I find it striking how much of this piece is just admitting that primaries produce far-left (or far-right) candidates. Primaries are bad! It's also the one piece of the American political system that's relatively new (since the 70s), and neatly coincides with the US political system going off the rails. If there were one problem I wish I could solve it would be how to get rid of primaries
I agree regarding congressional primaries, but do presidentials have a recent record of producing far left nominees? Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden…except for Obama, the winner was always to the right of their second place competitor. I’ll grant you that they give a lot of exposure to lefties like Bernie and Warren that probably isn’t great for the D brand with the national electorate.
I think the tendency is to produce someone from the mainstream of the dominant faction (left or right) of the party. When that dominant faction is the more extreme one, that winner is well to the left/right of the party much less of the country.
When it's the less extreme faction that wins (e.g. both Clintons, HW Bush, Romney, McCain), those candidates often compromise with the other wing to win the primary and then move to the centre for the general. When it's the more extreme faction that wins, while they usually do compromise with the more centrist wing in the primary (e.g. Obama), they're still way to the left/right of the country.
Yeah I think it's a new phenomenon. And it won't lead to leftist candidates getting nominated per se. But it will exert a gravitational pull to the left on more mainstream candidates. And it also means that normie Democrats will not have the luxury of exploring the candidacies of lesser-known normie-friendly politicians. There will be a need to consolidate early behind a known quantity, to avoid splitting the vote. This helped Biden in 2020, and it will help Harris in 2028 (never mind that she might not be all that normie-friendly, but whatever).
I liked this comment even though I agree with others below that the historical analysis is wrong. Primaries have not historically chosen extreme candidates, but going forward they very well may. Primaries *plus partisan sorting* is bad news.
Well, let's look at the tale of the tape. I'm willing to adjust on these if I hear good points otherwise, but here's my lightning round style take:
Carter: no
Ford: no
Reagan: yes
Mondale: not that much
Dukakis: ...? He ran such a weird and bad campaign in the general that it's tough to tell
HW: no
Bill Clinton: definitely no
Dole: yes, and really ran under the radar on this
Gore: no
Dubya: tough to say, probably depends on the issue
Kerry: yes, like Dole ran under the radar here
McCain: no, but like Dubya a bit issue dependent
Obama: no
Romney: the 2012 version of him, yes--perhaps not an earlier or later version of him
Hillary Clinton: probably yes relative to where she was before, but both Clintons can be chameleons in this regard
Trump: the highest variance dependent on issue
Biden: no
Now, I could buy an argument that the primary system needed some time to distill into its capability to nominate extreme candidates, and that that distillation may now be upon us.
I'm more interested in the position relative to the entire party than to just a handful of primary competitors, and I always saw Kerry near the left end of the Senate caucus when it came to the issues. Dean was weird and I don't think we can glean much from his brief run. Edwards, maybe, I'd have to review his policy takes relative to Kerry's, and in any case Kerry picked him as his VP.
Edwards started out billing himself as the 21st Century Bill Clinton, then pivoted left when he saw that’s where the energy/money was. He had quite the cheering section on Daily Kos based largely on his “Two Americas” speech about economic inequality, which became his trademark.
Edwards had a big contingent of support from the Hollywood left based on his economic populism. Which, TBH, I thought he was correct to champion. In my view economic inequality is the original sin from which most of our other problems flow. But he was obviously a highly flawed candidate.
I think the Iraq War was a big issue among progressive dems in 04 and Kerry voted for it. i think he was also generally very “establishment.” Edwards talked a lot more about inequality and he and Dean were perceived as “outsiders”.
But Bernie and Warren lost! So your position isn't that primaries produce extreme candidates (your comment's first sentence). It is that primaries expose extreme candidates (who go on to lose) to the public?
....can you think of any politically extreme candidates that might have shockingly won their party's nomination in the last 8 years? Going on to transform American politics in a negative way and push us close to a Latin American-style strongman government? Anyone come to mind? Think hard man
So, the GOP should basically ignore what a majority of it's voters want?
LIke, Trump is terrible, but it's because a lot of GOP voters are terrible. Again, Mitt Romney in 2012, regardless of his actual views, had to pivot hard right to win over voters who thought he was an elite squish, and he's basically the type of guy a GOP convention filled with rich dudes and their lackeys would've chosen.
Then again, the last couple weeks show a lot of this comment section would've agreed with 2012 Mitt Romney on immigration.
>So, the GOP should basically ignore what a majority of it's voters want? LIke, Trump is terrible, but it's because a lot of GOP voters are terrible
So to merge this and your other comment- Trump only won the 2016 nomination because of open primary states. He won most of those, likely pulling in former Democrats and independents. He actually lost most of the closed primary states to Cruz (to be fair, there's not that many of them). Which begs the question- who are the 'GOP voters', exactly?
If we have to do primaries, they should be closed primaries. 41 US states are some degree of open primary now (it's a spectrum as to how open). If you want to help select the representative of a private organization, *you should be a card carrying member of said organization*. Neither you nor I get to vote as to who the next Girl Scouts leader is, right? Or who wins the Oscars, or who the next president of the 4-H Club is, right? Is that undemocratic? No, they're all private organizations controlled by their members.
If voters are disgruntled with 2 parties, sure, they're free to go out and form their own party or whatever. Or, vote in independents. *That's totally legal now*. Don't have high odds of winning? Not my problem
I can't tell if you literally just landed on our planet and are not familiar with other extremist wins in US primaries, but off the top of my head:
AOC over Joe Cawley
Dave Brat, shockingly, over Eric Cantor. The # of Brat voters was like not even 10% of the district's total electorate. What's democratic about that?
Ted Cruz over David Dewhurst
Mike Lee over Robert Bennett
Rand Paul over Trey Greyson
Kari Lake is the likely favorite for the Arizona Senate
Etc. etc. Much worse, the threat of being primaried is enough to pull Republicans further to the right. Do you ever wonder why they've consistently become more extreme? Because they know if they anger the party's base, various donors, the Fox News establishment, etc., they'll face a primary challenge. The US- is far as I know- the only democracy in world history to *primary incumbents*. Of course the mere threat of losing pulls them further to the right! And the number of people who vote in the primaries is just a few % of the total voting population, so you're selecting for extreme partisans.
Why was Ken Paxton acquitted on impeachment charges of corruption recently? Because billionaire far-right donors promised to primary any Republican who voted to impeach him. It's a very, very, very bad system
Well, I'm not sure it's fully distilled on the presidential level, then. Lower levels, perhaps, though I think it's complicated, with Trump of course adding into the complication with chaos.
I'm not offering a take yet on whether I agree with LF or not--I am sympathetic to the idea that primaries are bad. I was more just thinking through what's happened before to see if any of us can glean some trends. My first thought is that at the presidential level there didn't seem to be much consistency.
Yes: primaries have, well, primed Dem voters to expect left-wing candidates. An open primary, like an open convention, would push Democrats to the left.
I dunno, I kind of agree in principle but if it were up to Democratic elites wouldn’t we have gotten someone far to Biden’s left in 2020? Republican primary voters are indeed nightmare fuel but moderate Black Democrats are seemingly the only force still saving Dems from their worst instincts.
One thing that might help is if the Democrats frontloaded their primary schedule in redder states like, say, Oklahoma where the primary electorate is closer to the national center than it is elsewhere. While Republicans could do the opposite.
Even if every single person voted in the primaries, you could still end up with not very moderate candidates. If voters are evenly spread out between -100 (far left) to 100 (far right), the median Democrat is -50 and the median Republican is +50, neither of which is close to 0. With parties centrally controlled, they would compete for the median general election voter, and nominate people at like -10 and +10. Of course primary voters can prioritize electability as well, but if many of them don't, you still get pulled toward the extremes.
Here's the thing, and I've said this before. You can have one of two things in modern politics -
1. A relatively weak party system and not that many parties.
2. A relatively strong party system, but it's fairly easy to have multiple parties that have a chance to win seats/matter.
I'd actually argue that's why there were more signifigant third-party challenges pre-primary system is if you were a group basically shut out from serious consideration (abolitionist in the 1850's, populists in the late 19th century, socialists & Dixiecrats in 1948, segregationists in 1968, etc.), there was no way to make your voice really heard within the system, so you could only make an impact by winning a big number of votes and make one or both parties shift toward you.
