I have two comments, one of which is to simply question the notion that primaries waste money; the other is to suggest a system that might capture the benefits of proportionality without losing the benefits of the current system:
1) I wonder if the primaries, rather than being a total waste of money, allow candidates to build up a donor network (small dollar especially). They don't drain a fixed pool of resources so much as they build a donor habit that the nominee, whoever it is, goes on to benefit from. Plus, those donor relationships go on to help a talented candidate get elevated later — see the NYT piece about Pete's donor network helping elevate him in the veepstakes in recent weeks.
2) Okay, the real item I want to address — Matt briefly refers to the possibility that having small, one-state-at-a-time competitions allows a candidate who doesn't have resources or name recognition beforehand to breakout on a national stage. By contrast, a national single-day primary would tilt us toward media- and party-coronated big names We'd lose a chance to see new faces prove their political skill via the competition. We'd get more VP ascensions and political dynasties. We've seen this kind of grassroots upswell at least hobble the media/party picked favorite in '08, '16 and to an extent in '20 in a very crowded field. Even if those new stars don't win, they build the number of well-known, trusted stars in the party and go on to win other important races, plus work as crucial surrogates for the nominee. Finally, common wisdom says infighting in the primary is bad — but the fact that Joe Biden had to adopt part of Bernie's platform to end the primary [a] helped secure far left support in the general and [b] made his initial BBB pitch $3.5T, a better bargaining start against Sinema/Manchin.
Primary competition is good: it elevates stars, builds a donor network, consolidates a spectrum of support, and may push us toward better policy once in office.
For all these reasons, we should keep the one-state-at-a-time system for four weeks until Super Tuesday. Then, we should compress the calendar. Divide the other states up into four weeks of March, 10-12 states per week. Finally, dethrone Iowa and New Hampshire — I once worked in the NH primary — and make the states compete for a higher spot in the order. How do they compete? Turnout.
Voters in the last primary / voting age population. This builds an incentive for state parties to work hard to register and turnout voters for primaries that otherwise skew toward high propensity voters. But if a state could win First In The Nation Primary/Caucus status by making their primary a high turnout affair, it'd create a nominating process that more closely reflects the electorate in the general.
The calendar compression would help keep more candidates in the race and increase the real application of the proportional system, per Matt's suggestion, but this system would avoid a national primary that requires big resources and name recognition, leading to coronations. Plus, an incentive system to get the attention of being an early state could push state parties to expand the primary electorate in helpful ways.
I agree the primaries need reform, but a national primary feels like the wrong solution. It would make the primaries even *more* expensive, and would give less established candidates no chance at breaking into the mold. Obama would never have beaten Clinton in 2008 who he trailed by 20+ points nationally before Iowa https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/democratic-primary/2008/national
Best pitch I have heard for primary changes yet. I'm a big fan of RCV, but acknowledge that it's difficult to move to it and won't solve a lot of problems. All of this seems very doable though, and I could see it help with a lot of problems. Who can make these changes? Can the DNC just vote to implement?
My idea is to have the primaries use ranked-choice voting. That makes votes much more meaningful, since it doesn't matter so much if the candidate I vote for in an early primary doesn't do well later. And, in later primaries, I can still express my preference for a candidate who isn't doing that great up to this point without wasting my vote.
This is a great idea except for the fundraising part. If you can’t enforce a block on 3rd party spending, you’ll just give dark money more ways to make mischief and delegitimize the process.
I personally like the idea of one national primary vote, rather than this state-by-state thing. But, how to actually implement it? After all, it's not like the head of the DNC gets to dictate the primary calendar. Rather, election days are controlled by laws passed by individual states, many of which are controlled by Republicans, whom I can't see passing a law to change their primary date because the DNC - their arch-enemy - asked for it. And, of course, there's New Hampshire who always wants to be first.
Like it or not, I feel we're kind of stuck with the system we have.
I love the idea of a national primary. It sucks that Iowa and New Hampshire have so much influence on picking our candidates. Both parties this year had flawed primaries because their top candidates were not vetted by debates. If it were up to me to design a process for modern times, I would suggest a reality show format where we whittle down from eight candidates to two through a series of debates, town halls, or 1-1 interviews. You would generate a helluva lot of interest and you could sell the broadcast rights to the networks to fund the campaigns of the candidates. Finish it by July and then have a normal campaign for winners of each party. I’d do something similar during the general election to raise money for the campaign. If properly produced, you could draw ratings similar to football games. This fixes the whole campaign finance crap and we would end up with thoroughly vetted candidates. I know it sounds crazy, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
Why even have primaries? I truly don’t understand why the government spends money on an election for what should theoretically be a private political party. Openprimaries.org claims the cost of presidential primaries at $427 million. That’s a ridiculous amount of money for a non-governmental function.
