About 6-10% of all voting eligible Iowans turn up for a caucus. In the 2004 primary, New Hampshire’s turnout was under 30%. So let’s aside the Norman Rockwell routine. Cite.
Give me a slate of candidates and I can read up on them and pick my favorite. But that’s not what the primary voter is asked to do. The primary voter is asked not who would make the best President, but rather, who should run for President later in the year?
Sorry, but that’s not a question which is sensibly answered by amateurs – like myself, for example.
No. Leave that task to the pros. Each party should choose the candidate with the most coherent organization, backing and let the people decide in November. Make the votes public. Those elected officials who back a joker will take a reputational hit, be it in November or after a few years of incompetent administration.
If you do that you just pick the person with the most money and the best ad agency. Without Iowa to trip them up, the Hillary-Giuliani juggeranaut would have been unstoppable. The current system where the weakest candidate withdraws first and their supporters find new homes is better, in my view. Better to test a candidate and potential president by how well they respond to a long campaign.
Well, the primaries are essentially party endeavors. They’re designed to allow each party to choose the candidate that best represents them (I know, I know…). Therefore I have no problem making them party-line events.
I think approval voting works even better in a primary election. Think of it as a checklist of who you’d be willing to vote for in the general election. The candidate with the most yeses has the most support from their party. Seems like an excellent way to pick who to represent the party.
Approval voting does tend to pick the most moderate candidate. That is counter-balanced by the fact that fringe candidates will get more votes than they would otherwise, since “wasting” a vote is no longer an issue. So while the more extreme candidates are less likely to win the most votes, their actual support will be recorded. And maybe in the next election cycle their ideas won’t be considered as extreme.
The system is set up so the nominee is bought and paid for before the process really begins. The last few months all the headlines were about who was in the money gathering lead. Not about political positions. If you need to raise 100 million to be taken seriously ,then you are bought and sold before the process is underway. The system is not flawed . it is what the wealthy want it to be. It is the system now.
Let me get it straight about how approval voting works: you can vote for as many candidates as you like, right? And you don’t vote for the candidates you don’t like.
It seems like a system capable of producing all sorts of anomalies. For instance, on the Dem side, you could wind up with Chris Dodd, who’s the first choice of a vanishingly small number of people, but the 3rd, 4th, or 5th choice of a whole lot of people, winning. Unless you think that having a nominee who’s on everyone’s dance card, but not particularly high on anyone’s dance card, is the guy we should all dance with, this seems like a bad idea to me.
My thought as a Dem is that a candidate that everyone is OK with, but doesn’t enthuse a lot of people, is our most recent been-there, done-that. A system that’s even more prone to that than the existing one is not an improvement, IMHO.
Seriously, I strongly believe in a long primary process, with months between the first caucus & the allocation of even half the votes. I deplore attempts to contract it with nonsense like Super Tuesday. Pace some of the respondents to this thread, that amounts to a ploy to destroy any chance for other states to undertake the level of deliberation Iowa & NH get. I fear the other states’ parties don’t want to undertake that kind of reflection.
Or should I just move to Iowa, so I can meet POTUS candidates at my house too?
Well, in this specific instance, I would think that Dodd would suffer from lack of name recognition.
I recall a study of British Union elections, where researchers obtained some sort of complete ordering of every voter’s preferences. They were thus apparently able to compare the effects of different voting systems.
The results were reassuring on the whole: all but one of the voting systems gave very similar responses. The outlier was “First past the post” otherwise known as “Winner take all”, otherwise known as “The US election system”. It’s the status quo which produces split ballots and other anomalies.
Approval voting has the advantage of simplicity, relative to other empirically equivalent voting systems.
Jonathan Chance and Pleonast: thanks for your comments. I think we’re talking at cross-purposes though. I like approval voting: I just believe that voters should choose public policy in November, rather than playing electability guessing games in the previous Winter.