If you want to give people only two choices, forced upon them via elite consensus, you're either going to get a massive drop in voting, and even more distrust of the system, or we're going to see far more 3rd party (especially in a world of basically no campaign finance limits) runs that ruin your precious moderate candidates chances of winning.
Part of the reason you didn't see a serious 3rd party effort in 2016 & 2020 from the left is they got to try to win the primary. They failed, and yes, as part of a coalition, they got their hand to effect policy, as much as that upsets many here.
Look, I get this comment section, that wants it to be 2003 forever, wants a world where they never have to listen to anybody to the left of them, but every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters.
"Look, I get this comment section, that wants it to be 2003 forever, wants a world where they never have to listen to anybody to the left of them, but every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters."
I've seen you voice this a couple of times, and I totally get being frustrated by obtuse commenters online
On the other hand, this is a pretty left of center place with people who are 99.999% likely to vote for Biden in the election. And the polls suggest that even with these people who are to your right, Biden might still lose. If the left does run a third party candidate of almost any sort, it will certainly lead to Republicans winning easily. That will in turn move policy dramatically to the right of where it is now. Democrats likely respond to such events by moving to the center like Clinton and the DLC did in the 90s in order to triangulate better. How does any of that accomplish what you want?
TL;DR Version - You just can't give people a "we're stopping the bad people from doing things, but we're not giving you anything you want" or they'll stop showing up, no matter how bad the alternative is. You actually have to give them or at least try to give them something they care about.
But, the current Democratic coalition, as somebody who is to the left of 95-98% of the populaiton is fine with me. Which is why I have no real issues Biden running for reelection, and will have zero problems voting for him in November.
But, much of that is a lot of things that much of this comment section is upset that Biden did. If the Biden administration actually ran like many people in this comment section want him too, I, a fairly partisan Democrat would have some real issues getting motived to drop my ballot back in the mail in lovely all-mail voting Washington, and the people I know under 40, which yes, in a deep blue city, but I also know via the Internet people in varying other places, would probably be even more upset with Biden than they are now, and I don't think he would be any more popular, since the largest chunk of his unpopularity isn't that he hasn't been meaner to immigrants, trans kids, or people with college debt, but because he's old, the Afghanistan withdrawl didn't do perfectly (and the Blob jumped on that), and stuff is expensive.
There's a lot of complaining about how the evil Left NGO's and Bernie voters (who are all rich trust fund kids in the eyes of the comment section here, despite Bernie basically even going 50-50 with African-American voters under 40, and overwhelmingly winning the other ethnic groups in the 2016 & 2020 primary) should all sit down and shut up, and hell, Warren voters should and realize they're in a coalition, there are a lot of people who, and let me mean here, don't realize that the fact they were OK with gay people, were against the Iraq War, and are OK with higher taxes doesn't mean you're on the left edge of the Democratic coalition anymore like it was when you were a edge Gen Xer in the 90's.
There are a lot of people who claim they're liberal, but continually talk and seem to vote on the issues that they're on the right edge or are just right-wing about a bunch here, which is actually different than most voters in the Democratic coalition, who may have right or centrist-leaning views on things, but they don't really care. Just like all the single-payer or pro-choice people who vote for Trump. They legitimately have those views, they just have issues they care about more, just like the 74 year old grandma in rural South Carolina probably believes in two genders, but doesn't care the Democratic Party doesn't - unlike many people here, who do deeply care about the things the Democrat's are too far left according to them.
Again, people claim this is a pretty left of center place, but on certain issues, especially issues the younger part of the population cares about is far more liberal about, the rancor is honestly, no different than blue checks on Twitter complaining about the kids these days and how wokeness is ruining free speech/college/politics/media/etc. Bluntly, on the trans issue, this comment section is to the right of every elected Democrat, including John Bel Edwards, Governor of Lousiana, who did some pretty pro-trans EO's while in office.
The reality is, if you're somebody on the 50% of the Democratic coalition on the leftier sides, basically the only thing you've gotten in the past six months to a year is some attempts at student loan forgiveness, a few minor (but good) regulatory things, all while Biden continues to basically let Israel do whatever they want with no reprecussions, and the Democrat's attempting to pass a law that would've been Steve Sailer and Tom Tacrendo's wet dream ten years ago.
Again - the actual current Democratic Party, I'm fine with. The Democratic Party this comment section seems to want at times - not interested in, and I think would be actually less electorally successful than the current Democrat's, who are basically the most electorally successful center-left party in the developed world outside of the Canadian Liberals or Portugese left in the past 20 years.
So you included a lot in your response and I would enjoy digging in a bit more on many aspects of it, but I want to focus purely on the coalitional aspects you highlight -
"You just can't give people a "we're stopping the bad people from doing things, but we're not giving you anything you want" or they'll stop showing up, no matter how bad the alternative is. You actually have to give them or at least try to give them something they care about. "
I think you are absolutely correct! But I think just as you think the Democratic party has to address the coalitional wants of the left of the party, I also think they have to address the coalitional wants of the center & right of the party. This is further complicated because there is not one single spectrum, but instead there are a host of issues where many people are left or right - as you noted in your discussion about trans issues.
Important to this discussion is what you said about those who feel they're not being sufficiently accommodated by the party. One of the key limitations the left has with Democrats is that if they aren't sufficiently enthused, they will stay home. While if the right of the party is not sufficiently enthused, they will vote Republican. Groups or segments that will credibly switch parties are much more impactful than those who stay home. If there are 100 voters, and the balance is 51-49 for left and right respectively, if one person on the left stays home, they still have a 50-49 advantage, but if one person on the right of the party switches it becomes a 50-50 tie. Every person either party gets to switch from the other party is worth twice as much one they pick up on the edge.
All of which is to say that a successful party will (and should!) try to balance the interests of coalition partners in order to be most effective, go as far to the edge to add votes without going so far that they start attriting votes in the center.
I'm curious if you think this is incorrect in some substantive way? Matt highlighted that the Democratic party has responded to Republicans putting up weak candidates by moving further to the left. Should that change, and Republicans put up much stronger candidates, do you think the Democratic party will be able to move right without losing your and other left support? Even with a very weak candidate like Trump, Democrats (Biden) are in danger of losing, what path to victory outside of moving to the right do you see possible for Democrats if Republicans offer stronger candidates?
1.) Again, I actually think the "Democrat's Stay Where They Basically Are + Nominate Somebody Who Isn't Old" will actually go fine in 2028, and past that, it gets really difficult for the GOP to win a national election since Millenial's aren't going as conservative as Gen X did (and they also started more liberal).
Again, I'm not against the current Democratic Party's positions on a whole (obviously, I have issues on specific things) because I understand we can't be Norway overnight, but I'm against the "Dem's should move to the right on all cultural issues" that a lot of people here want.
Like, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, and so on are in some ways, to the left of Biden on some issues, but I think they'd do fine in a general. For all the talk sometimes here about "safe, legal, and rare," Whitmer did basically make the "nah, it's in the Constitution, folks" with zero talk about rareness and won big in a swing state.
TL:DR - I don't mind the current Democratic position on things, and think a not old nominee could even shift a bit to the left, if they were actually charismatic.
2.) I think there's also some disagreement on whom the actual swing voters are. Swing voters don't have real politics the way we weirdos do. They base on vibes and what comes up in the election - see the famous graphic from David Shor where people who approved the ACA, but wanted less immigration went 60-40 Obama to 60-40 Trump from 2012 to 2016.
The best you can do about those voters is highlight the things the GOP is nuts on they don't like (abortion, etc.) and try your best to not talk about things they disagree with us on.
Yes, on crime and immigration, there was overreach, but Biden basically never caved to the stuff on crime, but he can't fix the fact that many urban dwellers care less about being as punitive to every homeless person or person who committed a crime as people in suburbs do. Also, the GOP will run on the cities being crime-ridden hellholes no matter what the actual truth is.
I also don't think there are actually that many "the Dem's are too woke on trans kids/CRT/DEI/whatever Chris Rufo is whining about today" voters outside of highly educated people annoyed about the milleiu in basically deep-blue districts. It's a very Online Issue, as even polling post-2022 midterms showed.
The actual right-edge of the Democratic coalition isn't white centrists on Twitter upset their kids talked about whiteness at their private school. It's actually older moderate non-white non-college-educated minorities with a variety of views on cultural issues, most of which they don't care about.
