The key thing is, there’s no such thing as party affiliation in Mississippi (and ~20 other states, mostly in the South and Midwest, FWIW).
In Mississippi, there’s no such thing as a Democratic or Republican voter; there are just voters. You have a party identification only at such time as you choose to vote in a primary. And once the primary is over and settled, your party affiliation once again ceases to exist.
So there’s no such thing as a crossover voter in Mississippi, except in people’s heads.
Mississippi is free at any time to allow voters to include a party affiliation as part of their voter registration, and limit primary participation for each party to those voters who’ve indicated an affiliation with that party in their voter registration. Until that time, there’s no such thing as crossover voting. All you have is people doing what they do.
I would distinguish the actions of individual unaffiliated voters from parties, candidates, and candidates’ campaign organizations acting to affect the other party’s nominating process.
Parties and candidates and their organizations inherently have party affiliation, and AFAIAC have no business monkeying around with the candidate selection process of the other party.
This did not apply to Mississippi, of course, since any manipulation of the GOP primary process was by a GOP candidate and his organization. There was no effort by Democrats to tip the GOP nomination to a particular nominee.
so, it boils down to the real possibility that, for the reason of getting the R’s to have the weakest candidate on the ballot, some dems voted for the wingnut; and some, for reason of wanting to eliminate the wingnut at that stage, not later, voted for the less wingnut Republican.
short and sweet, their votes cancelled each other out, unless there was a coordinated effort by Dem officials to get their people to vote for one or the other. don’t see that, so I think any ‘cross over’ perceived probably had no effect.
Nate Silver’s gang analyzed the county-level data and came up with reasonible evidence, in my opinion, to show that the African-American vote (of whom 90% typically vote Democratic) put Cochran over the top.
Not in Mississippi. Cochran was the stronger candidate in November, and the African American vote propped him up. It’s possible that some Tea Partiers will stay at home next November and make the Democratic candidate into a viable force. But Travis Childers (D) would have much better chances against the tea partying wackadoodle (McDaniel) than against the Republican Senatorial incumbant (Cochran).
In Virginia though, Cantor’s toppling may have been assisted by Democratic cross-over votes. That scenario is a better match for the OP.
Well, if you have the option of voting in the Democratic primary, you are not voting for your first overall choice. Which doesn’t bother me especially. Let’s extend your example. Say you prefer McCain to Romney, but you think that both will rubber stamp any kind of unaffordable fat cat tax cuts passed by Congress and that both will always find an excuse to send combat troops to any corner of the globe. In other words your preference is pretty weak. From a utilitarian perspective your first choice Republican candidate will be the one that does the worst in November. That might be Romney because of his stiff and robot-like presentation, plastic smile, and unpleasant sense of entitlement.
My understanding is that the Arrow Impossibility Theorem doesn’t matter too much in practice under most voting systems. Unfortunately, the one that it matters for is winner-take-all - i.e. the one we have. (Can’t find the cite, but it was a study of a particular British Union election where they had a complicated ballot which permitted various voting systems to be compared. I concede that this evidence isn’t overwhelming. There’s another poster here who thinks that French PR suffered from some problems that could be traceable to electoral theory. )
At any rate, I trust the parties to pass rules to address mischievous voting, should it become a problem for them. On balance though, Republicans will recognize that they have more to fear from their legion of wackadoodle supporters than from a few Democratic cross-overs. But if they fear both, they can plonk for a jungle primary.
I don’t like the primary system. I think it’s absurd that the general public gets to decide who a party nominee is.
And I really hate the open primary system. It’s ridiculous that a party nominee can be picked by people who have no intention of voting for them in the general election. And I have indeed crossed party lines and voted for candidates that I thought would be easier to be defeated in the general election. I think it is unethical and outrageous that I’m allowed to do that!
If we must have a primary system then it should be a closed primary. Better yet, let the party leaders pick the candidate and present them to the public. It would better define the agenda of each party and result in candidates that were more apt to toe the party line. Yes, I’m suggesting a return to the “smoke filled room” days.
