I keep seeing reports of state Republican Parties announcing they won’t hold Presidential primaries in 2020 and just cede the nomination to Individual 1. And even the national party is talking about blending their campaign apparatus with his.
So how will this play in down ticket primaries? If there is no candidate to vote for for President, will Republican voters even turn out to vote for Congressional and state party candidates in the primaries?
In particular, in states like California, which has an open primary, this could result in every general election in November being two Democrats.
I think this is an admission by the Republican party that Trump is going to have problems. They’re worried he’d be challenged by other candidates who will claim Trump isn’t a real Republican. Even if Trump wins renomination, he’d been weakened by the accusations. So they’re trying to prop him up by eliminating the possibility of a challenge.
That said, I don’t think the Republicans are going to suffer much additional damage from doing this. Even if a lot of voters don’t turn up for primaries that don’t include any presidential candidates, some of them will. So Republican candidates will be chosen.
I’m sure the GOP will make exceptions in any state like California where there’s a possibility of getting shut out.
I don’t think the Republican party has any problem with Trump. Sure, his approval ratings are low, but they’ve always been low. His numbers within the party are about the same as ever, and those were the numbers that got him enough votes in enough states to win last time. Meanwhile, over on the Democratic side you see a bunch of candidates who will have to cannibalize each other to advance. This will inevitably cause some percentage of each one’s supporters to be angry and sit out the general election because the nominee isn’t pure enough for them, or worse, vote for a third-party candidate.
Sure, all this could change if Mueller comes up with iron-clad proof of traitorous collaboration between Trump himself and the Russians. But it’s going to take a lot more than a few campaign finance violations to turn away the true believers.
Not having a presidential primary probably wouldn’t change that much in Missouri. Our presidential primary is a lot earlier in the year than the other primaries. And yet, it can still seem like the race is mostly over when it happens. That said…
How is this legal? Could the Democratic Party just say, “Well, our candidate is Hillary Clinton, we’re not bothering to hold presidential primaries either”? Could a state party just emerge from a smoke-filled room with a list of candidates and have no other primaries?
It seems like part of having the two-party system is allowing (sort of open) primaries. Why is the presidency different?
Parties are not part of our system of government, and so can set their own rules however they see fit. Yes, that’s right, our Founding Fathers didn’t even anticipate the possibility of political parties. That’s how incompetent they were at the whole politics thing.
Sure they could. The Democratic Party gets to set its own rules on how the Democratic Party’s candidate is chosen. Which seems reasonable.
The trend in the last few decades has been to have a lot of the delegates chosen by a series of state primary elections. But it wasn’t always that way and there’s nothing saying it can’t be changed.
Right. It’s legal because there’s no law against it. It’s not uncommon for State parties to decide not to bother holding Presidential primaries or caucuses in years when they have an incumbent running unopposed.
In this case, though, I agree that it’s because they want to protect Trump. There will certainly be some plausible candidate or candidates opposing him, and they want to spare him and themselves the embarrassment of almost certainly not actually losing, but having a significant chunk of the Party reject him.
Sure it’s legal - it would only be illegal if there was some law against it, and the parties are actually private organizations that support people running for office. If I form the Pantastic Party, I can offer only me as a candidate for every office, and (presuming I can jump through the hoops to get on the ballot, which is usually collecting lots of signatures) there’s nothing wrong with it. If I can’t get on the ballot, I run as a write-in candidate.
The two-party system isn’t a legal construct, there hasn’t ever been a law saying ‘we are now a two-party system’, defining what that means, or anything of the sort. Technically speaking it’s not a two-party system, as there are active third parties, the fact that they generally don’t get a plurality of the votes doesn’t mean they don’t exist.