For all the talk of some actual shift toward the GOP by minorities, the actual good exit polls in 2022 didn't really show much, and I'll be blunt - I simply don't but the polling showing Trump winning Hispanic's or winning 25% of black men. A point or two shift, sure. But, until it actually happens, like people were claiming would happen in 2020 & 2022 by much further margins than it actually did, I'm not going to buy it.
Yes, there'll be bleeding in places like the border area of Texas, but those are a bunch of votes we shouldn't have been winning for a long time. It's basically the same as the pro-choice pro-LGBT suburban women that voted for Romney. Those people are gone gone gone from the GOP coalition in the long run.
As for the McArdle/etc. types, they're always temporarily allies and anything short of just becoming a bland centrist to center-right party will never make those people happy. I guess, my line is, if you're asking to the Dem's to move to the center more than Woke Bill Kirstol is, you're probably not a long-term Dem voter in any scenario.
TL;DR - The people on here and on Twitter who claim to be the important voters to win actually aren't. The actual important voters are weirdos who want single-payer, the border closed for 10 years, are pro-choice up to conception, and want all guns banned, and other wacky conflcting views.
3.) More specifically, on the GOP, I don't think it's possible really for them to nominate "normal" candidates a lot of the time. Mike Gallagher, who was basically fated to run for a WI Senate seat in the next cycle or two peaced out. And I'm not talking about moderates, but right-wingers who aren't openly nuts.
Look at 2022 - the only win they had was Joe Lombardo, who barely beat the incumbent Governor of Nevada even though they had the highest unemployment, and since being elected, he's basically been a moderate center-right guy hemmed in by an almost Dem supermajority and the fact his pre-Trump career showed him being a typical center-right cop - not crazy on immigration, pro-gun control, and not really caring about other social issues.
Otherwise, despite efforts by the NSCC & NCCC, a bunch of nuts got nominated, because that's what the GOP base wants.
Now, maybe in 2028, all the scales will fall, and a ticket of John Thune & Spencer Cox will win 39 states, but I highly, highly doubt it. This isn't me saying the GOP can't win, this is me saying that there's zero evidence they can fix what they're currently doing. The Democratic Party in 1989 hated losing three times - I see no evidnece most GOP voters will care if they lose for the fourth time in five POTUS elections.
TL:DR - Show me a competent GOP class of nominees for Senate and I'll worry.
"Show me a competent GOP class of nominees for Senate and I'll worry."
That is simply reinforcing what Matt said that because Republicans are offering weak candidates, that Democrats are moving left. They moved sufficiently left that despite Republicans offering a candidate who was impeached twice and has multiple civil and criminal trials ongoing is still neck and neck (if not leading) the current Democratic candidate.
You're response is
1) "Democrats where they are is fine" - but will they stay there? They have moved SIGNIFICANTLY to the left in the last decade on a large number of issues. You also note that older (more conservative) Democrats are dying off and younger more liberal Democrats are aging into the party - won't that in and of itself push the party left?
2) Swing voters are weird, but the general consensus is that most voters are generally more culturally conservative than the Democratic party and more economically liberal than the Republican party. (With the acknowledgement that large number of voters have loosely held and/or contradictory opinions). Moving into an age where culture beats economics suggests bad news for Democrats and in my opinion is THE reason why Trump is competitive.
3) The GOP is unable to provide non bonkers candidates - which seems like a risky thing to bet on and also suggests that if they did provide reasonable candidates, that they would win because they are closer to the majority opinion, its just that their candidates are crazy keeping them from winning now.
"every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters."
At one time I was as confident as you about new voters bringing strength to progressive Democrats, just as I was about increasing diversity bringing strength to progressive Democrats. Trumpism has scrambled those assumptions in ways that I'm still coming to terms with.
I support strong parties *because* I want third parties. Voters should have far more choices.
This would lead, IMO, eventually to proportional voting for Congress and state legislatures, at least in some states - the third parties, almost regardless of political stance, would support this and if they're getting 20+% of the vote as is typical in other FPTP countries, then they will have enough influence to get it through the initative process, and the nature of US politics means that it will be so obviously an old guard protection scheme to oppose it that at least some referendums will be won.
The US chose to head in the direction of ever-more-open primaries and those crushed the third parties by pushing all the best politicians into contesting major-party primaries instead of turning the third parties into serious forces. No-one with the ability to be a serious politician joins the Green or Libertarian Party, or at least stays in them (Kyrsten Sinema left, and you can have your own views on how serious she is, but she did make it to the US Senate).
The issue is, American politics is a lot more expensive than any place in the world. The reason why despite it being a FPTP system with two and a half strong parties, there still exists several reasonably strong minor parites in the UK is a constiuency is 1/10th the size of a congressional district, and it's far cheaper to run a parliamentary campaign.
If we had 2,000 House seats and campaign finance limits, that'd be another way as opposed to PR or ranked choice to have strong third parties, but that's probably even less likely to happen than a voting system change.
Plus, for whatever reason, minor parties in the US basically refuse to actually seriously run in local races. Like, why hasn't Jill Stein (pre-Russian connections) run for Mayor or some serious libertarian outside of Gary Johnson (when there was some) tried to run for Mayor or Governor. Like, maybe Ron Paul should've tired to start the revolutiion in Texas instead of the 2008 primary.
Once cool reform idea from Ian Shapiro & Frances Rosenbluth: make primaries non-binding when support for the winner is below some threshold (say, 10% of registered voters in the district).
At minimum, this would let voters know that primary winners tend to have incredibly *weak* mandates. And it would soften the ground for party leaders to remove truly bad candidates.
It's funny you say that, I've independently had the exact same idea. Just do 1 gigantic open 'primary' that's non-binding, anyone can vote for the candidate of either party. And do some really rigorous exit polling, so you know who voted for who, which candidates are popular with which groups, etc.
Then the party can pick, technically, whichever candidate they want. They'd likely go for whoever looks best-positioned to win in the general, but you're not making them do anything. It's better than just polling because you're seeing which candidates perform the best in a real contest
Primaries may be relatively new compared to how old the US is, but the 1970s were still ~50 years ago. If either Party tried to scrap their Primary system in favor of going back to party and local machine bosses picking Presidential candidates, you would have a massive revolt against said Party.
The party could pick a select number of candidates to run in the primary, and voters could get to pick 1 of them. It'd be a closed primary where only dues-paying, card-carrying members of the party can vote. This is how primaries are conducted in the world's 159 other democracies
I don't think that he explicitly makes that point, but he strongly implies it in points 9 & 17. I also read him as conflating contested primaries with brokered conventions in result and by implication in causal relationship to the results.
I don't see it in 9. No. 17. suggests Castro might have done better had he not turned left, but "the party elite, in terms of donations and top campaign staff" pushed left. Matt argues the Party mistakenly pushed to the left of the voters. That hardly seem like an argument favoring removing the voters and centering the Party.
I think 21 thoughts is an excellent post, by the way, I just don't see a 'primaries are bad' subtext. Maybe MY has done some tweets lately and people are synthesizing...
Sure, that's just completely unrealistic. Personally I think the US should abolish being a presidency, become a parliamentary republic, institute a national VAT, have completely open borders for anyone with a STEM PhD, and so on. I don't spend a lot of time advocating for these policies because they're not going to happen, you know?
There are constitutional or at least statutory impediments to everything you mention, you'd need to pass a bill, you'd need bipartisan support, Schoolhouse Rock and all that.
Primaries were imposed on the Presidential nominating process by a voluntary stroke of a pen by the parties themselves and could be removed by the stroke of a pen in the same way.
They don't want to do it, it feels very politically destructive and just sort of wrong. But to your initial point, we didn't have Presidential primaries of consequential substance for most of our history, and it seemed to lead to better outcomes.
Suppose the Klein scenario actually happens and Dems pick a candidate at the convention (I agree this is a very unlikely scenario). In this case however, I expect the Overton window would open to the possibility of getting rid of primaries
There would be. Do you agree with that opposition?
If it's THAT important, maybe it's worth taking a lonely stand and starting to build the case.
Because, to my initial response, the actual *doing* of it is easy and simple and totally within the control of the party itself. It's not like changing to a parliamentary system at all.
"Primaries were imposed on the Presidential nominating process by a voluntary stroke of a pen by the parties themselves and could be removed by the stroke of a pen in the same way.
They don't want to do it, it feels very politically destructive and just sort of wrong. But to your initial point, we didn't have Presidential primaries of consequential substance for most of our history, and it seemed to lead to better outcomes."
