I once read a person describing how the president was picked.
“Every 4 years the citizens search the land and find the wisest, most experienced man and choose that man to be president”.
Well everyone knows that’s not how it’s done. Each parties top candidate is a combination of popularity, party clout, good looks, and of course financial backers. I think both parties have lost out on nominating some very good people because they lacked… something. A black mark in their history. Inability to come across well. Another person in the party who took the spotlight. etc…
I think it was a terrible mistake to move to the Primary system. Parties should choose their candidate based upon the Party’s beliefs, and not through a popularity contest after which they need to force the platform to fit the nominee.
In a semi-related vein, I believe we need more parties to reflect more nuances in public discourse.
You need to recognize that the METHOD involved, determines your results. So the first decision to make, before talking about methods, is to decide what your party wants your candidate to be.
Do you want to find a candidate that appeals to a lot of voters already? Then primaries are the way to go (primaries are essentially TEST ELECTIONS). How you organize those primaries gets tricky, but that is what you would want.
Do you want your candidate to most reflect the detailed plans and goals of the top leadership of your party? Then you would want to go back to the so-called smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, where the top twenty or so political movers and shakers got together in secret and chose a schmuck. I mean a likely candidate.
Maybe you want to look to other aspects of life, and pick someone who has already proven that they can be successful there. That’s the “let’s get a rich businessman to run, since we want our leader to be all about getting rich.” Or maybe you want a guy who has a great family life, because you think that proves that he knows how to keep it in his pants, and raise a family in a wholesome manner.
You see where I’m going with this.
The road you choose to follow, needs to be selected based on where you think it will lead you. Not on whether or not it has nice scenery at the beginning.
I’ve wondered if instead of the primaries their should just be one giant general election where many candidates, even many within one party, could be on a ballot.
I agree. Go back to the smokey rooms where party leaders sliced and diced until a good candidate emerged.
In a semi-related vein, I feel like the ridiculously long primary season feeds into the “my side won/your side lost” sports team mentality we have in politics today. I’ve got relatives who are into politics more because they love seeing libtards lose rather than to advance any ideology or interests. It’s all one big sporting event to them, and the primary is like a baseball season.
It’s easy to be wistful about the smoke-filled room, but remember: Clinton is who the smoke-filled room would have chosen, anyway. Trump was not. We know that Trump was able to beat Clinton-- Would Jeb, or Rubio, or Christy have done as well? Granted, I would have preferred any scenario with those men as the candidate to the one we actually got, but the Republican Party wouldn’t have.
There’s no way of knowing that. The long slog of the primaries undoubtedly keep amazing candidates from throwing their hats into the ring. Perhaps if the actual public campaign season was limited to the summer and fall, you’d have seen someone like Biden or some bright young upstart emerge. If all Biden (or or Bush or Kasich or other quality candidates) had to do was politick behind closed doors over a month or so with party leaders, who knows what we’d be looking at today.
It’s getting to the point where only masochists and genuine psychopaths will even consider going near presidential politics.
The biggest issue with the smoke-filled room is that it’s far too easy for a small set of old boys to be out of touch with the issues, positions, and candidate that will motivate swing voters, those who don’t just automatically hit the D or R buttons and who determine presidential elections.
Then they’ll lose, and work on doing better next time.
There’s nothing wrong with guided democracy. I would’ve much rather seen the party leaders pick Kasich vs. Biden. Or Bush vs. Clinton. Or Ryan vs. Booker. Or Romney vs. Warren. Just let anyone who’s interested in the job wrangle it out with the party muckity-mucks, figure out who’s most electable and has the best ideas for the country that fit with the party platform, and go from there.
I just feel like the breathless matchups every week for months on end, that leave our “leaders” battered and bloodied, doesn’t do our country any good, and it doesn’t always give us the best candidate for the jobs.
Would you want the general population voting on who was going to perform brain surgery on you, from an open field of candidates who may or may not actually have the experience and education to do the job? If’n we’re gonna vote on it, I’d like some experts to select the final two candidates based on education, experience and track record-- instead of personality and overall popularity. I want Chris Fucking Pratt slicing *my *skull open about as much as I want Donald Fucking Trump holding the nuclear codes.
What about shortening the election cycle to 6 weeks, instead of 18 months? Hold all primaries on the same day. Ranked voting as iiandyiiii suggests. If we end up with 2 Republicans or 2 Democrats in the final run off, so be it.
I’d also like to see a nationwide, popular vote system for national races, at least for the final run off.
I don’t mind the primary election, but the campaign funding has to have its bubble burst. It’s just crazy and counterproductive to a politician without cabbage in the first place. It’s more than that, though, it’s bullshit. Here in Illinois our Republican governor has more money than God, and his likely Democratic foe is another billionaire. The money part of elections is a crock of shit.
Electoral college will be elected two years in advance of the election. They will be allowed to submit recommendations for candidacy to the rest of the college. These people will be contacted and after providing proof of citizenship and age, and further confirming that they are willing to run for President, the FBI will perform background checks on each remaining person and issue a report to the college on their criminal record, suspicious activities, and suspicious connections.
The college will then meet and call candidates to be questioned.
After this has finished, the college will select 3-5 criteria (leadership, trustworthiness, vision, etc.) on which to rate candidates. Each member of the college will subsequently vote on how important they believe each criteria to be, and rate each candidate for each criteria.
Each candidate will be rated by multiplying the average criteria importance to their average criteria rating, and those values will be summed together.
The top two candidates will go on to be the Presidential candidates for the rest of the nation to vote for.
I have often times thought there must be a better way. I mean there is zero doubt in my mind a better way exists. But I know I’m not the person to figure out what it is. So… a lot of help I am.
You could pretty much guarantee that electors of the leading party would end up getting both candidates, unless the number of electors of one party nearly equaled that of the other. Not much of a choice for anyone but the leading party.
One positive, though: Trump would never have gotten past the ‘primary.’
Possibly, but they would be very centrist candidates since people from both parties would be rating the candidate.
And since there would probably only be one “To my liking” criteria, it would be pretty easy for it to get swamped out by other criteria. Tactical voting would be nearly impossible, without significant coordination.
And who is to say that most of the candidates would even have been selected from the parties? It’s an easy way for the college to find candidates, but I would expect a few businessmen, economists, doctors, etc. to get in there. Neil DeGrasse Tyson would probably get a nod every four years.