representing their interests.
Forward has approximately 300,000 members, over 35,000 volunteers, ballot access in four states and partial access in a fifth state (and growing) and has scaled party infrastructure in over 25 states. The Forward Party needs candidates, volunteers, and financial contributors. Our ability to succeed and the speed of our success are dependent upon these critical factors. Longer term, we would expect Forward to be a major party and provide more choices to the voters.
While a new party might seem a daunting task — and it is — we need the moral courage and imagination to make our democracy function. It is really in our hands to make a difference. Every 60 years or so our democracy undergoes a fundamental challenge. This is our challenge, and we are obligated to rise to the occasion.
VanMiddlesworth: Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the 2024 presidential election in some ways reflected a return to normalcy. Election Day proceeded with few disruptions, the vote counting was conducted promptly, and the losing candidate conceded the day after the election. That candidate served as president of the Senate at the joint session of Congress, and, as many have done before her, proclaimed her opponent as the winner. And there are few cries of election cheating or theft. One hopes this builds trust in our election system and reinforces the norms of peacefully turning over the reins of power.
At the same time, the electoral system was not truly stress-tested this year. The electoral count was not close, and Donald Trump won both the electoral vote and the popular vote. On January 6, 2025, both houses of Congress will be in the hands of President Trump’s party. And Vice President Harris and her party campaigned on a promise to accept the election results, without condition. So, this election tells us little about what would happen if a candidate determined to win at all costs was narrowly defeated and decided to marshal their supporters to challenge the election through any means necessary. Questions remain whether our system is resilient enough to withstand such an assault, and we must be prepared in each election for that possibility.
Vulnerabilities in our system have existed since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At least three times, those vulnerabilities have created a constitutional crisis that threatened the peaceful transfer of power. The electoral college system has been described by critics as a Rube Goldberg mechanism and a ticking time bomb. So long as we have this system, there will be the potential, at least in a close election, for the efforts of a few state officials or a congress unhappy with the result to subvert the will of the voters.
There have been numerous attempts to reform our electoral college system. In 1969, with overwhelming popular support and the backing of President Nixon, the House voted 339 to 70 to adopt a national popular vote system, but the proposal died in the Senate at the hands of a filibuster. Such a proposal, which requires a constitutional amendment and the approval of 38 states, could not garner the necessary support today. There are efforts today through the National Popular Vote Initiative to establish an agreement among states with 270 electoral votes between them to cast their votes for the national popular vote winner. And there still are periodic efforts to move to a system like most other democracies that elect their chief executive through popular vote.
But in the absence of dramatic movement in reforming our electoral system, there are steps that should be taken to ensure that our current system of electing leaders functions as intended. First, voters and political parties must insist on nominating candidates who will accept the results of the election, win or lose. Second, pro-democracy organizations, elected officials, and others must prepare diligently to respond to future attempts to subvert elections. Finally, we must counter the rampant misinformation that has been deployed to foster mistrust in our election system.
History has proven that democracy does not sustain itself. Today, Americans are called upon to ensure that our democracy is passed down to future generations.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
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To learn more on related topics, please read the following articles in the Social Impact Review:
John Carroll’s opinion commentary, “Political Giving is a Sugar High”
Ambassador (Ret.) Deborah McCarthy’s interview with Mark Medish, co-founder of Keep Our Republic, “Unconventional Threats to the U.S. Electoral System and the Power of Civic Engagement“