Once you give an entitlement to any halfway powerful constituency, you can never take it away.
No approach is going to be infallible, the question is which one has the better odds of success. I don't have a strong opinion on that. I could also seeing the odds changing depending on the current conditions at play that might not always be the same.
Maybe because a lot of voters don't want to be given two bland choices by their supposed betters?
I bet you the vast majority of voters who voted for Youngkin know he was basically chosen by GOP state leaders, as opposed to a primary.
You can get away with that on the state level, but not on a national level.
If the Democrat's actually tried to go back to a convention-style system without buy-in from the electorate, I guarantee you there would be a serious third-party run, and it wouldn't even be that all left-wing, but just based more on "the party doesn't trust you, and thinks you need to be told who to vote for."
Hell, Bernie got a lot of votes in 2016 with basically this message in the primaries from people who probably disagreed with a lot of his policies.
What's your take on federal Senate and House races? They're for national office but are voted upon on the state level. And the GOP in particular has suffered multiple own goals on these offices by the primaries sticking them with clowns in the general election.
If a presidential nomination at the convention were to happen in 2024, I think it's highly likely that Trump would go third party, but that Biden wouldn't, and I'm not sure if there's another Democrat or Democratic supporter who could pull off a third party campaign that would be threatening enough. I'm using that as an example to prod at the idea that circumstances that are relative to the current situation at the time may matter as to what's the better path.
>Either party is totally free to just eliminate their primaries unilaterally.<
Presidential primaries, yes. I'm not sure that's true for lower offices. And that's because it's not actually the "primaries" that technically choose the two major party nominees. But rather the summer conventions. Parties are indeed free to opt out of the current way of doing things—perhaps returning to some version of smoke-filled rooms—in the selection of their presidential nominees.
But for lower offices, the primary elections directly determine ballot access. Anybody wanting to upend this system need to get a bill through the state legislature or a court ruling allowing them to bypass it. Right?
That ruling held that California's *blanket* primary violated the freedom of association rights of political parties. AFAIK it didn't strike down the authority of states to hold (partisan) primary elections to decide general election ballot access. Let's imagine the following scenario: the Massachusetts Democratic Party for whatever reason decides it no longer wants to participate in the Commonwealth's state primary (for state, local and congressional races), which is normally held in September. But Democrats would basically be shit out of luck absent an act of the legislature, because it couldn't prevent individuals who got the requisite number of signatures from getting on the primary ballot. And the first past the post winner in any of these races would subsequently: A) be allowed on the general election ballot and, B) would have "Democrat" next to their name. Does that not sound correct? (I realize there's some variation depending on the state in question; and again, needless to say, I'm happy to stand corrected). But I suspect a political party that was really determined to opt out of state-run nominating primaries would have to get the law changed and/or (equivalent) go to court.
For the record I fully support the right of parties to decide on nominees however they damn well choose. What I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around is: if parties do have this authority, why is public sector machinery used to participate in the (partisan) nomination process? Political parties are private entities, after all. If parties want to use a broad, popular approach to selecting nominees, they should organize private events, keep track of internal registration (who pays dues? who's a member in good standing?), rent polling places on their own dime, or book convention halls, or what have you...
Non-partisan (ie, jungle) primaries are a different matter in my view. They're pure, non-partisan, preliminary elections. But *most* primary elections in America are "The government getting involved in deciding which persons are allowed to enjoy the general election imprimatur of these private ideological clubs known as political parties."
You'd have to explain the Virginia/Youngkin situation. The broader right in that case was that the parties have a freedom of association right to choose their nominees, the blanket primary was just the vehicle by which the case landed at the Court
In theory they have the broad first amendment right to choose nominees however they wish, indeed. But that's not the same as "eliminating primaries unilaterally" — which is the original claim I'm responding to. Unless at some point they opt to exercise that right (either by court action or getting state election law changed in the legislature) the primary system will continue to be the method by which general election ballot access is managed, and by which candidates are awarded a "D" or an "R" next to their names.
I have been telling my liberal friends that if you seriously believe Trump is the worst, you should pick the most conservative Democrat you can accept, in the interests of carrying the swing states. I recommend Joe Manchin, and I swear to God they all make the same lemon-sucking face at the idea.
But I think Trump is such a danger that we should do it. (Though #9 is in fact my personal preferred path, probably via Whitmer or Kelly.)
IMHO the summary of points 3-6 is that no one should be thinking about Harris at the top of the ticket. Just don't. That's not what the people want.
>I have been telling my liberal friends that if you seriously believe Trump is the worst, you should pick the most conservative Democrat you can accept<
I hope your liberal friends informed you Joe Biden is both running for the nomination and blowing his opponents out of the water. So there seems little prospect of Manchin's securing the nomination.
Barring a health crisis, it's Biden vs. Trump. How much longer will these fantasies endure?
I agree that's what they should do but it's not how politics works in the social media age. Maybe at an earlier time in history but now politically active people are into politics as a means of broadcasting identity and as a lone voter it's crazy to take the identity hit of supporting someone like Manchin when you have so little influence individually. But since that's true of everyone and people don't like to see themselves as hypocrites they aren't going to vote for that kind of canidate at primaries.
Biden offers as moderate a package as possible without being unappetizing to modern Dems.
not much, but now I'm watching his videos on Youtube and he seems 100% fine re age. Like he looks "respectable experienced old" - not some JFK candidate of youth obviously.
OMG how have I NOT listened to him directly before. Goosebumps to hear a politician say such reasonable things. I think the Left has been lying to me about Joe Manchin to make him sound bad for some reason. This guy would totally win.
I mean, he reminds me of an 80s Republican, before the Gingrich revolution and all the crazy. And I mean that in a good way.
Davie are you over 50? Most voters are. I am too. I can 100% understand why the Millennials might not connect with Manchin, but for carrying the swing states and cutting into Trump's numbers on low-education White folks? I like Manchin.
Joe Biden is a little too old, and the idea of replacing him with a youngster like Manchin amuses me in a lot of ways, but it’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
In other words, I don’t think I will be able to survive the inevitable 2028 “he wasn’t too old to run 4 years ago, but maybe he is now?” re-election discourse. I think I might actually die.
Agree, but somehow this never comes up. Also, I don't think there are any democrats in West Virginia, so he's kind of a DINO, for all intents and purposes.
I think a Haley/Manchin ticket on No Labels or as independents could really disrupt this election. My guess is it would be strong in swing states and ultimately help Biden win. There are a lot of moderates in this country who don't care for the extremism of MAGA and your liberal friends.
I find it striking how much of this piece is just admitting that primaries produce far-left (or far-right) candidates. Primaries are bad! It's also the one piece of the American political system that's relatively new (since the 70s), and neatly coincides with the US political system going off the rails. If there were one problem I wish I could solve it would be how to get rid of primaries
I agree regarding congressional primaries, but do presidentials have a recent record of producing far left nominees? Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden…except for Obama, the winner was always to the right of their second place competitor. I’ll grant you that they give a lot of exposure to lefties like Bernie and Warren that probably isn’t great for the D brand with the national electorate.
I think the tendency is to produce someone from the mainstream of the dominant faction (left or right) of the party. When that dominant faction is the more extreme one, that winner is well to the left/right of the party much less of the country.
When it's the less extreme faction that wins (e.g. both Clintons, HW Bush, Romney, McCain), those candidates often compromise with the other wing to win the primary and then move to the centre for the general. When it's the more extreme faction that wins, while they usually do compromise with the more centrist wing in the primary (e.g. Obama), they're still way to the left/right of the country.
But Biden and H. Clinton definitely ran the general to the left of what their record would predict.
Yeah I think it's a new phenomenon. And it won't lead to leftist candidates getting nominated per se. But it will exert a gravitational pull to the left on more mainstream candidates. And it also means that normie Democrats will not have the luxury of exploring the candidacies of lesser-known normie-friendly politicians. There will be a need to consolidate early behind a known quantity, to avoid splitting the vote. This helped Biden in 2020, and it will help Harris in 2028 (never mind that she might not be all that normie-friendly, but whatever).
I liked this comment even though I agree with others below that the historical analysis is wrong. Primaries have not historically chosen extreme candidates, but going forward they very well may. Primaries *plus partisan sorting* is bad news.
