Breaking Barriers: An Exclusive Interview with Forward Party Maryland Chair Matthew Beyers

If you haven’t heard of the Forward Party it is a new third party with the primary goal of election reform.

In Maryland, the Forward Party is currently working to become an official party and is expected to start collecting signatures mid April 2023.

I did an interview with Matthew Beyers the Chair of Citizens for the Forward Maryland which you can see below along with more information about the Forward Party and how to get involved.

You can view the Forward Party Maryland’s website here which includes a sign up for their mailing list and ways to donate.

Follow the Forward Party Maryland on Twitter here and on Facebook here.

Forward Party Principles

Diverse Thinking Isn’t Just Welcome, It’s Required — The Forward Party will welcome new ideas and fearless conversations around the issues of the day. We won’t silence debate or refuse to adapt to the modern world.

Bottom-Up, Not Top Down — The Forward Party will empower leaders to find solutions that work in their communities. We won’t dictate a rigid, top down policy platform and expect it to work for all Americans.

Come as you are — Left, Right, or Center The Forward Party will create a political home for everyone willing to set aside the partisan extremes and find practical ways to make this country better. We won’t be checking IDs to see if people are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents.

More Listening, Less Talking — The Forward Party will ask you what we can do for your community. We will not ask what your community can do for us.

Work Together, Not Against — The Forward Party will strive for collaborative solutions, make sure they work, and try something else if they don’t. We won’t ignore problems so that we can use them to drive wedges between Americans; nothing gets done when opposing views are treated like enemy positions.

Grace and Tolerance — The Forward Party will approach each other with grace and tolerance, finding ways to pick people back up rather than knock them down. We won’t cancel people or cast them out of the party for not falling in line.

Forward Party Priorities

Three priorities will unite our broad coalition and serve as the springboard for policymaking by Forward Party candidates and leaders at all levels: Ranked choice voting; Nonpartisan primaries; Independent Redistricting Commissions

Interview with Chair Matthew Beyers

What made you get started in the Forward Party personally?

I’ve just been fed up with the vitriol of both parties (the Democrats and the Republicans) for years now. It seems like they’re growing further and further apart, and they’re spouting more and more hate for each other, and there doesn’t seem to be any room for compromise. There’s not really any such thing as bipartisanship anymore. It’s “my way or the highway.”

We talk about how the house has been taken over by the Republicans. So nothing will get done by Congress now because the houses are split. This has been going on for years. And it’s just bad for our country. It’s polarizing people and pushing people further and further apart.

There are 43% of the population that are independents. They’re neither Democrats nor Republicans. And so there’s got to be some room in the middle. That’s a large number of people that are not polarized to one side or the other. There’s got to be some room in the middle.

Editors note: You can see the national party affiliation data over time from Gallup here.

Personally, I’m a native born American and a naturalized Canadian citizen, so I spent about nine years up there with my ex wife where I participated in the political system. They’ve got five or six major parties that all get elected to the National Parliament. And they figure out how to get along. It happens in Britain, and it happens in France, and it happens in Israel. They formed coalition governments, these parties have different ideals, but they figure out how to get along with each other, and I’d like to see something like that happen in our country.

So when I heard about Andrew Yang and the Forward party being announced I thought: “Oh, wow, they’re actually making a push for this. This looks like it’s gonna be a real thing.” I said, “You know what, I’m ready to try something new. I’m ready to try to find a middle ground for the majority of people. That are neither extremes.”

What do you see as some of the unique challenges in MD vs other states?

One of the unique challenges we have is that there’s no way to become a political party without getting enough signatures and even when we get enough signatures, they’re going to challenge those signatures. It’s very much set up for a two-party system. Getting on the ballot is also a challenge.

We would have to hold our own while we have to go through the whole process of becoming a party, first of all, and that on its own is difficult. The rules on that are not particularly clear. They have it buried in various parts of the code, and it’s just not set up in a nice, clean, easy fashion for anybody to figure it out. We’re gonna have to hire a lawyer, and who can read through all the code knows all the code to help us figure out what we need to do for signature collection and hope that not too many of our signatures get challenged.

The other thing is that even if we do become a party, one of our big pushes and one of our policies that we’d really like to see change is election reform. We’d like to see some sort of rank choice voting. We’d like to see some open primaries or nonpartisan primaries and the independent redistricting commissions. These things can only happen by a vote in the [State] assembly. There’s no way that I can discern for a citizen petition to make any of these things happen. Even if we elect a member or two we need to have a majority in the House or and in the Senate for that to happen or form a coalition that’s willing to have it happen. So that’s a challenge.

What separates the Forward Party from other third parties?

That’s a really good question, and it’s really kind of a broad question that I’m not really prepared to compare one party to another, but what I can tell you is that the Forward Party is focused on appealing to the middle, to the moderates, that are neither one of the extremes.

We’re focused on giving voters more choices, and we’re focused on having more conversations and being inclusive. One of the Forward Party Principles that I really like, is that “Diverse thinking isn’t just welcome, it’s required.”

So we’re not requiring any of our candidates to have a specific viewpoint to be a candidate. They don’t have to agree to every single one of our points or a specific platform. We’re looking for people to be more willing to listen and less inclined to just talk and not listen to others. We are looking for people that are willing to work together and come to a compromise solution. We’re looking for people that are full of Grace and Tolerance, that are accepting of others and willing to tolerate differences and in our case differences are encouraged.

So we know that there are people with different opinions and that’s okay, we can talk about that. We can have those discussions and we don’t need to label them as liberal or conservative or right wing or left wing or anything like that. We don’t need the labels. There are more things that we agree on than divide us. And we want to focus on those things.

What are some incremental progress that we can expect of the Forward Party Maryland in the short term?

The thing that we have to focus on right now is becoming an actual political party in Maryland. Until we do that, we can’t stand up candidates. We won’t have a greater appeal to a larger audience because we’re not a party. To become a Party and to do that we need to collect the signatures, and we need to get them approved through the Board of Elections.

Once we’ve done that, and along with everything that’s happening nationally with Forward, I think we will see a natural momentum that will lead us to address the issues that we talked about: voting reform, something like rank choice voting or approval or star voting. Nobody’s quite clear on which one we should choose yet. That’s fine. We can have a conversation on that. We’re not set on one thing or the other. Ranked choice voting has been done in several states at the moment. And that seems to be really popular, but some people have issues with that particular strategy. Okay. We can talk about that. We’re not advocating for one particular strategy.

We can’t have that conversation as a Party and have political clout until we are a Party. Until we can say to the Republicans and the Democrats: “Hey, we’re here. We’re competing for your votes. So you might want to pay attention to us.”

And then once we are a Party, if we get somebody elected to even one seat, then we can start introducing bills. And once we’ve introduced bills, there will be a larger conversation.

Those are the incremental steps that we can do along the way. And when we build support when people start hearing more and more about what the Forward party is about, and the kinds of things that we want to do (election reform, non partisan primaries, independent redistricting commissions, conversations), then I think there’s going to be a groundswell of support for that.

What is the political makeup of the new Maryland Forward Party board?

The Board of Citizens for Forward Maryland is made up of members of the political spectrum. I consider myself more of a left leaning individual. And we have at least two members of the Board of Citizens for Forward Maryland, that I know off the top of my head that are more right leaning, and yet, we’re all committed toward this collaborative effort to engage people in communication.

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