Inside America’s Main Street Party | Interview with Tom Joseph

Well, the first thing I hope, you know, it's hard to wrap your head around.

It's really not a political party, as you would typically think.

Most people think of a political party or third party, first off, as, you know, dead on arrival.

But second off, you know, being something that's based on ideology and rich people funding their own campaigns.

To be honest, that's initially what I was thinking to do.

But I realized, you know, it wasn't really going to make any kind of seismic change And I kind of stumbled on the idea of creating, you know, using an app and tech to do kind of a reality contest approach to choosing a nominee.

I mean, we do a much better job of choosing the next American Idol than we do the next representative to Congress.

We go way through more scrutiny, more rounds, more training.

And that was really kind of the joke that started the whole thing.

I mean, it's kind of stuck with this idea of doing a third party.

And then I thought, you know, here I am, I'm a tech guy, I'm a business person.

You know, the idea of using an app and a tech to do this.

So I spent time figuring out how to shoehorn a fair contest into our currently unfair system.

And I figured out how to do it.

That's interesting.

Most political parties are built around an ideology or a set of policy positions.

And Main Street seems deliberately different.

If you don't have a single party ideology, what actually makes someone a Main Street candidate?

Well, to me, I'm getting back to what the founding fathers really didn't want, you know, a two-party system.

They wanted to have something as a free and equal method to figure out who was the true voice to represent that person.

And I'm an engineer.

I'm applying math to this.

I think about statistics and bell curves.

And I just don't think that people that are representing us from these districts are at the center of that bell curve.

So my thought, if you apply it like an engineer, if you apply a process to it and you Let people have real levers of input, like where do these candidates stand on certain issues and have a filtering process.