Well, let's look at the tale of the tape. I'm willing to adjust on these if I hear good points otherwise, but here's my lightning round style take:
Carter: no
Ford: no
Reagan: yes
Mondale: not that much
Dukakis: ...? He ran such a weird and bad campaign in the general that it's tough to tell
HW: no
Bill Clinton: definitely no
Dole: yes, and really ran under the radar on this
Gore: no
Dubya: tough to say, probably depends on the issue
Kerry: yes, like Dole ran under the radar here
McCain: no, but like Dubya a bit issue dependent
Obama: no
Romney: the 2012 version of him, yes--perhaps not an earlier or later version of him
Hillary Clinton: probably yes relative to where she was before, but both Clintons can be chameleons in this regard
Trump: the highest variance dependent on issue
Biden: no
Now, I could buy an argument that the primary system needed some time to distill into its capability to nominate extreme candidates, and that that distillation may now be upon us.
From what I recall, Kerry was positioned to the right of Howard Dean and John Edwards in '04.
I'm more interested in the position relative to the entire party than to just a handful of primary competitors, and I always saw Kerry near the left end of the Senate caucus when it came to the issues. Dean was weird and I don't think we can glean much from his brief run. Edwards, maybe, I'd have to review his policy takes relative to Kerry's, and in any case Kerry picked him as his VP.
Edwards started out billing himself as the 21st Century Bill Clinton, then pivoted left when he saw that’s where the energy/money was. He had quite the cheering section on Daily Kos based largely on his “Two Americas” speech about economic inequality, which became his trademark.
Edwards had a big contingent of support from the Hollywood left based on his economic populism. Which, TBH, I thought he was correct to champion. In my view economic inequality is the original sin from which most of our other problems flow. But he was obviously a highly flawed candidate.
I think the Iraq War was a big issue among progressive dems in 04 and Kerry voted for it. i think he was also generally very “establishment.” Edwards talked a lot more about inequality and he and Dean were perceived as “outsiders”.
My stance is your last sentence, pretty much
But Bernie and Warren lost! So your position isn't that primaries produce extreme candidates (your comment's first sentence). It is that primaries expose extreme candidates (who go on to lose) to the public?
....can you think of any politically extreme candidates that might have shockingly won their party's nomination in the last 8 years? Going on to transform American politics in a negative way and push us close to a Latin American-style strongman government? Anyone come to mind? Think hard man
So, the GOP should basically ignore what a majority of it's voters want?
LIke, Trump is terrible, but it's because a lot of GOP voters are terrible. Again, Mitt Romney in 2012, regardless of his actual views, had to pivot hard right to win over voters who thought he was an elite squish, and he's basically the type of guy a GOP convention filled with rich dudes and their lackeys would've chosen.
Then again, the last couple weeks show a lot of this comment section would've agreed with 2012 Mitt Romney on immigration.
>So, the GOP should basically ignore what a majority of it's voters want? LIke, Trump is terrible, but it's because a lot of GOP voters are terrible
So to merge this and your other comment- Trump only won the 2016 nomination because of open primary states. He won most of those, likely pulling in former Democrats and independents. He actually lost most of the closed primary states to Cruz (to be fair, there's not that many of them). Which begs the question- who are the 'GOP voters', exactly?
If we have to do primaries, they should be closed primaries. 41 US states are some degree of open primary now (it's a spectrum as to how open). If you want to help select the representative of a private organization, *you should be a card carrying member of said organization*. Neither you nor I get to vote as to who the next Girl Scouts leader is, right? Or who wins the Oscars, or who the next president of the 4-H Club is, right? Is that undemocratic? No, they're all private organizations controlled by their members.
If voters are disgruntled with 2 parties, sure, they're free to go out and form their own party or whatever. Or, vote in independents. *That's totally legal now*. Don't have high odds of winning? Not my problem
Trump is extreme in many respects, eg corruption, but he is not extreme _politically_. He was famously perceived as the more moderate candidate in 16.
OK, I get it. Trump won a primary, therefore primaries are bad.
Interesting preposition, seems wholly separate from MY's post.
I can't tell if you literally just landed on our planet and are not familiar with other extremist wins in US primaries, but off the top of my head:
AOC over Joe Cawley
Dave Brat, shockingly, over Eric Cantor. The # of Brat voters was like not even 10% of the district's total electorate. What's democratic about that?
Ted Cruz over David Dewhurst
Mike Lee over Robert Bennett
Rand Paul over Trey Greyson
Kari Lake is the likely favorite for the Arizona Senate
Etc. etc. Much worse, the threat of being primaried is enough to pull Republicans further to the right. Do you ever wonder why they've consistently become more extreme? Because they know if they anger the party's base, various donors, the Fox News establishment, etc., they'll face a primary challenge. The US- is far as I know- the only democracy in world history to *primary incumbents*. Of course the mere threat of losing pulls them further to the right! And the number of people who vote in the primaries is just a few % of the total voting population, so you're selecting for extreme partisans.
Why was Ken Paxton acquitted on impeachment charges of corruption recently? Because billionaire far-right donors promised to primary any Republican who voted to impeach him. It's a very, very, very bad system
Well, I'm not sure it's fully distilled on the presidential level, then. Lower levels, perhaps, though I think it's complicated, with Trump of course adding into the complication with chaos.
Exactly. I have trouble understanding what Lost Future is staying. But his comment has 44 likes so what do I know?
I'm not offering a take yet on whether I agree with LF or not--I am sympathetic to the idea that primaries are bad. I was more just thinking through what's happened before to see if any of us can glean some trends. My first thought is that at the presidential level there didn't seem to be much consistency.
OK, interesting question: Are primaries bad?
Seems like it could be a good post. Any connection to MY's 21 thoughts?
Yes: primaries have, well, primed Dem voters to expect left-wing candidates. An open primary, like an open convention, would push Democrats to the left.
That's not the message of the 2020 primary. Lots of candidates moved left and the moderate won.
Matt's had some vague hints at this on Twitter at least, but I'll let him expound on those on his terms if he wants to. An article could be good.
I dunno, I kind of agree in principle but if it were up to Democratic elites wouldn’t we have gotten someone far to Biden’s left in 2020? Republican primary voters are indeed nightmare fuel but moderate Black Democrats are seemingly the only force still saving Dems from their worst instincts.
Parties should just do a better job of a getting normies to register their opinion.
The thing is that once you're even voting in a primary you're already not much of a normie as far as political engagement goes.
One thing that might help is if the Democrats frontloaded their primary schedule in redder states like, say, Oklahoma where the primary electorate is closer to the national center than it is elsewhere. While Republicans could do the opposite.
That's exactly why parties should find ways to reach out to more normies to vote.
If getting them a more median voter opinion helps them choose a viable candidate, then they have an electoral advantage.....
Even if every single person voted in the primaries, you could still end up with not very moderate candidates. If voters are evenly spread out between -100 (far left) to 100 (far right), the median Democrat is -50 and the median Republican is +50, neither of which is close to 0. With parties centrally controlled, they would compete for the median general election voter, and nominate people at like -10 and +10. Of course primary voters can prioritize electability as well, but if many of them don't, you still get pulled toward the extremes.
If every democrat voted in the primary, they're probably more likely to show up for the general.
moderation isn't in itself the goal here.
Here's the thing, and I've said this before. You can have one of two things in modern politics -
1. A relatively weak party system and not that many parties.
2. A relatively strong party system, but it's fairly easy to have multiple parties that have a chance to win seats/matter.
I'd actually argue that's why there were more signifigant third-party challenges pre-primary system is if you were a group basically shut out from serious consideration (abolitionist in the 1850's, populists in the late 19th century, socialists & Dixiecrats in 1948, segregationists in 1968, etc.), there was no way to make your voice really heard within the system, so you could only make an impact by winning a big number of votes and make one or both parties shift toward you.
If you want to give people only two choices, forced upon them via elite consensus, you're either going to get a massive drop in voting, and even more distrust of the system, or we're going to see far more 3rd party (especially in a world of basically no campaign finance limits) runs that ruin your precious moderate candidates chances of winning.
Part of the reason you didn't see a serious 3rd party effort in 2016 & 2020 from the left is they got to try to win the primary. They failed, and yes, as part of a coalition, they got their hand to effect policy, as much as that upsets many here.
Look, I get this comment section, that wants it to be 2003 forever, wants a world where they never have to listen to anybody to the left of them, but every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters.
"Look, I get this comment section, that wants it to be 2003 forever, wants a world where they never have to listen to anybody to the left of them, but every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters."