You could instead have:
Literal smoke-filled room and just pick the most electable candidate
Theoretically, the parties have contact information for their party members… just mail all of them a ballot, or email them a ballot and have the primary over in a couple of days.
Matt, Dude, I love ya’, but you gotta quit the randomly-gendered-pronoun thing. It’s a big ol’ speed bump in your prose. It brings gender suddenly to the foreground in cases where it should be irrelevant. It makes me stop to double-check whether you’re actually referring to a specific individual rather than a generic person. “They” has been in colloquial use as the gender-indeterminate pronoun for as long as I can remember, and I’m old as dirt. How about giving it a try?
possibly a primary with two days might be a tweak to this:
pick up to ~10 battleground states for the first round, relatively quickly followed by the remaining states. That way there is some ground-truth on what makes an attractive candidate in the places that matter and the party doesn't get sort of blinded by the preferences of urban CA & NY voters. Also, gives extra weight to building infrastructure in those states
Of course primary voters in battleground states are not necessarily representative of the voters that decide elections in battleground states.
A party primary, where the goal is to select pledged delegates for the convention, also is an _excellent_ scenario for Approval (or Range) ballots. Basically you'd be doing the party-list variant of Sequential Proportional Approval or Reweighted Range. Approval should match the intuition of a lot of voters here:
Is Biden a good representative of the party to send into the general election? yes/no
> The party probably can’t write a rule that formally prohibits the “independent” SuperPAC schtick, but they should be able to heavily discourage it by saying any candidate who gets that kind of backing will be excluded from debates, given bad ballot placement, etc.
This seems complicated since the PACs are nominally independent. What's to stop a primary opponent (or even someone from the other party) from starting a PAC that nominally supports the candidate but whose real goal is to get the candidate punished? Maybe the answer is obvious to someone more familiar with SuperPACs, but not to me.
1) "But then the questions begin. Does he endorse Harris? Almost certainly yes, because to do otherwise would raise questions about his own judgment."- Why should he? Obama did not endorse Biden in 2020 and I suggest that is a very presidential move. Unlike Trump who is the party boss who sticks his fingers into every pot on the stove, Obama sets a good example as staying above the fray. Not to see that JB wouldn't have done that, but it remains speculative.
2) "There’s a myth that Bernie Sanders voters “staying home” somehow cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election. That’s not true, and there’s no evidence for it." There is proof that it hurt her but it would be hard to prove whether that was the deciding factor, but maybe. From Wiki: 12% of Sanders voted for Donald Trump and another 12% didn't vote, that's a lot of votes and more than the usual swing. If those were mostly Democrats and Sanders got about 40% of that vote, that is more than enough people to have lost PA, MI, and WI which went R by under 0.7%
3) " Except with an open field, she’d almost certainly face a challenger on the left who’d call for a “climate emergency,” well that might be true, but I think that having a history of being one of the most progressive senators and having run left of Biden in 2020, the more logical challenge would be from her right, where I live, and speaks to my concerns, that Democrats elected the moderate candidate in 2020 and ended up with one to the left and now have Harris to the further Left. In fact, most of the push for Biden to step down came from moderates from Dean Phillips to James Carville. His biggest supporters to the end telling him to stay in were Sanders and AOC, because he had spent much of his term pleasing his left flank which caused him to be abandoned by his Independents and Never Trumper voters from 2020. Analysis of his decline from 54% approval at inauguration to his abysmal 38% when he dropped out has shown it to be mostly moderates. I hope Harris can get them back, it will take moderation on issues, but I think Shapiro or Whitmer would have had an easier time. Note that in recent history Governors poll better than Senators or VPs, and since JFK Dems from uber liberal states like CA, NY, MA fare poorly.
I just can't imagine there being anything but outrage if a national primary was held and the non-plurality winning candidate was chosen. I think as a result unless you have something like ranked choice voting you'd see even more pressure for a small primary field by the time of election day. I feel like the party goals of a primary should be focused on electability and how well the candidate aligns with the party platform. A process that favors more moderate states that better reflect general election and electoral college viability seems superior. That being said the length of the primaries and only one state going at a time seems weird. I'd love to see like 4 or 5 sections of the country instead, like midwest, southwest, south, northeast, and west coast.
The biggest unstated problem with a primary is that it only reflects about half the general election voters. A second problem is that the people voting don't necessarily have a good way of telling what vote is in their interest -- after all doing that requires an understanding of who can win.
We can solve both problems by not requiring democrats to actually go to the polls. Let democrats delegate the power to vote for them to democratic organizations or even politicians. Yes, doing this right will require some judgements from the party but that's fine -- the democratic party can make judgements about what kind of organizations get to participate in a way the government shouldn't.
