The Primary Game

With primary season coming to an end, I find myself wondering about our primary system. Should we allow non-party people to participate? Should we allow caucuses or anything less than a full primary? What has particularly raised these issues is what is going on in California, where ballot initiative Proposition 14 is looking to open California’s primaries and, basically, combine them.

Proposition 14, which currently has 60% support, would amend the California state constitution to make primaries open and non-partisan. The ostensible idea behind this is to let unaffiliated voters have a say in the selection of candidates. The thinking is that this would lead to more moderate candidates. But would it really?

Under the new system, everyone regardless of party, would receive the same ballot with the same list of candidates. The top two vote-getters would then face off in the general election. Thus, theoretically, Pelosi would face a second Democrat in November. Similarly, two Republicans could square off against each other in Orange County. And this would likely happen a lot. . . but there's a twist. For while a study by the Centre for Government Studies found that more than 1/3 of the races for the state legislature or Congress could have produced runoffs between members of the same party if this system had been in place over the past few elections, almost all of these would have happened in overwhelmingly Democratic districts in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

So I guess the question becomes, could the few Republicans in these districts, combined with the few independents and the few Democrats who would never vote for a Republican but might vote for a moderate Democrat, produce enough votes to toss out someone like a Pelosi in favor of a moderate Democrat? I must admit that I like the idea of tossing out Pelosi, even if it’s with another Democrat, but I don’t think this will work.

Democrats have shown time and again that they are much more susceptible to groupthink than Republicans, so I see this as a much greater danger for the Republicans. Indeed, this sounds like an easy way to game the system by running a large number of Republicans and keeping the number of Democratic candidates small, so that you end up spreading the Republican vote and routinely getting two Democrats. In fact, I'm sure there are dozens of RINOs salivating at the chance to hurt their own party.

Moreover, Washington State ran this kind of system for 70 years until 2003, and they continued to produce reliably liberal Democrats. And I find it interesting that Democrats support this plan in liberal states, but don’t even mention it in deeply conservative states. That’s rather telling in and of itself. What this sounds like to me is nothing more than a gimmick with the potential for freezing out the less popular party, which in California happens to be the Republicans. And that’s not the only reason I oppose it.

I also oppose this measure because political parties are private organizations that should have the right under the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of association, to choose who their nominees are and to decide who gets to vote to make that decision. State governments should not be allowed to tell parties that they must let non-party members choose party candidates.

Further, I am troubled by adding more gamesmanship to our electoral system. Politics is dirty enough already without adding more opportunities to game the system. I don’t think it helps the reputation of our democracy when we use a caucus system that results in candidates claiming that the other candidate shipped voters in to rig the system, when we use open primaries that let one party manipulate the selection process of the other party, and when we don’t require voters to produce identification and we don’t pursue people who commit election fraud or intimidation. I certainly don’t think it will help our reputation when 1/3 of the races in California suddenly feature only Democratic candidates.

This is a bad idea.