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If We Survive This, Let’s End Open Primaries
There have been four closed contests so far this season: Iowa, Nevada, Oklahoma and Alaska. Notice anything about those? Cruz won three out of four.
I have several thoughts on this. First, it makes me feel better about the Republican Party, as it looks like Trump is winning largely because he’s pulling Democrats and Independents in to vote in the Republican contest (presumably in some combination of actual support and sabotage). Second, it makes me feel better about the chances of taking him down, as we now shift to primarily closed contests (including Florida). Third, it makes me think the Democrats (and, indeed, all of us) should be very afraid if Trump actually gets the nomination. Fourth, it makes me think Ted Cruz is probably the first choice of most actual Republicans.
But mostly it makes me scream into the night: Whose idiot idea was it to have open primaries?!
I’ve always thought this was a terrible idea. The Republican nominee should be just that, the Republican nominee. If you’re an Independent or Democrat, you can decide to support the Republican in the general or not, and Republican voters can take that into consideration when choosing their nominee, but if Democrats and Independents can help choose the Republican nominee, in what sense is he or she even really the Republican nominee?
End open primaries, regardless of the outcome.
Published in Elections, General, Politics
This is correct. States that hold open primaries/caucus should have their delegates gutted in half.
Amen
Ironic that the party that is getting excoriated for wanting to bring back the poll tax, deny the precious pups from Black Lives Matter their opportunity to attend Trump rallies, and wants to crush the Voting Rights Act is the party that subscribes to the most asinine, counter-productive rules in the Western world.
Agreed. Open primaries are self-defeating.
But this could be putting the cart before the horse. It’s likely that limiting voters to true Republicans helped Cruz to win in these states. It’s also likely that they have closed primaries because the kind of Republicans who run these states tend to be no-nonsense hard-liners with little sympathy for independents.
In other words, it’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation. You need solidly conservative Republicans to legislate a closed primary system. But you need a closed primary system to elect solidly conservative Republicans.
That’s interesting. Is it always a matter of state law whether the primary is open or closed? Or do the parties sometimes get to choose? I note that California, New York, D.C. and other liberal jurisdictions have closed primaries, so it may not be that simple.
I don’t think this is much of a problem. Notice that in Vermont, once you remove Trump, Rubio and Kasich are the two who were in play. Same in Massachusetts.
I grew up in Jersey, and I can tell you that blue states not only have fewer conservatives than red states, but they are less conservative when compared side by side.
In closed primaries you’ll still have states who prefer moderates. You just won’t have liberals like Trump.
Well I have been saying this for a while. Welcome to the club folks.
You should not feel better about the party. That this wasn’t fixed prior to this year is bonkers. It’s indescribably stupid. Unforgivable. This, alone, makes me want to quit the party, never mind that the Colorado GOP changed the rules to eliminate the straw poll this year, literally disenfranchising Colorado’s Republican voters.
I agree 100%: Republicans should be nominated by their own party. That said, I’m curious to see whether there’s any empirical evidence that it makes a difference. NH poll data (for what they’re worth) suggested Trump would have won anyway.
OTOH, in 2008 McCain started out winning open primaries and losing closed ones. IIRC, there was evidence that Democrats were crossing over to vote for him.
FWIW, I wrote last month:
I agree.
I’m convinced it happened because the Republican organizations figured out a way to get the state governments to pay for their primaries.
People, forget the money and run your own primary.
If Trump wins this, and we start a new party lets never have open primaries from the start.
Since we’re fantasizing anyway, I’d go further. Let’s follow the model of most nonprofits. To vote in an election to select the party’s nominee, you’d have to be a member in good standing, i.e. have your membership dues paid up. We can be like Ricochet, and charge something small, like $25 per year. That wouldn’t be prohibitive but it would make sure that party members have a little skin in the game.
Adding more super delegates would be an easier path to increasing party control that wouldn’t rustle too many feathers I think.
In SC and Massachusetts, tens of thousands of Democrats registered as Republicans before voting. The common take on this is that Trump is pulling them into the Republican tent. Clearly these people are merely rigging the election for Hillary. This whole thing is a giant catastrophe.
