Film Review: How To Fix a Primary

 Inside an Outsider’s Campaign

That American politics is an insider’s game (preferably a rich or well-funded insider, at that) will surprise no one, but in case you’ve never seen it in action, writer/director Brittany Huckabee enlightens you in “How To Fix a Primary,” a documentary that uses Michigan’s 2018 primary for the governor’s job as her example.

Six candidates filed, three Republicans and three Democrats, but the film concentrates on the three Democratic front-runners: Gretchen Whitmer, Progressive Abdul El-Sayed and Shri Thanedar, a rich self-funded entrepreneur who contributed $10.6 million to his own campaign. Huckabee is primarily interested in El-Sayed and Whitmer.

Whitmer is favored by the Democratic establishment, but El-Sayed attracts a staff of mostly younger, enthusiastic progressives who are attracted to his ideas, energy and personal charm. An epidemiologist born to Egyptian immigrants in metropolitan Detroit, he is a Muslim who hopes to attract Michigan’s 271,000 potential Muslim voters. 

                                            Candidate Abdul El-Sayed
 

But he lacks big money, so winning statewide will be a tough job. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him, and he is hoping for the big endorsement from Bernie Sanders.

But meanwhile, there’s funding, and that’s where corruption and fixing come in. El-Sayed has no big donors. Whitmer is in better shape, married to the onetime CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

The way to cheat, Huckabee tells us, is to create a dark-money PAC and let that contribute to the must-be-reported legal 527 PAC. El-Sayed’s Progressive campaign doesn’t want to take big corporate PAC money, which puts him at a huge financial disadvantage.

Meanwhile, there’s the business of talking to voters, something El-Sayed does almost as well as Whitmer, though she has the advantage of a program slogan that precedes her everywhere – “Fix the damn roads!” – that speaks to everybody.

But let’s face it, the business of politics is broken and needs to be fixed. Big donors want big payoffs, and routinely get them. This inevitably changes what we like to call democracy into a buyers’ market. Whether it can or will be changed by a group who have won elections this way, only time will tell.

But “How To Fix a Primary” is a good introduction to the problem.

"How To Fix a Primary" opens Oct. 20, 2020 on Apple TV and iTunes.

P.S. I've just found out that PBS has done a much more in-depth exposé of how Dark Money works on "The Democracy Rebellion: A Reporter's Notebook with Hedrick Smith."