Party Primaries Must Go

[Torie]

So says the author of this opinion piece in The Atlantic magazine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/party-primaries-must-go/618428/

His reasoning  is that partisan primaries are dominated by the most perfervid and extreme of the party adherents. His fix is the usual one of nonpartisan primaries with IRV.

I doubt it will have that much impact as long as Trump holds sway on the public's mind, but in due course it might do some good, particularly as voters get more skilled with the system and vote strategically. It might encourage those  who are more data based and would be reasonable and civil elected officials to run, and get elected, who now just say no, because they don't think they can get elected, at least not without disingenuously pandering to such elements of the electorate to get elected.

[ilikeverin]

I am absolutely convinced of this. The worst excesses of the current system are the result of primaries. R politicians are just so terrified of their primary base, and so unconcerned about the general elections, that this explains a huge chunk of their behavior.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

I am absolutely convinced of this. The worst excesses of the current system are the result of primaries. R politicians are just so terrified of their primary base, and so unconcerned about the general elections, that this explains a huge chunk of their behavior.

To be fair, the R politicians are afraid of their constituents for more than just how they'll vote in the primary.

Cheney says some GOP members voted against impeachment out of fear for their lives

Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, whose criticism of former President Donald Trump led to her ouster from House Republican leadership, said Friday that several Republican members of Congress had voted against impeaching Trump out of fear for their own lives.

Telling CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" that there are "more members who believe in substance and policy and ideals than are willing to say so," Cheney cited the impeachment vote earlier this year, in which she was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to hold Trump accountable for the Capitol riot.

"If you look at the vote to impeach, for example, there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security -- afraid, in some instances, for their lives," she said. "And that tells you something about where we are as a country, that members of Congress aren't able to cast votes, or feel that they can't, because of their own security."

(This is not the first such allegation, just the most recent.)

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

My ideal is a ranked vote jungle primary on election day

[Roll Roons]

Reform of some kind is definitely needed, and could go a long way. I think Alaska's new system of a top four jungle primary with a RCV in the general could be very interesting.

[Hope For A New Era]

Yes!

Nonpartisan primaries work. You get representatives who actually represent their constituents, instead of getting representatives who represent the most extreme and devoted faction of the party that is dominant in their (likely gerrymandered to be safe for one party or the other) constituency.

Just look at Nebraska. You have the incredibly sane legislature elected by nonpartisan primary, and then you have the crazy partisan hack governor who says legal marijuana will "kill your kids," who was elected by winning a primary, an election voted in by the most devoted and partisan members of the electorate, before cruising to victory on his state's partisan lean.

No Democrat could defeat him under current levels of polarization, because of the partisanship of the state. But a more sane Republican absolutely could, bringing Nebraskans a more effective and unified state government that better represents them.



The question is now the best way to do it.

Do you do RCV for the primary, and then take the top two from that and hold the general FPTP with two candidates only?

Or do you do a top-two (or three, or four) FPTP primary, and then a RCV general?

Or combine both and make it a ranked-choice extravaganza?

I'm not sure which would produce more representative results.


And, here's an idea: encouraging state legislatures to institute nonpartisan primaries by crossover-voting in primaries in safe states. Utah Democrats have been doing this for years - why not have every minority party in every safe state do it en masse and turn the primaries for the dominant parties into de facto nonpartisan elections? That should get their attention pretty quickly.

[Sir Mohamed]

I think this misses the point that the results of primary contests producing more and more ideologically and rhetorically extreme candidates is just a symptom of a deeper problem and not the actual cause. Neither will the root causes disappear by changing the election mode.

We need other structural reforms for more equal representation, fewer elections in general and less influence of corporations and lobbyists.

[America Needs a 13-6 Progressive SCOTUS]

A top 7 primary, Condorcet RCV general would help towards solving many of the problems we have.

[GeneralMacArthur]

tbh just let me pick the candidates and we'd save so much time and money.  It would be huge for the economy.

[President Johnson]

I think this misses the point that the results of primary contests producing more and more ideologically and rhetorically extreme candidates is just a symptom of a deeper problem and not the actual cause. Neither will the root causes disappear by changing the election mode.

We need other structural reforms for more equal representation, fewer elections in general and less influence of corporations and lobbyists.

Agreed.

Furthermore, there needs to be a reform of the senate and more competitive House districts. If 80-85% of districts are safe, there's no need for being less extreme because as officeholder your only threat is a primary challenge.

It's also much more a problem on the Republican side because their voters are constantly fed with missinformation through various news outlets and social media.

[VBM]

We shouldn’t get rid of primaries just because the low-info “moderates” are too dumb/ignorant to vote in primaries

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

We shouldn’t get rid of primaries just because the low-info “moderates” are too dumb/ignorant to vote in primaries

It's not calling for getting rid of primaries in general, but just switching to a more non-partisan "blanket" sort of system, like in California and Washington or Alaska's new ranked-voting system.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The framing of this article is very fascinating to me in that it makes the typical mistake of asserting that political parties are bad for democracy when, in actuality, political parties are the bedrock of mass politics and democracy. Political parties make politics legible to ordinary people, as a certain label or brand becomes associated with particular policy choices, ideological tendencies and representing certain groups in society.

