I still don’t see what problem this is supposed to solve. If you don’t like some candidate in a primary, don’t vote for her. If you don’t like the candidate that comes out of the other end of the primaries with the nomination, don’t vote for him. If enough of your fellow citizens decide differently than you did and he gets elected, tough noogies.
I hardly think giving more power to the entrenched party hacks is going to do anything significant to help.
Regards,
Shodan
Formalizing the process gives these signatures a higher profile. And upthread there’s a table of endorsements. Only Romney, Perry and Gingrich scored more than eight mostly because they don’t matter that much at present.
Incidentally, if you have any elaboration on, “Hiding the crazy”, I should like to hear it. I imagined that my plan had little downside, if also modest upside in the form of not wasting our bandwidth on irrelevant candidates. But when Cain polls above 20% among likely primary voters, perhaps that sends a useful message to independents about the kookiness of the Republican base. I’m having difficulty weighing that consideration though.
How? Let’s look at the past GOP nominees for the past 40 years, all under the primary system: McCain, GW Bush X2, Dole, Bush I X2, Reagan X2, Ford, Nixon X2.
Every one of these candidates were the favorites of the party bosses. They would have been picked under the old smoke-filled room system and were picked under the new primary system. I don’t see, as you contend, how crazies are getting nominated. If anything, the primary process gives the illusion that voters have some sort of say in the matter.
4 States out of 50 have voted, but the pundits are saying the contest is over, and the winner only won 2 of those states. Are we really given a choice?
And to the OP, what difference would his suggestion make to the inevitable win of the party’s top choice?
Nice point. The political statistician Wayne P. Steger concluded, “Republican nominations are largely predictable and determined mainly by effects occurring prior to the primaries, while Democratic nominations are relatively unpredictable before the primaries and are susceptible to momentum during the primaries,” at least according to his forecast model.
They call it the “Invisible Primary” and it is particularly important in the Republican context. The two exceptions were Jimmy Carter in 1976 who did an endrun around the party bigwigs and to a lesser extent John McCain, who the party distrusted because of his advocacy of campaign finance reform.
Roundup of research: http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/01/31/the-invisible-primary/
Interview with Hans Noel, author of the 2008 classic, The Party Decides. How to Understand the ‘Invisible Primary’ - Columbia Journalism Review He and his co-authors called John McCain, “An embarrassment” to their argument.
Still, the invisible primary matters a lot. But I never claimed that my proposal would affect the outcome: I’ve emphasized its modest effects. FTR, neither Cain nor Trump ever had a shot at victory IMHO. What my proposal does (at most) is clear away a few distractions from the mind-space, make parts of the invisible primary more explicit and encourage more of a vetting process. Rick Perry is an interesting counter-example: as he was put forth by core political leaders. But he flamed out due to insufficient intelligence or national experience. (Reagan after all wasn’t the brightest light on the porch, but he had years of national experience which taught him how to avoid the worst flubs and charm his way out of the other ones.)
Why should a political party decide who gets to run for office? The opportunity to run for office should be open to any eligible citizen and the voters should decide who gets elected.
I realize the parties exist as de facto organizations and have a huge influence over who gets elected. But I think it would be a terrible idea to give them official power to control the ballots.
Political parties won’t have the power to decide who gets to run for office. Anybody can run as an independent in November, or as a Green or as National United Wackadoodle.
But if you want to run under the Republican banner, you have to follow certain rules. It’s always been that way. Even today, there are unpledged superdelegates, ready to throw the contest if the voters don’t obey their masters. And nobody stays in without a base of committed and monied donors.
ETA: Also, anybody who thinks that the Republican House of Representatives, the Senate, the Governors and the State Houses all dance to the tune of the RNC hasn’t followed politics too closely. Not only are these independent power centers, each has it’s own set of caucuses (Governors excepted of course). The “Parties” won’t control things because they themselves aren’t especially hierarchical.
I live in New York and we’re an example of what happens when the two big parties get much power.
For example, back in 1992 George Bush was running for re-election. As the incumbent, he was almost certain to be the nominee but he was challenged by Pat Buchanan and David Duke. But we didn’t have any say on the nomination in New York. The state Republican party decided that Bush was the only candidate who qualified to be on the ballot. We didn’t even have a chance to write in another candidate; with only one official candidate the primary was cancelled and Bush was awarded the state’s delegates.
If we didn’t have winner-take-all voting I honestly wouldn’t have any problem with that. The idea is that each party decides on what policies it wants, and people would choose their favorite among them in the fall: if 20% of the voters opted for Party A, then Party A would get 15-20% of the seats. (You might want to give it less than 20% for the purposes of awarding the top vote-getter with legislative leverage. It’s also been found in Israel that giving minor parties representation in proportion to their numbers gives them disproportionate political power, as a party with 1-2% support can make squirrely claims in exchange for membership in a broader coalition.) There’s really no general reason to have popular voting during the pre-election, any more than we would want to have voting on a pre-pre-election or pre-pre-pre, etc. I hasten to acknowledge that we in fact do not have proportional representation or approval voting, so there is some concern about smoke-filled rooms though I believe it to be overblown and misleading.
If we believe Noel et al then the primary doesn’t matter too much anyway. My hot-air link gives the following characterization: The invisible primary is essentially a long-running national conversation among members of each party coalition about who can best unite the party and win the next presidential election. The conversation occurs in newspapers, on Sunday morning television talk shows, among activist friends over beer, in chatter at party events, and, most recently, in the blogosphere. ***
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Some voices obviously count for more than others in the invisible primary, but anyone can join in simply by paying attention, attending party gatherings, and chiming in. The weighting of voices is determined by the resources (money, labor, expertise, prestige) the speaker can bring to party business and by the cogency of the remarks offered. Politics enters as well: pressure to go along with one’s group, to get on the bandwagon of the likely winner, or to repay old obligations. But the main business of the invisible primary is figuring out who can best unify the party and win the fall election. Then again, much of the conversation consists of figuring out who would be electable in the visible primary itself, so Noel et al may exaggerate somewhat. A pro-Choice Republican for example can't be nominated today, which is why Bush Sr. flipped flopped on the issue during the 1980s.