We took a system that has consensus-driven decision-making as a bedrock principle and decided to let the 25% most ideologically driven people in our population choose who we are allowed to vote for. And then we act surprised when we end up with extremists paralyzing government.
Posted by apzh
10 Comments
End primaries entirely
Extremists have helped paralyze the government but the truth nuke is this Congress is just full of lazy bums
Not sure I agree. I think private parties should be allowed freedom to assemble how they wish. Besides, registering is as easy as signing a piece of paper.
My state (very red) is moving towards closed primaries and I’m dreading it. They do not like that some of us vote in the local GOP primaries as Dem candidates often run unopposed and rarely win generals so it makes more sense to try to help the less extreme Republicans win their primary.
Just get rid of primaries and do ranked choice
California-style jungle primaries everywhere for everything.
Open primaries are good but the issue is that you still have to pick one to vote in, so you’d never have the entire population making decisions in both of them
Why? The Republican primary is not for me. I don’t want them to succeed and would absolutely vote for the outcome that make is most likely that they will fail.
Equally, I don’t want Trump to win the Democratic primary.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that opening primaries creates better outcomes and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that people join a party to have a say in who that party nominates
Political scientists checking in here. While I agree with you in theory, the actual evidence we have is that the effect is fairly marginal. The average voter is not participating in any type of primary (open, closed, semi-open/closed), and we don’t see polarization spiking more among elected officials in states with closed systems.
The type of person willing to participate in any type of primary is on average far more polarized than the average citizen.
There are a lot of reforms I would support to improve American politics, and banning closed primaries would be near or at the bottom of my list.