As I understand it, political parties in the US are private entities, whose members may or may not get elected, appointed or otherwise employed by the US federal government or the various state, city…etc governments. But in reading about the MI/FL democratic primaries fracas, I come to understand that the various state governments conduct and ?even pay? for the party primaries. Is that kosher?
My broader question is do the two big parties have any special or official status within the various US governments, apart from the incidental fact that over the past few decades that they’re the only viable game in town?
Well, other than the fact that they write the rules on elections to favor them and pretty much ignore or exclude (or at least make it decidedly difficult to participate) third parties and independents, no…
What DSYoung said, but I wanted to add a few things:
Let’s not be THAT hard on the state governments. They are simply recognizing reality by promoting the two parties. It is an extremely rare event when a third party wins even a minor race. And that’s not the fault of the states because, while it varies, usually at least one other party has ballot access and gets their 1 to 2 percent of the vote. How much more should the state do to accomodate those candidates?
And the primary elections are for any eligible party. Dems, GOP, and any other party that has ballot access. It’s just that a minor party is lucky to find one candidate to run for an office, so you don’t typically have primary fights.
I’m not an expert on other states, but in West Virginia, any party that received more than ONE percent of the vote in the last governor’s election automatically has FULL ballot access. That’s not that high of a threshold.
The Libertarians had it for a few years, but then a governor candidate tanked and they lost it. But having ballot access gives your nominee name recognition on the ballot for all offices from President down to town dog catcher. Even with this ballot access, no third party candidates get elected.
In large part, the overwhelming majority of the electorate are happy having two moderate parties and any foray outside that (to the left or right) drives enough people away to make those efforts insignificant.
In New York, third parties have primaries all the time. They’re held in September and are usually for state and local offices. Any party that’s on the statewide ballot (i.e., any party whose gubernatorial candidate got 50,000 votes or more in the previous election) can have a primary. We occasionally have Conservative Party primaries around here all the time.*
The presidential primary is limited to the Republicans and Democrats, but if a third party came into being and had a primary (usually a third party is lucky to get one candidate, and is often a party in support of a paricular person), it would be held along with the other two.
*The Conservative Party in Schenectady, despite its name, was long ago taken over by the police and fireman’s unions, who use it to get concessions in return for their endorsement.
Mostly it’s a reasonable and necessary concession to reality, in much the same way that public schools offer days off for religious holidays. Nobody would come to school for Christmas (or for Jewish or Muslim holidays in areas where those groups concentrate) anyway, so why have the expense of keeping them open?
For elections it’s that the public wants primaries and wants the official organization and guarantee of privacy and accuracy that state election apparatus provides. The state, in the guise of a legislature and governor who have incentive to make voting for their party’s candidates as convenient as possible, is happy to oblige.
I don’t know if there is a history of court cases protesting state-run primaries. It would be interesting to see the legal justification for them. Of course, states always have the option of having party-run and paid for caucuses instead of (or even in addition to) primaries. They are impractical in the larger states. New York has more people than the Netherlands. California more people than Greece, Portugal, Armenia, and Hungary combined.
I agree that bowing to private interests just because it’s convenient and approved of by a majority of the population has historically had serious consequences in the U.S. However, the problem here lies not in the state opening voting booths for primaries but in the barriers placed in front of third parties to keep them from ballots.
If you mean “kosher” in the sense of “constitutional” or “legal,” I don’t think the specific issue has been challenged in court, but it’s very likely, that, yes, it is a valid governmental function to pay for party primaries only if the rules do not unfairly discriminate. In other words, there must be allowances for all legitimate political parties to have government-paid primaries. The details of how these laws are structured in each state really is the key, and I know that Ralph Nader, in particular, has had a lot to say about how unfair they are.
No, they don’t have special or official status, but given the winner-take-all (first-past-the-post) nature of the electoral system, it’s a natural default. Theoretically, any other party that meets whatever standards that are set forth in state law should be able to get a primary election.
The New York system is notable in that it allows candidates to accept the nomination of multiple parties. That’s what keeps small parties alive in New York.
How it works in Missouri, as I understand it, is that the state announces a day it will hold an election. Local governments (and political parties) can put their own issues on the market at that election for a fee. However, if the local government (or political party) wants to hold its own election at another time, they’re allowed to do it, as long as they pay the entire cost of the election.
As a result, the Dems and Reps (and sometimes the Libertarians, when they have multiple candidates) hold their primaries at the same time. But that particular election day might also have a ballot for a tax increase or a bond issue.
So, anyone else can run a primary, but it’s not governed by the same laws as the real ones, and presumably not funded by the government. I do appreciate how they don’t name the Republicans and Democrats in the law. That’s very subtle.
(OTOH, it’s worth keeping in mind that the election laws are pretty fluid, almost more like a set of regulations. For instance, the primary date is fixed in the law, but they had no problem last year passing a bill to change it to a month earlier.)
Let me explain why third parties are almost inevitably doomed to failure. Suppose you’re a bright eyed and bushy tailed young idealist, who wants to get into politics to send a message to the fat cats and entrenched interests.
What path do you take? Do you join the Socialist Workers Party? The Libertarian Party? The Green Party? The Constitution Party?
Sure, you do that if you want to remain forever on the outside, looking in. But if our young idealist actually wants to attain office, if they want to actually create policy, then they can either join the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Any other choice is a choice to remain outside the electoral system and focus on advocacy rather than governing.
