Party Primaries Must Go

[Хahar 🤔]

I am not against electoral reform in theory; hardly anyone who thinks about elections in a serious way is. But there's a universal sense among people who are "policy-oriented" or "wonks" that they can create the politics they want if only they can get rid of those pesky voters accidentally choosing the wrong candidates. This is why those people love convoluted systems like the Alaska system that have never been used anywhere before and require multiple paragraphs to explain, because the point here isn't reflecting the will of the people but rather electing the right candidates. In this very thread we see multiple posters advocating the absurd notion that strategic voting is a positive good, that actually it's desirable for all voters to have to engage in some elaborate game instead of voting in accordance with their beliefs.

In practice, what have nonpartisan primaries in California done? They've made a mockery of democratic choice in candidate selection, because invariably the whole party apparatus coalesces behind a favored candidate and all other candidates are crowded out of the race before the election. Again, to those advocating this sort of thing, this is desirable, because it's far better that party elites should make these choices than voters, who might not make the choice that's best for them. Advocates of this system claim that it would result in more "moderate" candidates, but there's no evidence of that; the Georgia special election last year, which used a jungle primary, featured two Republican candidates each pushing each other farther to the right. None of these claims are founded in fact; it's all just magical thinking that if you make the right laws you can paper over any actually existing divisions in society.