Thread: The U.S. Has a Primary Problem

"Some 300 bills have been introduced in Congress over the years to reform presidential primaries "and not one of them has seen the light of day."
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The U.S. Has a Primary Problem

Primary elections, from the presidential level on down, are a total mess.

By Pat Garofalo | Assistant Managing Editor Feb. 19, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.

(Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images)

When it was all said and done and the final results were tallied, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders fought to a tie in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary.
Wait, what?

Yes, Sanders won the election in the Granite State by a whopping 22 points, dealing what was trumpeted from coast to coast as a major blow to the Clinton campaign and its oft-mentioned "inevitability" ahead of Saturday's Nevada caucus. But when the delegates were doled out – and in presidential nomination races, they're the number that really matters – each camp walked out of New Hampshire with at least 15.

That's because Clinton, while losing the state's allocated delegates 15-9, has the support of six New Hampshire "superdelegates," party insiders who get to cast a vote at the nominating convention divorced from any election result.

Undemocratic? You bet. But it's par for the course when it comes to America's primaries, which from the presidential level right on down are a disaster of disenfranchisement, discrimination and despair. In short, America has a serious primary problem.

[READ: 5 Things We've Learned About the 2016 Presidential Election]

Let's start at the top: Our system for choosing presidential nominees makes little sense. As Brookings Institution senior fellow Elaine Kamarck wrote recently, "There are many different ways to organize a presidential nominating system and almost all of them are more rational and orderly than the hodgepodge of systems that voters experience today."

To start, Iowa and New Hampshire go first simply because they do, even though they are wildly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. They're smaller, way more white and way more rural, and, in the case of Iowa, more evangelical, with a side of bizarre special-interest politics in the form of the ethanol lobby. Yet they shake up the race, thinning the herd before most of the country has a chance to vote.

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In fact, the order of the primaries effectively disenfranchises millions of Americans. It's possible that the primaries and caucuses in March and April will result in two candidates having insurmountable delegate leads. So what about voters in states whose primaries aren't until May or even June?

And these aren't small buckets of people: They're the residents of California, New Jersey, New Mexico and the Dakotas. (Adding some insult to injury, the already disenfranchised residents of the District of Columbia vote dead last in the nation.) The sequential system, as currently designed, makes the votes of millions of Americans far less important than the few residents of the early states. Some 535,000 caucus-goers in Iowa can matter more than the millions eligible to vote in the Golden or Garden States, depending on what happens there in terms of culling candidates or setting "expectations" for the rest of the campaign.

"No one sat down one day and said Iowa must go first, by God, and then New Hampshire," says David Karol, associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "That's a historical accident."

Even if the results aren't necessarily predictive of who ultimately gets the nomination, the two early states have an effect on the race disproportionate to their size or demographic makeup.

Which brings us to our second problem: caucuses.

Several states, including early-goers Iowa and Nevada, use caucuses rather than secret ballot elections to decide who gets their presidential delegates. This process – more akin to a public meeting than an election, particularly on the Democratic side – warps the nomination race by severely limiting voter turnout and rewarding more extreme voters.

Because coming to a caucus is much more of a commitment than casting a traditional secret ballot – both in the amount of time it takes and, for the Democratic primary in Iowa at least, having to publicly declare your allegiance – they tend to attract the most committed supporters of a candidate and only those who have the time to navigate the drawn-out process.

"Even after accounting for many other factors, caucus attenders were more ideologically extreme than primary voters," wrote Brigham Young University political science professors Christopher Karpowitz and Jeremy Pope. "Voters who perceive caucuses as unfair, less friendly to different points of view, and better for special interests may not be able to perfectly articulate what is wrong with caucuses, but their intuition that caucuses are not representative is supported by the data."

[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on the 2016 Presidential Elections]

Consider: Iowa caucus winner Ted Cruz, a Republican GOP senator from Texas, received just 51,000 votes, out of a state with some 2 million eligible voters. For anyone who can't afford to take several hours to caucus in the evening due to a job or parental duties or who knows what other responsibility, too bad. (And don't even get me started on Iowa's coin tosses.)

Which brings us finally to the superdelegates. Clinton currently leads Sanders in the superdelegate count by a total of 362 to 8. To many critics, these delegates are the epitome of unaccountable party politicking; they were explicitly brought into being after Democratic officials were unhappy with the winners of the 1972 and 1976 presidential primaries.

These delegates can switch so there aren't enough of them to reverse a landslide, but it is theoretically possible for them to tip a close election one way or the other. It's never really come to that, and there are reasons to think the superdelegates wouldn't ultimately reverse the voters' will, but it could mathematically happen. (Republicans have superdelegates too, but they aren't free to vote for any old candidate.)

The upshot of the presidential primary system, then, is that it leaves a lot of people out in the cold unless the race is so competitive that it comes down to the final few states. Even then, voters in later states don't get to choose from the same slate of candidates as those who go first. And superdelegates add a veneer of party wheeling and dealing to the process that doesn't have to be there, even if their effect on the final tally is usually negligible.

