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The primary primaries: game over? — 14 Comments

  1. Open voting doesn’t help either. Spoilers from the other party may well exert undue influence.

    Open voting in generals is great. In primaries, not so much.

  2. I liked open primaries – I believe in voting for the best person, not by party line.

    But seeing what it has devolved into – which is more partisan warfare, playing games with the votes to disrupt the process, and deny one side any hope, I am no longer a supporter.

    Like so many things, it is only as good as the people participating – and vicious partisanship ruins everything. I think partisanship is likely to be the downfall of the nation, as we are divided into “sides” and instead of actually working on catastrophic problems, like the budget, instead the elected officials figure out how to stymie the other “side.”

    Yet – much as I detest partisanship, this year, I will be voting strict party line, because for all their failures, Republicans are the only ones standing up to say, “STOP!” Stop the spending, stop driving the nation, and the nation’s businesses into the ground, stop taking away our freedoms – they hold the fate of the nation in their hands, and they must live up to the challenge. And we have to support them. You can vote Democrat again AFTER we restore fiscal health and sanity.

  3. Tesh: I agree about open voting; I forgot to mention that.

    The problem, however, is that I’m not sure what the remedy should be. Certainly people need to be able to change party affiliation, and there would have to be rules about that. How close to a primary should it be allowed? Would this avoid the problem of gaming the system and voting in one primary when you’re really a member of the other party?

    And what of true independents? Should they not be able to vote in primaries? Perhaps not, but I’m not sure that’s a good solution either. It could lead to party nominees who are very very extreme (and that’s true of both parties).

  4. Perhaps some of those independents would stay in a party and help it moderate its platform.

  5. I’m not sure any reform would be better than the system we’ve got. If we look at it from a functional standpoint, then I think the relevant question to ask would be, what candidate, clearly superior to the eventual nominee, has the present lineup of caucuses and primaries kept from winning? For me, at least, nobody comes to mind.

    Although there are a lot of theoretical questions and criticisms one could raise about the current system, as a practical matter, I think the parties tend to end up with the nominee they want, given the available choices. It may seem odd that Iowa and NH get so much early influence, but I don’t know that the choices these early states make are that different from what a larger segment of the GOP electorate would make.

  6. Conrad: exactly.

    Oddly enough, Iowa and New Hampshire represent two distinct wings of the Republican Party, so they somewhat average each other out. Iowa is socially conservative, New Hampshire fiscally conservative but socially rather liberal.

    And then South Carolina is a southern state, another representative wing of the party.

  7. These little useless primaries gave us McCain who rightfully was not elected giving us Obama. It is beyond stupid to allow two or three little states to push viable candidates out of the race. We should have 50 primaries on the same day.

  8. Primaries are party functions. If a party chooses to restrict participation in selecting a candidate, they must also live with diminished participation in the general election.

    A better remedy, I think, would address the two-party dominance. The tyranny of the majority would be better checked by increasing minor-party power and participation in elected government.

  9. The current Republican AND Democrat party systems were in reaction to their respective former primary systems.

    The system then was the so-called “smoke-filled rooms”, where party kingpins chose party nominees in secret, with little real say-so from the hoi-poloi.

    Or so we characterized the process at the time.

    After 30 years of “the solution” though, the question that is being voiced more and more is: was the cure worse than the disease?

    To the several reasons neo mentions, I’d add an honorable mention of one she doesn’t: the length of time for opposition research (by both parties) in the current mode, which allows for too long a duration to poison the well, and results in the emphasis on wholly negative campaign strategies that leave disengaged AND engaged voters with non-useful and outright untruthful information.

    …frustrated voters end up being unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will (or unwilling, due to the time and effort involved).

    Jay Cost wrote about it a short while back (I included the link in an earlier thread …but here’s the column again).

  10. I think it’s a great system. Living in New Jersey, I’m saved from so many of those robocalls and campaigners when the contest is decided early on.

    Not all primaries are uncontested, either, as Obama and Hillary can confirm. This primary would not be, either, if any of the anti-Romney’s were strong enough to attract the votes from other candidates as they fall out of the race.

    A few states deciding the nominee is really just an illusion.

  11. Very well said.

    Personally, I do not vote in primaries. This is due to my many years living in Illinois. By declaring myself as a republican I was placed on the jury duty list and served on a jury each year for ten years.

    After my first Illinois primary a friend told me about this unspoken truth so I stopped voting in primaries after my first. Didn’t matter, I was tagged.

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