Why I Started Looking

The founding essay

I didn't set out to start anything. I set out to answer a question.

Every election, someone blames the people who didn't vote. So I went looking for why they didn't. What I found was a system that schools the poor less, jails them more, takes away their votes, counts their votes for less, and then calls them lazy for staying home.

58% of Americans told Gallup in 2024 that we need a third major party. I understand why. But I don't think the answer is one more team. I think it's better information for every voter, and a fair shot at using it.

That's what The Way is: a nonpartisan research and voter-guide project for voters in every state. We don't endorse candidates. We don't rate politicians by party. We read the actual laws, follow the actual money, and show our work.

Why “The Way”

The name comes from an old idea. In Chinese it's Dao. In Japanese it's michi. Both mean “the way,” or “the path.”

Everything has its own way, yet The Way is the same for everyone.

Rich or poor, city or farm, left or right, in every state, we're in this country together and we go where it goes.

So when someone asks what we stand for, the answer is simple: this is the way. And when someone asks us to do something shady, the answer is simple too. That is not the way.

Why Japanese for an American-focused website?

Fair question. The Way is about American voters, and it carries a Japanese word, michi (道).

Because America has always worked that way. This is a country built by people from everywhere, and it runs best when it borrows the best of what they brought. Our own motto, on the Great Seal since 1782, says it: E pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” The numbers we count with started in India and reached Europe through Middle Eastern mathematicians. Paper is traditionally credited to a Chinese court official, Cai Lun. The founders leaned on a Frenchman, Montesquieu, for the idea of splitting government into branches, and Madison cites him by name in Federalist No. 47. I read Adam Smith, a Scot, and Karl Marx, a German, and learn something from both.

The word michi came into my life through martial arts, where it means a path you walk and keep walking. The same character is Dao in Chinese. I never found an English word that says it better. So I kept it, the way English keeps “algebra” and “pizza” and “kindergarten.”

That's the whole point. A good idea doesn't have a passport. If it helps people, we'll use it, whichever culture it came from, and we'll say where we got it.

How we decide what’s true

Logic, math, and the most good for the most people. We don't start with a team. We start with a question: what does the most good for the most people?

Then we do the math. For every policy and every ballot measure we study, we ask four things.

Who gains?
Who pays?
How much, in dollars and in lives?
Can we show our work?

If a claim can't answer all four in plain English, we say so.

One more piece of math matters. A dollar means more to someone who has less. $1,000 is a rounding error to a millionaire. To a family living paycheck to paycheck, it's rent. So when we measure who gains and who pays, we look hardest at the people at the bottom. They're the ones with the least room for error.

What The Way does

A voter guide you can trust. Ballot measures and races in every state, explained from the official text: what it does, what it costs, the strongest case for and against, in plain English. We're building it state by state. No “vote yes.” No “vote no.” You decide.
The Observatory. A public record of what government actually did: the law, the vote, the money, and what happened next. The same rules for every official, every party, and every state.
Records that don't disappear. When we correct something, the old version stays visible with the date and the reason. Nothing gets quietly rewritten.
No login needed to read any of it.

What I believe, and what we’ll test

I have opinions. Here they are, labeled as mine. The Way as an organization doesn't take a platform. These are the questions I want it to research honestly, and some of my answers may not survive the research.

Open trade. In 1990, about 38% of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, it was 8.5%. That's over a billion fewer people, mostly in China, India and the rest of Asia, as they opened up to trade and markets. I think a tariff is a tax that lands on whoever is buying. The question for The Way: who really pays for each tariff, and who really loses when trade opens up?

Lift the bottom first. Economist Raj Chetty found that 90% of Americans born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. For those born in the 1980s, it's about 50%. A coin flip. The question: which policies put the rungs back on that ladder, and which ones only sound like they do?

Simpler taxes and a public receipt. Americans spend about six billion hours a year on tax paperwork, time taken mostly from people who can't afford an accountant. I'd like every taxpayer to get a receipt showing what their money paid for. The question: where does the money go now, in plain English, line by line?

Public lending. 42.7 million Americans owe over $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank since 1919, the only one in the country. The question: could public lending at cost, for school, a first home or a small business, save people money, and what would it really cost?

Votes that count. About 73% of eligible Americans are registered to vote. Canada, which builds its list from government records, is over 95%. We vote on a working Tuesday; most rich democracies don't. 19 states have banned ranked choice voting. The question: which rules make it harder for the poor and for minorities to vote, or make their votes count for less, and what changes when those rules change?

Who I learn from

I take good ideas wherever I find them. Two of the best economists were Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and they agreed on more than people think.

Adam Smith, the father of free markets, warned in 1776 that a worker doing the same simple task all day could become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” His fix was public schools. “For a very small expense,” he wrote, the public could help almost everyone get the basics of an education.

I think Marx was a good economist and had some good ideas. He saw that money piles up: “One capitalist always kills many.” That's an argument for real competition and against monopolies. He backed free trade in 1848, because it broke down old walls between countries. And he called for a public bank, which North Dakota has now run for over a hundred years.

That doesn't make me a communist, any more than reading Smith makes me a robber baron. It makes me someone who reads.

And to be clear, Marx's economics is about money, work and class. The Way isn't a culture-war project. Who you love and how you live is your business, not ours. We're here about the paycheck, the vote, and the budget.

Our own receipt

Every group says it's for the people. Then it takes the money. So we hold ourselves to this:

We publish every dollar in and every dollar out, the same way we want the government's budget published.
We take no money from political parties, candidates or campaign committees.
We don't endorse candidates.
No one at The Way gets rich from it.

If we ever stop doing this, call us on it. We'll deserve it.

Where the hard parts are

We said we'd show our work, so here's where it gets hard.

Free trade has losers. When factories moved overseas, whole towns in every region took years to recover, and some never did. The country as a whole came out ahead, but that doesn't help the worker whose plant closed. Any honest look at trade has to count him too.
Lower taxes and better schools pull in opposite directions. You can't know what to cut or keep until the budget is in plain sight. That's why transparency comes first.
Nothing is free. Public lending at zero interest still costs someone something. We'll show the math, and if the math says no, we'll say so.
Staying neutral is hard. Everyone has a side, including me. That's why we publish our sources and methods, keep every correction on the record, and hold every party to the same rules.

Have pity for the minority

Have pity for the minority. Not one group. Every kind: the poor, the people without a car, the people on one radio station and no broadband, the rural and the urban, the ones locked out of the vote. In some state or town, each of us is in the minority. Lift them, and the whole country rises.