And this is a self perpetuating system. If everyone with any real shot at winning office joins a major party because that’s the only way to have a real shot at winning office, third parties will always be fringe parties because only fringe candidates will join them. Of course, if major candidates joined third parties then the third parties wouldn’t be fringe anymore, except any major candidate would be foolish to join a third party, because the third parties are all currently fringe, and so there is no possible advantage to any viable candidate to join that third party.
If one of the major parties collapses, then there is the potential for a third party to step into the vacuum and become a new major party, the last time this happened was in the 1850s when the antislavery Republican party became a major party. But a more likely scenario is that the shell of the collapsed major party will be taken over by a new coalition and rebranded. A collapsed, discredited and disgraced Republican or Democratic party would still have huge advantages over any third party.
New York has elected a Conservative to the Senate (naturally, he caucused with the Republicans), and John V. Lindsey was elected to some major office as a Liberal when the Democrats refused him a nomination. And, of course, Connecticut elected a Senator (and former V.P. candidate) under the aegis of the Connecticut-for-Lieberman Party.
Going back in time a bit, the Populists elected candidates in the 1890s, the first of three Progressive Parties in 1912 and 1914 (this was the “Bull Moose Party”). Wisconsin had a few candidates elected in the LaFollette-run Progressive Party in the 1920s, and the 1948 election had yet another Progressive Party that made a serious showing, though I don’t know if they elected any candidates; it survived as the American Labor Party for a while and then helped give rise to the New York Liberal Party. Russ Perot’s group made an impact in the 1980s-90s but seems to have tanked. And the Farmer-Labor Party did elect candidates in Minnesota and I think the Dakotas, before merging with the Democrats. (As of a few years back the state organization was still officially the Democratic-Farmer-Labor [DFL] Party, though they may have finally dropped that.)
Amusingly, the Town Clerk of the Town of Pinckney, NY, was for some years a member of the Right-to-Life Party, though she owed her election to Democratic cross-endorsement.
North Carolina liberalized their laws since we moved here; ballot access used to be limited to the Republicans and Democrats, plus the Libertarians went through the painstaking process for ballot access each election. Now candidates for President on a minor party ticket can get ballot access, apparently for the President-VP line alone, with somewhat less onerous means.
You will search state and federal election laws in vain for any occurrence of the words “Democratic” or “Republican”. Rather, the laws are written, and distinctions are drawn, based on performance in previous elections.
Some of these laws involve subsidies far more direct than the state-run primary—for example, federal law provides huge grants to the two parties to hold their national conventions, and to campaign in the fall presidential election. But again, the relevant distinction is previous performance—when the Reform Party drew more than five percent of the presidential vote in 1996, it drew a cut of the fall subsidies in 2000—and accomplished nothing.
Proposals to change it get shot down by the combined efforts of Farmers & Labor union workers (both rather moderate groups in the party), the Farmer-Labor caucus (a very progressive group of the party), and old-timers (who are just used to the DFL name and don’t see any reason for a change). Not gonna happen.
There is a organization of alternative parties, the Coalition For Free and Open Elections (COFOE) that exists to fight the slant towards the two dominant parties. If you look over the list of member parties (scroll down the right side) you’ll notice they have very little to do with each other politically. In particular, look over the Ballot Access News section for information about legislation and lawsuits in this area.
To which, contrary to what he promised when he started the thing so he could stay in the Senate, he does not actually belong. One of his opponents (politically, but not electorally, if you see what I mean) has taken it over, and one of the requirements for being a member is essentially that you must work against Joe Lieberman in some way, if I recall correctly.
Illinois allows anyone who can get enough signatures to get onto a ballot. Furthermore, if you can gain 15% or more of the vote in a general election (statewide or national), you become a bona fide party and are automatically included into the state primaries.
Last gubernatorial election, over 15% of the voters went with the Green Party candidate (as a protest vote or because they actually wanted him) and this year at the primaries we had Green Party primary ballots printed at the state’s expense for the first time. I’m guessing that when the Green Party fails to collect 15% of the vote in November, they’ll lose their official party standing and have to go back to collecting signatures but it does show that the game isn’t solely open to Democrats & Republicans. They’re just the only ones who can consistantly meet the threshold.
Every state is different. Oddly, yesterday I spent several hours of my life doing Supervisor training for the next election.
Very good OP. I hadn’t even thought about it much. Supervisor is procedural, not legal, so I’m doing it from that viewpoint.
kunilou got a lot of it for Missouri. There’s some minimum number of signatures a would-be party must give the Secretary of State to be certified to get on the ballot. Otherwise, you’re a write-in. Previous performance counts, so the Dems and Pubs don’t have to bother. Any other state or local measures that submitted the required proportion of signatures gets listed too. There have been court fights concerning a few of those last.
Libertarians are diligent about staying on the ballot, but I could count on my fingers the number of ballots they actually get. Greens show up sometimes too.
A primary is not quite a real election. The “real” parts are initiatives and such; the primaries are only deciding who gets to run (“stand”, I think, for many non-US folks) in the GENERAL election, which does elect somebody to a real office. Except for President, which gets the Electoral College treatment…
You can only vote once, for whatever party or write-in you want. Activists routinely and proudly attempt to sabotage one anothers’ primary, so that somebody on the other side who is extra-offensive wins, so will screw them in the General Election.
Like all laws, this junk runs all over 'til your head hurts. Hey, man, I only work here.
Actually, the threshold is 5%. The Green Party candidate received 10.4% of the vote for Governor in 2006, so the Greens will indeed have a primary for statewide offices in 2010.