Remember all those articles about record numbers or R’s voting and low numbers for D’s? Kinda puts a new spin on it doesn’t it?
It ruffles feathers when you use them to deny the popular vote.
Excellent idea.
Agree. Open primaries have never made any sense to me.
I agree broadly, but would also like to point out that the one state where Rubio won, also the one state where Trump placed third, has open caucuses and primaries.
Maybe we just have a better-developed sense of fair play than the rest of the country?
I just don’t know if this amount of coordination is possible within the electorate without some sort of spread message to do so. So we either A) have to believe that thousands of people who do not know one another across multiple states decided on their own that they are going to register Republican to throw the race to Trump making it easier for Hilldabeast or B) a secret campaign message went out from the DNC to thousands of people across states to register Republican to throw the race to Trump making it easier for Hilldabeast. I find A almost impossible to believe and B too hard to keep secret. Some one would have found out about that who did not want to keep it secret.
Plus, if you don’t pay taxes you don’t get to vote in the general.
Anecdotal evidence is that a lot of Dems don’t want Hillary! or the socialist. They don’t want Ted and they aren’t voting for Marco. So, who is left? Kasich? The good doctor? Maybe but probably not.
I’ve been telling some of my Democrat friends, when talking about how the fix has always been in on their side, that we could use some superdelegates right about now, however given more thought I’m not so sure that had they existed they wouldn’t have rolled over for Trump, given that several of our betters volunteered that Trump would be far preferable to Cruz.
Even if the party apparatus were completely trustworthy, I’d be much more comfortable going into a convention where a majority of delegates are held by not-Trump alternatives than knowing that the fix would be in via simple disenfranchisement by party leaders.
This is a no brainer. Even if it is being pursued for the wrong reasons.
I hate to say it but the Democrats have a better primary system than the Republicans. They have full proportional voting, without a 20% threshold, and they have Super Delegates. If we had both of those reforms, Donald Trump could be more easily stopped.
I agree about open primaries, and also think, as Kevin Williamson argued today, that the party should have some veto power over who can run as a Republican. We should have been able to show Trump the door at the outset. I will also argue with your assessment of Cruz. The different regions have been choosing very different candidates. Cruz started courting the South clear last fall, and frankly, for all that, didn’t do that well there. At any rate, you have to look at the different regions and the type of candidate they like before drawing such conclusions. You might be able to do so after all the voting is over, but it is impossible right now. So no, I don’t believe it shows in any way that Cruz is more acceptable to the mass of Republicans. I personally think exactly the opposite is true–that Rubio is more acceptable to Republicans on the national level. Time will tell.
Be careful what you wish for. Republicans have taken lots of people off the tax rolls. We no longer have a requirement for landed gentry (property owners) to merit the voting right. One might clamor about the rightness or wrongness of requiring taxes being paid (or property being owned) to qualify for the vote, but one suspects that if you showed up waving this banner, you’d get killed by the people whose right to vote you were contesting. Since we all die sooner or later, might it be suggested that we not rush out for this opportunity more quickly than is necessary?
Frank is right. You think people are upset with the establishment now? Imagine if the Republicans set up a system of Super Delegates where 2 candidates tied in Iowa and candidate B wiped out A in New Hampshire and yet candidate A was ahead in delegates because of Super Delegates. Oh, and A was widely known as the “establishment” choice”. (This, of course, is exactly what the Democrats had this year.)
Sorry but that is a terrible idea.
But as soon as primaries become “closed,” won’t that just prompt Democrats to change party affiliation sooner, in election years when doing so doesn’t deprive them of a meaningful Democrat vote AND would provide an opportunity to create GOP chaos?
I’m not arguing in favor of open primaries, I just wonder whether there’s no way to protect against electoral chaos in years when one side has an obvious, inevitable nominee and so that party’s voters can change affiliation early enough and risk-free for the primary.
There is no coordination to switch parties.
Trump attracts huge numbers of “the radical center”, who are not represented well by either party. If you had to be a registered republican X number of days before the primary, huge numbers of Trump’s (not an insult, just an objective fact) less well educated voters would end up unable to vote for him.