But local primaries are actually a bigger problem. In many places, primaries at the local level, as they are for state or presidential elections, are "closed," meaning only registered members of the party can participate. While this may make sense in elections for federal offices, where party ID really matters, at the local level, where politics is often dominated by one party, it really doesn't.

Consider Washington, D.C., or Baltimore. In both places, the Democratic primary is considered the be-all, end-all of election season; the winner is the odds-on favorite to win in the general election come November. In fact, the winner of the Democratic primary has won every mayoral election in D.C. since the city created the position.

About 76 percent of the capital city is registered Democratic, while 17 percent are of no party and 6 percent are Republican. Those who, for whatever reason, don't wish to register as a Democrat are in many cases frozen out of the decision-making process entirely by not being able to participate in the primary.

By the time the general comes around, the simple weight of numbers renders their votes largely meaningless. (The absurdity is compounded by Democrats simply switching to run as "independents" for the city council seats explicitly set aside for non-majority parties.)

A trip down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Charm City, as it's known, finds an even bigger mess.

Thirteen candidates are running in the Democratic primary to replace outgoing Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake this year. The winner of that primary, again, is the overwhelming favorite to triumph in November due to the city's partisan tilt; only 8 percent of registered voters are Republican. So it's possible for the preferred candidate of a small subsection of one party to assume office in the fall. The latest poll, taken before Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson jumped into the race at the last second, shows former Mayor Sheila Dixon leading with 27 percent of the vote.

[PHOTOS: The Big Picture – January 2016]

At the national level, closed primaries, for all their faults, help knit together disparate national parties. For local elections, however, they simply freeze out anyone not willing to affiliate with the party in power.

All that said, "the way party leaders are chosen around the world is much less inclusive," says Karol. "The big clear trend over the course of American history is toward more participation and more inclusion."

Indeed, until fairly recently party elites in the U.S. simply foisted nominees onto voters, as they do in many countries operating parliamentary systems; the process is much improved since then.

Still, a recent Morning Consult poll showed broad dissatisfaction with the current primary process. Large majorities support dumping Iowa and New Hampshire as the first primaries (and also making Election Day a national holiday, a good move for boosting voter turnout).

The problem with actually implementing a new system, though, is two-fold. First, the current beneficiaries will do just about anything to preserve their positions, whilst others only see the drawbacks with the system every four years and then forget about them until the next nomination season rolls around.

But more importantly, the fixes all have their own downsides. One big national primary? Name ID and money could play a bigger role than they already do. Rotating regional primaries (an idea which I'm very sympathetic to)? Again, more territory preferences, money, plus anyone from the first region gets a big advantage.

It's also unclear if Congress, the natural arbiter, even has the power to re-do the system, or the political will to follow through assuming it did. As Kamarck noted, some 300 bills have been introduced in Congress over the years to reform presidential primaries "and not one of them has seen the light of day."

At the local level, cities could experiment with the so-called "blanket primary" system used in California, Louisiana and Washington state, in which all candidates run in one primary and the top two vote-getters – regardless of party – move on to the general election. While the jury is out on how such a system benefits state-level elections, it would certainly give marginalized parties more of an opportunity to participate in places where they currently have next to no say at all.

There are no quick and easy solutions here, no snap of the fingers that will turn our current morass into the perfect system. But one thing is clear: We could do a lot better.

http://www.usnews.com/news/the-repor...ons-are-broken

The current election process keeps the power in the hands of the ruling Washington elites and strips
it away from the American people.

And yes, the election process has been this way for many decades and we must demand change,
starting with term limits in Congress. Nobody should be allowed to hold office 20, 30, 40 years as it
only breeds corruption and crony capitalism. Ted Kennedy is a perfect example.

Kennedy took office 1 year prior to my birth and 40......something years later it was a brain tumor that
finally got him out!

Unfortunately, little by little, year after year, decade after decade...... these Washington
elites have become more corrupt, more concerned with the ass kissing with donors lining there pockets
with outrageous personal wealth at the expense and well-being of the American people and economic
health and security of our nation.

And now finally, and more specifically after the 7+ years of Obama/Clinton disastrous failed policies.....

The American people woke up and will begin to take this power back to the people and make this country great again.

"300 bills have been introduced in Congress over the years to reform presidential primaries "and not one of them has seen the light ​of day."

When the primary elections are all over everyone will walk away and do nothing, just like every election year, because all eyes will then be on the November election.

And then we have the same system in 4 years.

The whole idea of primary elections are the problem. Once you turn over party nominations to the government, this is where the problem starts. It is none of the government's business how the parties run their nominations. Government keeps records of party affiliation for purposes of the primaries and so government is run based on party affiliations. Political parties confuse themselves with government. And this is just two parties, the Two Party System.

Get rid of the government records of voter party affiliation on the voter registration rolls. Get rid of the primary elections and turn the election process back over the political parties. If you don't like the way your party nominates candidates, leave the party. Notice how the government run primaries don't make any difference anyway. And the government can't do anything about it. Do you really want government telling the political parties how to run their affairs?

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

"300 bills have been introduced in Congress over the years to reform presidential primaries "and not one of them has seen the light ​of day."

Well, there's the problem. Each party has to reform their own primaries. It's up to the members
of the parties to do this--not Congress.