I have two comments, one of which is to simply question the notion that primaries waste money; the other is to suggest a system that might capture the benefits of proportionality without losing the benefits of the current system:
1) I wonder if the primaries, rather than being a total waste of money, allow candidates to build up a donor network (small dollar especially). They don't drain a fixed pool of resources so much as they build a donor habit that the nominee, whoever it is, goes on to benefit from. Plus, those donor relationships go on to help a talented candidate get elevated later — see the NYT piece about Pete's donor network helping elevate him in the veepstakes in recent weeks.
2) Okay, the real item I want to address — Matt briefly refers to the possibility that having small, one-state-at-a-time competitions allows a candidate who doesn't have resources or name recognition beforehand to breakout on a national stage. By contrast, a national single-day primary would tilt us toward media- and party-coronated big names We'd lose a chance to see new faces prove their political skill via the competition. We'd get more VP ascensions and political dynasties. We've seen this kind of grassroots upswell at least hobble the media/party picked favorite in '08, '16 and to an extent in '20 in a very crowded field. Even if those new stars don't win, they build the number of well-known, trusted stars in the party and go on to win other important races, plus work as crucial surrogates for the nominee. Finally, common wisdom says infighting in the primary is bad — but the fact that Joe Biden had to adopt part of Bernie's platform to end the primary [a] helped secure far left support in the general and [b] made his initial BBB pitch $3.5T, a better bargaining start against Sinema/Manchin.
Primary competition is good: it elevates stars, builds a donor network, consolidates a spectrum of support, and may push us toward better policy once in office.
For all these reasons, we should keep the one-state-at-a-time system for four weeks until Super Tuesday. Then, we should compress the calendar. Divide the other states up into four weeks of March, 10-12 states per week. Finally, dethrone Iowa and New Hampshire — I once worked in the NH primary — and make the states compete for a higher spot in the order. How do they compete? Turnout.
Voters in the last primary / voting age population. This builds an incentive for state parties to work hard to register and turnout voters for primaries that otherwise skew toward high propensity voters. But if a state could win First In The Nation Primary/Caucus status by making their primary a high turnout affair, it'd create a nominating process that more closely reflects the electorate in the general.
The calendar compression would help keep more candidates in the race and increase the real application of the proportional system, per Matt's suggestion, but this system would avoid a national primary that requires big resources and name recognition, leading to coronations. Plus, an incentive system to get the attention of being an early state could push state parties to expand the primary electorate in helpful ways.
I agree the primaries need reform, but a national primary feels like the wrong solution. It would make the primaries even *more* expensive, and would give less established candidates no chance at breaking into the mold. Obama would never have beaten Clinton in 2008 who he trailed by 20+ points nationally before Iowa https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/democratic-primary/2008/national
Best pitch I have heard for primary changes yet. I'm a big fan of RCV, but acknowledge that it's difficult to move to it and won't solve a lot of problems. All of this seems very doable though, and I could see it help with a lot of problems. Who can make these changes? Can the DNC just vote to implement?
My idea is to have the primaries use ranked-choice voting. That makes votes much more meaningful, since it doesn't matter so much if the candidate I vote for in an early primary doesn't do well later. And, in later primaries, I can still express my preference for a candidate who isn't doing that great up to this point without wasting my vote.
This is a great idea except for the fundraising part. If you can’t enforce a block on 3rd party spending, you’ll just give dark money more ways to make mischief and delegitimize the process.
I personally like the idea of one national primary vote, rather than this state-by-state thing. But, how to actually implement it? After all, it's not like the head of the DNC gets to dictate the primary calendar. Rather, election days are controlled by laws passed by individual states, many of which are controlled by Republicans, whom I can't see passing a law to change their primary date because the DNC - their arch-enemy - asked for it. And, of course, there's New Hampshire who always wants to be first.
Like it or not, I feel we're kind of stuck with the system we have.
I love the idea of a national primary. It sucks that Iowa and New Hampshire have so much influence on picking our candidates. Both parties this year had flawed primaries because their top candidates were not vetted by debates. If it were up to me to design a process for modern times, I would suggest a reality show format where we whittle down from eight candidates to two through a series of debates, town halls, or 1-1 interviews. You would generate a helluva lot of interest and you could sell the broadcast rights to the networks to fund the campaigns of the candidates. Finish it by July and then have a normal campaign for winners of each party. I’d do something similar during the general election to raise money for the campaign. If properly produced, you could draw ratings similar to football games. This fixes the whole campaign finance crap and we would end up with thoroughly vetted candidates. I know it sounds crazy, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
This is smart and would reduce the time and money spent. Let’s regain our sanity!
Why even have primaries? I truly don’t understand why the government spends money on an election for what should theoretically be a private political party. Openprimaries.org claims the cost of presidential primaries at $427 million. That’s a ridiculous amount of money for a non-governmental function.