Over the past forty years or so, American society has become more sharply polarized around class lines, which has a strong geographic and caste component. In a democracy, one would expect political divisions to reflect these differences and, naturally, both parties have shifted accordingly. When life expectancy falls off a cliff in eastern Ohio but continues to increase in San Francisco or Seattle and this is a function of political choices, why wouldn't political divisions become more extreme when voters have their say?

This post is pretty abbreviated and I'm happy to provide more detail about my thinking at some point but this article mostly reminds me that the old division between socialists and liberals exists for a reason.

[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.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I think this misses the point that the results of primary contests producing more and more ideologically and rhetorically extreme candidates is just a symptom of a deeper problem and not the actual cause. Neither will the root causes disappear by changing the election mode.

We need other structural reforms for more equal representation, fewer elections in general and less influence of corporations and lobbyists.

Agreed.

Furthermore, there needs to be a reform of the senate and more competitive House districts. If 80-85% of districts are safe, there's no need for being less extreme because as officeholder your only threat is a primary challenge.

It's also much more a problem on the Republican side because their voters are constantly fed with missinformation through various news outlets and social media.

Also I think we need to have separate party systems for the federal and state level like they do in Canada .



Though I don’t think redistricting reform would fix this problem as even at the state level there isn’t that many opposite party governors left . I think there are just 3 republicans in truly blue states left ( VT , MA, MD) and 3 democrats at truly red states left(KY , KS, LA).

[dkxdjy]

For the most part I support ideas such as this since I don't believe candidates should be forced to appeal to both the members of their political party and also the general public in a single election cycle. Under the party primary system, the general election essentially always becomes a choice between two candidates that were forced to take positions that appeal the most to their own party, preventing candidates who may hold more mixed beliefs (that very well may still be popular on their own) from succeeding. Under a system similar to the jungle primary, while it might be true that many candidates will still end up largely direct their campaigns toward members of one party, that would be the candidate's choice (as I believe it should be), as opposed to the current party system, where it is effectively mandated.

[junior chįmp]

One of the major reasons we have primaries today is because one of the primary champions of it, Robert La Follette, came out for it only because he was butthurt that he was passed over for a nomination by the party bosses:

Similarly, Ranney (1975, 122) noted that the most influential champion of the direct primary, Robert La Follette, was inspired “to destroy boss rule at its very roots” when the Republican Party bosses of Wisconsin twice passed him over for the gubernatorial nomination.

https://casparoesterheld.com/2017/06/18/summary-of-achen-and-bartels-democracy-for-realists/

So much of what makes up our democratic system is just stuff jammed in there for electoral expediency by power hungry politicians as opposed to some rationally thought out system meant to work and endure.

[emailking]

If doing IRV there is no reason for primaries at all. You just do 1 election with everybody who wants to run on both sides running. Doing a non-partisan primary with IRV, and then another election with the top 4 with IRV, is a waste of time and money.

[Damocles]

Yes. Replace them with proportional representation.

[Lechasseur]

Yes. Replace them with proportional representation.

I agree with this

[Agafin]

If doing IRV there is no reason for primaries at all. You just do 1 election with everybody who wants to run on both sides running. Doing a non-partisan primary with IRV, and then another election with the top 4 with IRV, is a waste of time and money.

I disagree. A single IRV election would be terrible in contests where there are several candidates. Arguably, voters need to be minimally informed of who they are voting for and that becomes impossible with too many candidates. Imagine IRV being used in 2020 when we had something like 20 candidates on the democratic side, most of the votes beyond the first would just be donkey votes. And if this happens in an open year (that is, with no incumbent on both sides), the amount of wasted votes would be insane, you'd have an election with like 150 million voters but where only like half actually selected the winner because most people's top choices aren't even considered. I think two rounds is better even with IRV.

[emailking]

If doing IRV there is no reason for primaries at all. You just do 1 election with everybody who wants to run on both sides running. Doing a non-partisan primary with IRV, and then another election with the top 4 with IRV, is a waste of time and money.

I disagree. A single IRV election would be terrible in contests where there are several candidates. Arguably, voters need to be minimally informed of who they are voting for and that becomes impossible with too many candidates. Imagine IRV being used in 2020 when we had something like 20 candidates on the democratic side, most of the votes beyond the first would just be donkey votes. And if this happens in an open year (that is, with no incumbent on both sides), the amount of wasted votes would be insane, you'd have an election with like 150 million voters but where only like half actually selected the winner because most people's top choices aren't even considered. I think two rounds is better even with IRV.

I think you're saying people will just vote their first choice like normal and then not rank the rest or just haphazardly rank all the D's ahead of all the R's. If so, how is it not also terrible for the first round, for the same reason? The top 4 will be essentially random if it ends up working that way.

[DS0816]

Partisan primaries motivate legislators to keep in lockstep with a narrow and extreme slice of the electorate rather than govern in the public interest.

This, right here, is a key problem.

Neither of the two major United States political parties “govern in the public interest.”

The Republican and Democratic parties’ elected officials govern in the interest of the corporate masters who fund them.

[Sirius_]

We shouldn’t get rid of primaries just because the low-info “moderates” are too dumb/ignorant to vote in primaries

And who is the president right now?

[Sirius_]

The problem is clearly FPTP, and that becomes evident when you compare the 2016 GOP primary to the 2020 democrats. Trump never even got a majority of votes in that primary, but there was a lot of vote splitting, which is a good thing for a big base populist. The moderates in 2020 anticipated that, whether you like it or not, and didn't allow Bernie Sanders to pull off a similar victory.