I've seen you voice this a couple of times, and I totally get being frustrated by obtuse commenters online
On the other hand, this is a pretty left of center place with people who are 99.999% likely to vote for Biden in the election. And the polls suggest that even with these people who are to your right, Biden might still lose. If the left does run a third party candidate of almost any sort, it will certainly lead to Republicans winning easily. That will in turn move policy dramatically to the right of where it is now. Democrats likely respond to such events by moving to the center like Clinton and the DLC did in the 90s in order to triangulate better. How does any of that accomplish what you want?
TL;DR Version - You just can't give people a "we're stopping the bad people from doing things, but we're not giving you anything you want" or they'll stop showing up, no matter how bad the alternative is. You actually have to give them or at least try to give them something they care about.
But, the current Democratic coalition, as somebody who is to the left of 95-98% of the populaiton is fine with me. Which is why I have no real issues Biden running for reelection, and will have zero problems voting for him in November.
But, much of that is a lot of things that much of this comment section is upset that Biden did. If the Biden administration actually ran like many people in this comment section want him too, I, a fairly partisan Democrat would have some real issues getting motived to drop my ballot back in the mail in lovely all-mail voting Washington, and the people I know under 40, which yes, in a deep blue city, but I also know via the Internet people in varying other places, would probably be even more upset with Biden than they are now, and I don't think he would be any more popular, since the largest chunk of his unpopularity isn't that he hasn't been meaner to immigrants, trans kids, or people with college debt, but because he's old, the Afghanistan withdrawl didn't do perfectly (and the Blob jumped on that), and stuff is expensive.
There's a lot of complaining about how the evil Left NGO's and Bernie voters (who are all rich trust fund kids in the eyes of the comment section here, despite Bernie basically even going 50-50 with African-American voters under 40, and overwhelmingly winning the other ethnic groups in the 2016 & 2020 primary) should all sit down and shut up, and hell, Warren voters should and realize they're in a coalition, there are a lot of people who, and let me mean here, don't realize that the fact they were OK with gay people, were against the Iraq War, and are OK with higher taxes doesn't mean you're on the left edge of the Democratic coalition anymore like it was when you were a edge Gen Xer in the 90's.
There are a lot of people who claim they're liberal, but continually talk and seem to vote on the issues that they're on the right edge or are just right-wing about a bunch here, which is actually different than most voters in the Democratic coalition, who may have right or centrist-leaning views on things, but they don't really care. Just like all the single-payer or pro-choice people who vote for Trump. They legitimately have those views, they just have issues they care about more, just like the 74 year old grandma in rural South Carolina probably believes in two genders, but doesn't care the Democratic Party doesn't - unlike many people here, who do deeply care about the things the Democrat's are too far left according to them.
Again, people claim this is a pretty left of center place, but on certain issues, especially issues the younger part of the population cares about is far more liberal about, the rancor is honestly, no different than blue checks on Twitter complaining about the kids these days and how wokeness is ruining free speech/college/politics/media/etc. Bluntly, on the trans issue, this comment section is to the right of every elected Democrat, including John Bel Edwards, Governor of Lousiana, who did some pretty pro-trans EO's while in office.
The reality is, if you're somebody on the 50% of the Democratic coalition on the leftier sides, basically the only thing you've gotten in the past six months to a year is some attempts at student loan forgiveness, a few minor (but good) regulatory things, all while Biden continues to basically let Israel do whatever they want with no reprecussions, and the Democrat's attempting to pass a law that would've been Steve Sailer and Tom Tacrendo's wet dream ten years ago.
Again - the actual current Democratic Party, I'm fine with. The Democratic Party this comment section seems to want at times - not interested in, and I think would be actually less electorally successful than the current Democrat's, who are basically the most electorally successful center-left party in the developed world outside of the Canadian Liberals or Portugese left in the past 20 years.
So you included a lot in your response and I would enjoy digging in a bit more on many aspects of it, but I want to focus purely on the coalitional aspects you highlight -
"You just can't give people a "we're stopping the bad people from doing things, but we're not giving you anything you want" or they'll stop showing up, no matter how bad the alternative is. You actually have to give them or at least try to give them something they care about. "
I think you are absolutely correct! But I think just as you think the Democratic party has to address the coalitional wants of the left of the party, I also think they have to address the coalitional wants of the center & right of the party. This is further complicated because there is not one single spectrum, but instead there are a host of issues where many people are left or right - as you noted in your discussion about trans issues.
Important to this discussion is what you said about those who feel they're not being sufficiently accommodated by the party. One of the key limitations the left has with Democrats is that if they aren't sufficiently enthused, they will stay home. While if the right of the party is not sufficiently enthused, they will vote Republican. Groups or segments that will credibly switch parties are much more impactful than those who stay home. If there are 100 voters, and the balance is 51-49 for left and right respectively, if one person on the left stays home, they still have a 50-49 advantage, but if one person on the right of the party switches it becomes a 50-50 tie. Every person either party gets to switch from the other party is worth twice as much one they pick up on the edge.
All of which is to say that a successful party will (and should!) try to balance the interests of coalition partners in order to be most effective, go as far to the edge to add votes without going so far that they start attriting votes in the center.
I'm curious if you think this is incorrect in some substantive way? Matt highlighted that the Democratic party has responded to Republicans putting up weak candidates by moving further to the left. Should that change, and Republicans put up much stronger candidates, do you think the Democratic party will be able to move right without losing your and other left support? Even with a very weak candidate like Trump, Democrats (Biden) are in danger of losing, what path to victory outside of moving to the right do you see possible for Democrats if Republicans offer stronger candidates?
1.) Again, I actually think the "Democrat's Stay Where They Basically Are + Nominate Somebody Who Isn't Old" will actually go fine in 2028, and past that, it gets really difficult for the GOP to win a national election since Millenial's aren't going as conservative as Gen X did (and they also started more liberal).
Again, I'm not against the current Democratic Party's positions on a whole (obviously, I have issues on specific things) because I understand we can't be Norway overnight, but I'm against the "Dem's should move to the right on all cultural issues" that a lot of people here want.
Like, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, and so on are in some ways, to the left of Biden on some issues, but I think they'd do fine in a general. For all the talk sometimes here about "safe, legal, and rare," Whitmer did basically make the "nah, it's in the Constitution, folks" with zero talk about rareness and won big in a swing state.
TL:DR - I don't mind the current Democratic position on things, and think a not old nominee could even shift a bit to the left, if they were actually charismatic.
2.) I think there's also some disagreement on whom the actual swing voters are. Swing voters don't have real politics the way we weirdos do. They base on vibes and what comes up in the election - see the famous graphic from David Shor where people who approved the ACA, but wanted less immigration went 60-40 Obama to 60-40 Trump from 2012 to 2016.
The best you can do about those voters is highlight the things the GOP is nuts on they don't like (abortion, etc.) and try your best to not talk about things they disagree with us on.
Yes, on crime and immigration, there was overreach, but Biden basically never caved to the stuff on crime, but he can't fix the fact that many urban dwellers care less about being as punitive to every homeless person or person who committed a crime as people in suburbs do. Also, the GOP will run on the cities being crime-ridden hellholes no matter what the actual truth is.
I also don't think there are actually that many "the Dem's are too woke on trans kids/CRT/DEI/whatever Chris Rufo is whining about today" voters outside of highly educated people annoyed about the milleiu in basically deep-blue districts. It's a very Online Issue, as even polling post-2022 midterms showed.
The actual right-edge of the Democratic coalition isn't white centrists on Twitter upset their kids talked about whiteness at their private school. It's actually older moderate non-white non-college-educated minorities with a variety of views on cultural issues, most of which they don't care about.
For all the talk of some actual shift toward the GOP by minorities, the actual good exit polls in 2022 didn't really show much, and I'll be blunt - I simply don't but the polling showing Trump winning Hispanic's or winning 25% of black men. A point or two shift, sure. But, until it actually happens, like people were claiming would happen in 2020 & 2022 by much further margins than it actually did, I'm not going to buy it.
Yes, there'll be bleeding in places like the border area of Texas, but those are a bunch of votes we shouldn't have been winning for a long time. It's basically the same as the pro-choice pro-LGBT suburban women that voted for Romney. Those people are gone gone gone from the GOP coalition in the long run.
