I looked around for a thread with a similar topic but didn’t see one so apologies if this is a dupe.
The current primary system where, in most jurisdictions, only registered party members can vote, tends to pick the most extreme candidates for party nominations. Since it’s usually only the most extreme voters who bother to vote in these primaries. Exit polls show Eric Cantor lost his party nomination for his soft (not exactly PRO) stance on immigration. Even though polls in his district as a whole show similar views on immigration as him. Yet it was only the extremes who voted in the primary who were much further to the right. So the extremes won.
NY Senator Chuck Schumer proposed a system where primaries would be open to ALL voters and then the top two vote getters, regardless of party, would go in the general election. The idea being, the extremes won’t be picking the candidates, or at least, have much less influence.
Don’t these things vary by state? In Texas, anybody can vote in any primary. (If they have the proper Photo ID, to prove you’re not an Illegal!)
If you vote in a primary, the party’s name is stamped on your voter’s registration card. (You know the one that also used to let you vote.) You are not allowed to switch parties* if a run-off election is needed that year*. Next election cycle, you’re back to voting for whichever party in the primary.
What we need is more sane people getting off their asses & voting–in the primaries, runoffs & general elections. Even if it’s not a Presidential year. And they need to pay attention to those names at the end of the ballot; in Texas, the State Board of Education is elected.
I hate the primary system. In open primary states it allows people to cross party lines and help skew the results to determine who the opposing party is running. That’s crazy!
Even in non-open primaries why is Joe Sixpack determining who a party candidate is? The party leaders should pick their candidate and present them to the public. This would lead to more defined parties and more candidates who stuck to the party line (i.e. less RINO’s). Yes, I am suggesting a return to the smoke filled back room. I don’t have a problem with it.
Coming from New York, which restricts all primaries to registered primary members, I find the thought that any Republican should have any say in a Democratic primary or vice versa to be completely insane. There is literally no other reason to be a registered party member except for the privilege of voting for who you want to be your candidate. Giving this ups also negates the millions of volunteer hours that people supply to their parties for the grunt work of politics. You get people versed in the local party and local issues this way, and those candidates thereby accrue for the tens of thousands of offices. The few glamour positions are a tiny percentage of the whole and they’re already afflicted by outsiders trying to buy their way into the process through name recognition. Are you talking about national office primaries or all of them? Because all is orders of magnitude more than the Congress and the Presidency.
If you don’t like who your party selects as a candidate, then let me repeat - get up off your ass and vote. If you don’t care enough about a party to register for it, then why should you get any say in who they run?
I need to put this in all caps: IN TODAY’S AMERICA YOU VOTE FOR A PARTY, NOT FOR A PERSON. Until the parties go back to the old school of having left, center, and right wings, nothing else makes sense. If you have an argument to be made that an open voting system as in the OP would really create broad parties that represent across the board, then I’d be very interested in hearing it. Schumer’s op-ed doesn’t give any real arguments; he merely asserts it.
I would be in favor of mandatory nonpartisan fair districting laws as a first step before changing primaries. It needs to be done no matter what so do it first and then see what else needs changing.
Any independent or third party candidate with a realistic chance of being elected would also have a realistic chance of finishing in the top two of an open primary.
That said, I agree with Exapno above: party primaries should be limited to the members of that party.
As do I - A political party is an organization, wholly independent of the government, with a finite membership. The members should be able to determine whom is to be the candidate they put forward, and the method of making that determination (voting, foot-race, high score on a pin-ball machine, etc.)
The House of Representatives is controlled by 51% of its members.
If that majority is GOP, the “Hastert Rule” means 51% of that majority rules … 26%.
Those members were elected by the 51% GOP majority in their district … 13%.
Using a candidate selected by a majority of the GOP voters … 7%.
With only a small fraction of GOP voters even participating in the primary … 2%.
Thus the House can be controlled by enthusiastic extremists representing only 2% of national voters. The 2% are often older voters enflamed and embittered by propaganda.
Is this an actual problem? you can barely get the most dedicated people from your base to vote in your own primary, voting on the other parties has to be fairly rare.
That’s fine, except when the state pays for a public primary election. Then the state gets to make the rules for that election. Some states have decided that it’s better to have an open primary so that the general election is between the two most popular candidates, regardless of affiliation.
If a party wants complete control over who they choose as their candidate, they can hold caucuses or other types of private votes. Then they can put forward their candidate for the public primary, who if popular enough will win enough votes to advance to the general election.
Sounds too good to be adopted in our country the USA. But would be a lot better than what we have. All primaries to be held on the same day in maybe August including for federal office and then elections in Nov.
It happens. Especially if one side doesn’t have major races of their own.
Here in Milwaukee, for example, David Clarke would more than likely not have won his primary if Republican voters hadn’t crossed over and voted in the Democratic primary.
Yes, and because of the open primary system Wisconsin is less polarized than most states. Not.
The one argument that I think of about the primary system is that since the state, not the parties, are paying for the election process, the primaries should be open to all voters not just those registered to a particular party. If each party paid for its own primary - then fine, restrict access.
In NY we have a bunch of small parties. One party, the Independence party is particularly bad. People think they are registering as an independent when, instead, they now belong to a party run by a few hacks. Often, both major parties fight to get themselves cross-endorsed by this essentially non-party.
Generally speaking the Democrats cannot win elections in NY without the support of the Working People’s Party and Republicans cannot win without the Conservative Party. So sometimes those parties also have primaries.
Personally, I think making primaries open would isn’t much of a solution.
I’m not a fan of the OP’s proposal, because I feel like it will generally further entrench the two-party system. What happens is that there’s either just the two major parties anyway, or there’s the favorite and then various also-rans. If you hate the favorite, you can either vote for your prefered also-ran, or you can pool together to find someone palatable enough to possibly win. And if you go with the closed caucus, that also heavily favors it.
I’d rather just have a system where anyone that can achieve a certain reasonable number of signature on a petition can get on a ballot. That number needs to be high enough to keep the ballot from getting flooded, but low enough that it doesn’t force it into only the major parties, probably somewhere around 5-10k. The only concession I think should be made for parties would be that if they hold some kind of internal vote for a candidate that has at least some minimum number, say on the order of 20-50k, then that overrides the necessity for a petition and will list them on the ballot with their party name, and the number of candidates for a party can’t exceed the number of slots being voted for, typically one. And I only make that concession because parties are inevitable and if they can get some minimum number of votes, then the petition would just be an unnecessary formality.
I think the problem is that we’ve let the major parties, regardless of which one you may or may not support, rig the system such that basically only those two parties can win. If you happen to align well with one of the other’s platforms, I guess that’s okay for you, but for a lot of us, we feel stuck between voting for the lesser of two evils, which I think a lot of people end up doing, voting for a third party with little chance to win, or possibly not finding anyone worth voting for and just not participating. If it’s truly a democratic voting process, it shouldn’t be rigged to favor any particular party.
Hey all. Thanks for all the replies. One other thing I want to throw out is that American voters these days are trending to register as independents (NOT the Independence Party). Yet still mainly throwing their votes behind either republican or democrat. I’m actually in this category, myself. I lean democrat but I’m registered as independent. Mainly because, although I lean democrat, I like to think of myself as voting for the candidate, not the party. So in party only primaries, I get shut out. That’s one of the reasons I’d rather have an open primary.