You could instead have:
Literal smoke-filled room and just pick the most electable candidate
Theoretically, the parties have contact information for their party members… just mail all of them a ballot, or email them a ballot and have the primary over in a couple of days.
Conduct a poll
Darts tournament
Matt, Dude, I love ya’, but you gotta quit the randomly-gendered-pronoun thing. It’s a big ol’ speed bump in your prose. It brings gender suddenly to the foreground in cases where it should be irrelevant. It makes me stop to double-check whether you’re actually referring to a specific individual rather than a generic person. “They” has been in colloquial use as the gender-indeterminate pronoun for as long as I can remember, and I’m old as dirt. How about giving it a try?
possibly a primary with two days might be a tweak to this:
pick up to ~10 battleground states for the first round, relatively quickly followed by the remaining states. That way there is some ground-truth on what makes an attractive candidate in the places that matter and the party doesn't get sort of blinded by the preferences of urban CA & NY voters. Also, gives extra weight to building infrastructure in those states
Of course primary voters in battleground states are not necessarily representative of the voters that decide elections in battleground states.
A party primary, where the goal is to select pledged delegates for the convention, also is an _excellent_ scenario for Approval (or Range) ballots. Basically you'd be doing the party-list variant of Sequential Proportional Approval or Reweighted Range. Approval should match the intuition of a lot of voters here:
Is Biden a good representative of the party to send into the general election? yes/no
How about Bernie? yes/no
Warren? yes/no
etc.
> The party probably can’t write a rule that formally prohibits the “independent” SuperPAC schtick, but they should be able to heavily discourage it by saying any candidate who gets that kind of backing will be excluded from debates, given bad ballot placement, etc.
This seems complicated since the PACs are nominally independent. What's to stop a primary opponent (or even someone from the other party) from starting a PAC that nominally supports the candidate but whose real goal is to get the candidate punished? Maybe the answer is obvious to someone more familiar with SuperPACs, but not to me.
I would take exception to some points, Matthew:
1) "But then the questions begin. Does he endorse Harris? Almost certainly yes, because to do otherwise would raise questions about his own judgment."- Why should he? Obama did not endorse Biden in 2020 and I suggest that is a very presidential move. Unlike Trump who is the party boss who sticks his fingers into every pot on the stove, Obama sets a good example as staying above the fray. Not to see that JB wouldn't have done that, but it remains speculative.
2) "There’s a myth that Bernie Sanders voters “staying home” somehow cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election. That’s not true, and there’s no evidence for it." There is proof that it hurt her but it would be hard to prove whether that was the deciding factor, but maybe. From Wiki: 12% of Sanders voted for Donald Trump and another 12% didn't vote, that's a lot of votes and more than the usual swing. If those were mostly Democrats and Sanders got about 40% of that vote, that is more than enough people to have lost PA, MI, and WI which went R by under 0.7%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanders%E2%80%93Trump_voters
3) " Except with an open field, she’d almost certainly face a challenger on the left who’d call for a “climate emergency,” well that might be true, but I think that having a history of being one of the most progressive senators and having run left of Biden in 2020, the more logical challenge would be from her right, where I live, and speaks to my concerns, that Democrats elected the moderate candidate in 2020 and ended up with one to the left and now have Harris to the further Left. In fact, most of the push for Biden to step down came from moderates from Dean Phillips to James Carville. His biggest supporters to the end telling him to stay in were Sanders and AOC, because he had spent much of his term pleasing his left flank which caused him to be abandoned by his Independents and Never Trumper voters from 2020. Analysis of his decline from 54% approval at inauguration to his abysmal 38% when he dropped out has shown it to be mostly moderates. I hope Harris can get them back, it will take moderation on issues, but I think Shapiro or Whitmer would have had an easier time. Note that in recent history Governors poll better than Senators or VPs, and since JFK Dems from uber liberal states like CA, NY, MA fare poorly.
I just can't imagine there being anything but outrage if a national primary was held and the non-plurality winning candidate was chosen. I think as a result unless you have something like ranked choice voting you'd see even more pressure for a small primary field by the time of election day. I feel like the party goals of a primary should be focused on electability and how well the candidate aligns with the party platform. A process that favors more moderate states that better reflect general election and electoral college viability seems superior. That being said the length of the primaries and only one state going at a time seems weird. I'd love to see like 4 or 5 sections of the country instead, like midwest, southwest, south, northeast, and west coast.
The biggest unstated problem with a primary is that it only reflects about half the general election voters. A second problem is that the people voting don't necessarily have a good way of telling what vote is in their interest -- after all doing that requires an understanding of who can win.
We can solve both problems by not requiring democrats to actually go to the polls. Let democrats delegate the power to vote for them to democratic organizations or even politicians. Yes, doing this right will require some judgements from the party but that's fine -- the democratic party can make judgements about what kind of organizations get to participate in a way the government shouldn't.