As for the McArdle/etc. types, they're always temporarily allies and anything short of just becoming a bland centrist to center-right party will never make those people happy. I guess, my line is, if you're asking to the Dem's to move to the center more than Woke Bill Kirstol is, you're probably not a long-term Dem voter in any scenario.
TL;DR - The people on here and on Twitter who claim to be the important voters to win actually aren't. The actual important voters are weirdos who want single-payer, the border closed for 10 years, are pro-choice up to conception, and want all guns banned, and other wacky conflcting views.
3.) More specifically, on the GOP, I don't think it's possible really for them to nominate "normal" candidates a lot of the time. Mike Gallagher, who was basically fated to run for a WI Senate seat in the next cycle or two peaced out. And I'm not talking about moderates, but right-wingers who aren't openly nuts.
Look at 2022 - the only win they had was Joe Lombardo, who barely beat the incumbent Governor of Nevada even though they had the highest unemployment, and since being elected, he's basically been a moderate center-right guy hemmed in by an almost Dem supermajority and the fact his pre-Trump career showed him being a typical center-right cop - not crazy on immigration, pro-gun control, and not really caring about other social issues.
Otherwise, despite efforts by the NSCC & NCCC, a bunch of nuts got nominated, because that's what the GOP base wants.
Now, maybe in 2028, all the scales will fall, and a ticket of John Thune & Spencer Cox will win 39 states, but I highly, highly doubt it. This isn't me saying the GOP can't win, this is me saying that there's zero evidence they can fix what they're currently doing. The Democratic Party in 1989 hated losing three times - I see no evidnece most GOP voters will care if they lose for the fourth time in five POTUS elections.
TL:DR - Show me a competent GOP class of nominees for Senate and I'll worry.
"Show me a competent GOP class of nominees for Senate and I'll worry."
That is simply reinforcing what Matt said that because Republicans are offering weak candidates, that Democrats are moving left. They moved sufficiently left that despite Republicans offering a candidate who was impeached twice and has multiple civil and criminal trials ongoing is still neck and neck (if not leading) the current Democratic candidate.
You're response is
1) "Democrats where they are is fine" - but will they stay there? They have moved SIGNIFICANTLY to the left in the last decade on a large number of issues. You also note that older (more conservative) Democrats are dying off and younger more liberal Democrats are aging into the party - won't that in and of itself push the party left?
2) Swing voters are weird, but the general consensus is that most voters are generally more culturally conservative than the Democratic party and more economically liberal than the Republican party. (With the acknowledgement that large number of voters have loosely held and/or contradictory opinions). Moving into an age where culture beats economics suggests bad news for Democrats and in my opinion is THE reason why Trump is competitive.
3) The GOP is unable to provide non bonkers candidates - which seems like a risky thing to bet on and also suggests that if they did provide reasonable candidates, that they would win because they are closer to the majority opinion, its just that their candidates are crazy keeping them from winning now.
"every day, a bunch of older Democrat's to your right die, and a bunch of new 18 year olds to your left become voters."
At one time I was as confident as you about new voters bringing strength to progressive Democrats, just as I was about increasing diversity bringing strength to progressive Democrats. Trumpism has scrambled those assumptions in ways that I'm still coming to terms with.
I support strong parties *because* I want third parties. Voters should have far more choices.
This would lead, IMO, eventually to proportional voting for Congress and state legislatures, at least in some states - the third parties, almost regardless of political stance, would support this and if they're getting 20+% of the vote as is typical in other FPTP countries, then they will have enough influence to get it through the initative process, and the nature of US politics means that it will be so obviously an old guard protection scheme to oppose it that at least some referendums will be won.
The US chose to head in the direction of ever-more-open primaries and those crushed the third parties by pushing all the best politicians into contesting major-party primaries instead of turning the third parties into serious forces. No-one with the ability to be a serious politician joins the Green or Libertarian Party, or at least stays in them (Kyrsten Sinema left, and you can have your own views on how serious she is, but she did make it to the US Senate).
The issue is, American politics is a lot more expensive than any place in the world. The reason why despite it being a FPTP system with two and a half strong parties, there still exists several reasonably strong minor parites in the UK is a constiuency is 1/10th the size of a congressional district, and it's far cheaper to run a parliamentary campaign.
If we had 2,000 House seats and campaign finance limits, that'd be another way as opposed to PR or ranked choice to have strong third parties, but that's probably even less likely to happen than a voting system change.
Plus, for whatever reason, minor parties in the US basically refuse to actually seriously run in local races. Like, why hasn't Jill Stein (pre-Russian connections) run for Mayor or some serious libertarian outside of Gary Johnson (when there was some) tried to run for Mayor or Governor. Like, maybe Ron Paul should've tired to start the revolutiion in Texas instead of the 2008 primary.
Once cool reform idea from Ian Shapiro & Frances Rosenbluth: make primaries non-binding when support for the winner is below some threshold (say, 10% of registered voters in the district).
At minimum, this would let voters know that primary winners tend to have incredibly *weak* mandates. And it would soften the ground for party leaders to remove truly bad candidates.
It's funny you say that, I've independently had the exact same idea. Just do 1 gigantic open 'primary' that's non-binding, anyone can vote for the candidate of either party. And do some really rigorous exit polling, so you know who voted for who, which candidates are popular with which groups, etc.
Then the party can pick, technically, whichever candidate they want. They'd likely go for whoever looks best-positioned to win in the general, but you're not making them do anything. It's better than just polling because you're seeing which candidates perform the best in a real contest
Jamelle Bouie wrote a good column on why getting Biden to drop out would be problematic, and he also addresses, indirectly, the issue of primaries: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/opinion/joe-biden-democratic-primary.html.
Primaries may be relatively new compared to how old the US is, but the 1970s were still ~50 years ago. If either Party tried to scrap their Primary system in favor of going back to party and local machine bosses picking Presidential candidates, you would have a massive revolt against said Party.
The party could pick a select number of candidates to run in the primary, and voters could get to pick 1 of them. It'd be a closed primary where only dues-paying, card-carrying members of the party can vote. This is how primaries are conducted in the world's 159 other democracies
Ranked choice voting?
Is complete vaporware that doesn't do anything? I completed the sentence for you
RCV usually just ends up being window-dressing to produce the same result.
Uh, LF and Muccigrosso have had legendary debates on this one...
Matt has been admirably consistent on this, I remember 2015 weeds(!) doing an episode on it
What? I don't follow. How does this column suggest primaries produce extreme candidates.
I don't think that he explicitly makes that point, but he strongly implies it in points 9 & 17. I also read him as conflating contested primaries with brokered conventions in result and by implication in causal relationship to the results.
I don't see it in 9. No. 17. suggests Castro might have done better had he not turned left, but "the party elite, in terms of donations and top campaign staff" pushed left. Matt argues the Party mistakenly pushed to the left of the voters. That hardly seem like an argument favoring removing the voters and centering the Party.
I think 21 thoughts is an excellent post, by the way, I just don't see a 'primaries are bad' subtext. Maybe MY has done some tweets lately and people are synthesizing...
Yeah, it worked okay for a while because the parties didn't become so ideologically sorted until after 2000 or so.
Jungle primary
I don't like primaries either (No Party Ranked Choice FTW!)
But until recently the primaries mostly brought parties back to the center by reminding them they actually wanted to win the general.
Either party is totally free to just eliminate their primaries unilaterally.
Sure, that's just completely unrealistic. Personally I think the US should abolish being a presidency, become a parliamentary republic, institute a national VAT, have completely open borders for anyone with a STEM PhD, and so on. I don't spend a lot of time advocating for these policies because they're not going to happen, you know?
There are constitutional or at least statutory impediments to everything you mention, you'd need to pass a bill, you'd need bipartisan support, Schoolhouse Rock and all that.
Primaries were imposed on the Presidential nominating process by a voluntary stroke of a pen by the parties themselves and could be removed by the stroke of a pen in the same way.
They don't want to do it, it feels very politically destructive and just sort of wrong. But to your initial point, we didn't have Presidential primaries of consequential substance for most of our history, and it seemed to lead to better outcomes.
There would be overwhelming public and elite opposition. That's what 'unrealistic' means
Suppose the Klein scenario actually happens and Dems pick a candidate at the convention (I agree this is a very unlikely scenario). In this case however, I expect the Overton window would open to the possibility of getting rid of primaries
There would be. Do you agree with that opposition?
If it's THAT important, maybe it's worth taking a lonely stand and starting to build the case.