Also:
[ul]
[li]You can trust the bigwigs to screw up royally on occasion: they are, after all, human. But so what? The pick and present method provides accountability. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush IMHO were lightweights at the time they were elected. Smoke filled rooms would have never produced such candidates. And yet nobody lost any sort of face from propping these boobs, other than the candidates themselves. Contrast with Nixon, Eisenhower and FDR: you might disagree with them or question their morality but they weren’t lightweights. (For the sake of completeness, Obama is a pretty sharp customer, but he would have had to wait until 2016 to toss his hat in. Bill Clinton had been hob-nobbing at the national level for years: I argue that he would have had a shot under a pick and present system, though he would of course have campaigned for it differently. ) [/li][*] Letting the party pick the candidates would encourage intra-party deliberation so they could decide what they stand for and also what issues they want to straddle or even blur. Which is really all to the good. It’s not like readers of various news outlets won’t be able to figure out what they’re up to. As for those who get their news from the television or talk radio, their confusion will be neither rectified nor enhanced. No difference really. [/ul]
But these were the guys who won multiple terms. You can’t hold them up as typical. The same smoke-filled room system also produced Willkie, Humphrey, and Stevenson.
I agree with all of this. But I also note that many voting systems are much less susceptible to strategic voting than our is. That is, in many voting systems, the situations where “strategic voting” that is different from “voting for people you like” is in your interest are sort of weird outlier situations, whereas in our “plurality takes all” system, it comes up routinely.
Personally, I like approval voting. That is, vote for as many of the candidates as you like. (each person can vote for 0 to n candidates, when n candidates run. Of course, voting for zero or n is a waste of time.) Whoever gets the most total votes wins. It’s not perfect, but it’s very simple, it makes it easier for solid moderates to win, it makes support for “extremist” candidates explicit in the results, and most of the time, you can vote without the cognitive dissonance of choosing between the vote that you want to make and the one that you think will give the best outcome.
The problem I have with approval voting is that where you draw the line between “approve” and “disapprove” depends on strategic considerations. If we were to have an election between Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Brian Schweitzer, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Bobby Jindal, for instance, I would approve Clinton, Biden, and Schweitzer, while disapproving Cruz, Paul, and Jindal, because while I see differences in all six of those candidates, the gap between the first three and the second three is far larger than the other gaps. But if the only candidates were Clinton, Biden, and Schweitzer, I wouldn’t approve of all three of them any more, because doing so would be equivalent to abstaining: I’d instead either approve my favorite and disapprove the other two, or the other way around. And if the election were those three plus one Republican, I’d have to make a decision based on how likely the Republican is to win: If he’s likely to win, I’d approve of all three Democrats and disapprove of the Republican, to try to minimize the Republican’s chances, but if he’s not likely to win, I’d treat it the same as the three-Dems election, and try to get the best Dem I can. How I feel about Clinton, Biden, and Schweitzer relative to each other shouldn’t depend on who else is running.
You are offered a menu of choices. Whether you choose a narrow spectrum (eg vote for one candidate) or a broad one (eg vote for all but one candidate) depends on your relative preferences. You might vote for all the Democrats if Nixon ran (because your preferences are essentially anti-Nixon) or just one Democrat if Ford runs (because you find Ford unobjectionable). This system provides greater representation of the public’s preferences, not less. The more voters choose strategically, the more information they send via the ballotbox. It’s very different from strategic voting in an opposing party’s primary.
We had our Tennessee primary elections today, and although there is almost no chance I will be voting for any Republicans in November, I gritted my teeth and asked for a Republican ballot today (hoping that no one I knew heard me).
The reasons are simple:
Most of the Democratic races are uncontested, or between candidates I’ve never heard of.
In my district, Republican candidates usually win by a 65-70% majority. So if I want my vote to count, it has to be in the Republican primary.
Our Senator (Lamar Alexander), while no friend of liberals, will at least give lip service to the idea of working with the opposition party. He actually voted for immigration reform. For that he is facing a strong challenge from a Tea Party candidate. Since the winner of this primary is almost guaranteed to win in November, it was my only chance to vote for the more reasonable candidate.
Similarly I voted against my US Representative and State Senator, who have spent the last few months railing against Obamacare and “Obama’s overreaching Common Core agenda” (WTF?).
I also voted to retain all of our state supreme court justices, who have been under attack for recall because they’re “too liberal.”
We have Minnesota primaries on Tuesday (8/12). Since they are open primaries, what races would a Democrat vote for in the Republican side to interfere the most?
Let’s see: Charlie Cook ranks MN-08 as lean Democrat and MN-02 as likely Republican. Al Franken is “Likely” to win in the fall for the Senate.
Is there an unelectable wackadoodle running against Kline (R) is district 2? Is Kline so weird that it doesn’t matter? The point is strategic voting is more difficult than just voting on the basis of policy. If the seat is safe for Republicans, then you want to vote for the guy who is most RINO. But if the seat is in play, you have to weigh probabilities. Which is part of the reason I think the existing system is a mess.
From a month ago:
I don’t consider those guys to be lightweights either. Willkie showed a lot of courage by not campaigning against WWII for example.