Because, to my initial response, the actual *doing* of it is easy and simple and totally within the control of the party itself. It's not like changing to a parliamentary system at all.
"Primaries were imposed on the Presidential nominating process by a voluntary stroke of a pen by the parties themselves and could be removed by the stroke of a pen in the same way.
They don't want to do it, it feels very politically destructive and just sort of wrong. But to your initial point, we didn't have Presidential primaries of consequential substance for most of our history, and it seemed to lead to better outcomes."
Once you give an entitlement to any halfway powerful constituency, you can never take it away.
Virginia GOP did it with governor!
I think you could do it at state level because no one pays attention to state politics, and other state parties would be wise to try to copy that.
If Youngkin had lost, there would've been a lot of hand-wringing on the Right about GOP elites "imposing" a loser candidate on the base.
But he didn't!
No approach is going to be infallible, the question is which one has the better odds of success. I don't have a strong opinion on that. I could also seeing the odds changing depending on the current conditions at play that might not always be the same.
Maybe because a lot of voters don't want to be given two bland choices by their supposed betters?
I bet you the vast majority of voters who voted for Youngkin know he was basically chosen by GOP state leaders, as opposed to a primary.
You can get away with that on the state level, but not on a national level.
If the Democrat's actually tried to go back to a convention-style system without buy-in from the electorate, I guarantee you there would be a serious third-party run, and it wouldn't even be that all left-wing, but just based more on "the party doesn't trust you, and thinks you need to be told who to vote for."
Hell, Bernie got a lot of votes in 2016 with basically this message in the primaries from people who probably disagreed with a lot of his policies.
What's your take on federal Senate and House races? They're for national office but are voted upon on the state level. And the GOP in particular has suffered multiple own goals on these offices by the primaries sticking them with clowns in the general election.
If a presidential nomination at the convention were to happen in 2024, I think it's highly likely that Trump would go third party, but that Biden wouldn't, and I'm not sure if there's another Democrat or Democratic supporter who could pull off a third party campaign that would be threatening enough. I'm using that as an example to prod at the idea that circumstances that are relative to the current situation at the time may matter as to what's the better path.
>Either party is totally free to just eliminate their primaries unilaterally.<
Presidential primaries, yes. I'm not sure that's true for lower offices. And that's because it's not actually the "primaries" that technically choose the two major party nominees. But rather the summer conventions. Parties are indeed free to opt out of the current way of doing things—perhaps returning to some version of smoke-filled rooms—in the selection of their presidential nominees.
But for lower offices, the primary elections directly determine ballot access. Anybody wanting to upend this system need to get a bill through the state legislature or a court ruling allowing them to bypass it. Right?
No, the parties are private organizations, they can technically choose their nominee however they see fit. There was a Supreme Court case in 2000 establishing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Democratic_Party_v._Jones
The Virginia Republican party recently used a convention and not a primary to select Youngkin as their nominee, for instance
That ruling held that California's *blanket* primary violated the freedom of association rights of political parties. AFAIK it didn't strike down the authority of states to hold (partisan) primary elections to decide general election ballot access. Let's imagine the following scenario: the Massachusetts Democratic Party for whatever reason decides it no longer wants to participate in the Commonwealth's state primary (for state, local and congressional races), which is normally held in September. But Democrats would basically be shit out of luck absent an act of the legislature, because it couldn't prevent individuals who got the requisite number of signatures from getting on the primary ballot. And the first past the post winner in any of these races would subsequently: A) be allowed on the general election ballot and, B) would have "Democrat" next to their name. Does that not sound correct? (I realize there's some variation depending on the state in question; and again, needless to say, I'm happy to stand corrected). But I suspect a political party that was really determined to opt out of state-run nominating primaries would have to get the law changed and/or (equivalent) go to court.
For the record I fully support the right of parties to decide on nominees however they damn well choose. What I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around is: if parties do have this authority, why is public sector machinery used to participate in the (partisan) nomination process? Political parties are private entities, after all. If parties want to use a broad, popular approach to selecting nominees, they should organize private events, keep track of internal registration (who pays dues? who's a member in good standing?), rent polling places on their own dime, or book convention halls, or what have you...
Non-partisan (ie, jungle) primaries are a different matter in my view. They're pure, non-partisan, preliminary elections. But *most* primary elections in America are "The government getting involved in deciding which persons are allowed to enjoy the general election imprimatur of these private ideological clubs known as political parties."
You'd have to explain the Virginia/Youngkin situation. The broader right in that case was that the parties have a freedom of association right to choose their nominees, the blanket primary was just the vehicle by which the case landed at the Court
In theory they have the broad first amendment right to choose nominees however they wish, indeed. But that's not the same as "eliminating primaries unilaterally" — which is the original claim I'm responding to. Unless at some point they opt to exercise that right (either by court action or getting state election law changed in the legislature) the primary system will continue to be the method by which general election ballot access is managed, and by which candidates are awarded a "D" or an "R" next to their names.
Re #13 - Joe Manchin
I have been telling my liberal friends that if you seriously believe Trump is the worst, you should pick the most conservative Democrat you can accept, in the interests of carrying the swing states. I recommend Joe Manchin, and I swear to God they all make the same lemon-sucking face at the idea.
But I think Trump is such a danger that we should do it. (Though #9 is in fact my personal preferred path, probably via Whitmer or Kelly.)
IMHO the summary of points 3-6 is that no one should be thinking about Harris at the top of the ticket. Just don't. That's not what the people want.
>I have been telling my liberal friends that if you seriously believe Trump is the worst, you should pick the most conservative Democrat you can accept<
I hope your liberal friends informed you Joe Biden is both running for the nomination and blowing his opponents out of the water. So there seems little prospect of Manchin's securing the nomination.
Barring a health crisis, it's Biden vs. Trump. How much longer will these fantasies endure?
Punditry can stay irrational longer than you can stay sane.
I agree that's what they should do but it's not how politics works in the social media age. Maybe at an earlier time in history but now politically active people are into politics as a means of broadcasting identity and as a lone voter it's crazy to take the identity hit of supporting someone like Manchin when you have so little influence individually. But since that's true of everyone and people don't like to see themselves as hypocrites they aren't going to vote for that kind of canidate at primaries.
Biden offers as moderate a package as possible without being unappetizing to modern Dems.
Joe Manchin is in his mid seventies. How would that short circuit the age issue?
Because he doesn't seem old. Age wasn't a big factor four years ago either.
True. Four years ago we knew Biden was old, but he seemed OK. Now he seems old as soon as he opens his mouth.
Have you heard him speak?
not much, but now I'm watching his videos on Youtube and he seems 100% fine re age. Like he looks "respectable experienced old" - not some JFK candidate of youth obviously.
I'm watching his retirement speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-xiBEy8GTg
and for something with less editorial control, statements on the budget:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgsxaSFImcM
and now on manufacturing/imports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qw0GWA_MVI
OMG how have I NOT listened to him directly before. Goosebumps to hear a politician say such reasonable things. I think the Left has been lying to me about Joe Manchin to make him sound bad for some reason. This guy would totally win.
His problem isn’t age, it’s that he has the charisma of a bowl of cold oatmeal.
sorry to break it to you, but those look bad. he looks like an old fogey trapped in another generation.
I mean, he reminds me of an 80s Republican, before the Gingrich revolution and all the crazy. And I mean that in a good way.
Davie are you over 50? Most voters are. I am too. I can 100% understand why the Millennials might not connect with Manchin, but for carrying the swing states and cutting into Trump's numbers on low-education White folks? I like Manchin.
Five or six years of aging can make a big difference, and Biden's clearly lost more steps than Manchin at this point in their lives.
Joe Biden is a little too old, and the idea of replacing him with a youngster like Manchin amuses me in a lot of ways, but it’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
In other words, I don’t think I will be able to survive the inevitable 2028 “he wasn’t too old to run 4 years ago, but maybe he is now?” re-election discourse. I think I might actually die.
Ooh, ooh, I know the one: because the age issue is complete bullshit.
Agree, but somehow this never comes up. Also, I don't think there are any democrats in West Virginia, so he's kind of a DINO, for all intents and purposes.
I think a Haley/Manchin ticket on No Labels or as independents could really disrupt this election. My guess is it would be strong in swing states and ultimately help Biden win. There are a lot of moderates in this country who don't care for the extremism of MAGA and your liberal friends.
Sore loser laws prevent Haley from running