The voters need their help. This may seem like an argument for elitism over democracy, but the current system is democratic only in form, not in substance. Without professional input, the nominating process is vulnerable to manipulation by plutocrats, celebrities, media figures, and activists.
At the most fundamental level—the level of electoral math and cognitive bandwidth—primaries are an inherently flawed mechanism for registering voter preferences. When offered several options, individuals tend to lack sufficient information to make a choice that reflects their actual preferences. In fact, many presidential-primary voters mistakenly back candidates who do not reflect their views.
One important study of the presidential primaries found that voters do barely better than chance at picking the candidate whose views most closely match their own. Even if all voters were cognitive virtuosos and informed to the hilt, distilling millions of individual preferences into a single candidate choice is much more difficult than most people assume.
As long ago as the s, the French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet showed that in any field offering multiple candidates, majorities may prefer Smith over Jones and Jones over Brown, yet Brown may nonetheless beat Smith. In the s, the Nobel Prize—winning economist Kenneth Arrow took the argument further, proving mathematically that, no matter what system of voting is used or how rationally voters behave, the electorate can fail to arrive at any consistent majority choice, even when choosing from as few as three candidates.
Theorists have thus long understood that there is no one right way to aggregate group preferences, nor is there any one representative majority. Candidates can emerge from the pack or be eliminated because of a random event or a fluke of election timing. Worse, there is a nontrivial likelihood that the plurality winner will turn out to be positively unwanted by a majority, as was the case in , when Trump secured the Republican nomination without managing to garner 50 percent support within the party.
The U. For example, the front-loading of primaries in the race allows a candidate to wrap up the nomination based on a small share of the electorate voting in a handful of states. If the electorate splits its vote among several candidates competing in the same political lane—say, two or three pragmatists facing an extreme partisan—the extremist can win even if she is the last choice of the majority. Under the old convention system, by contrast, party leaders would move to a more broadly representative second-choice candidate if the plurality candidate was unacceptable to the larger coalition.
In a large field, enduring the early battles requires mobilizing a loyal faction rather than pulling together a coalition. The goal is not to win a majority but to survive and hope that luck pits you against a clutch of candidates who compete with one another in a different lane.
Insurgents, extremists, and demagogues are good at pursuing factions, because they are not tethered to the realities of governing, which demand compromise and coalition-building. The media might be expected to expose the flaws and limitations of such candidates.
In reality, the media can be a powerful accomplice to fringe candidates who play their cards right. Extremism, outrage, and conflict are catnip for journalists. The current media landscape also encourages the kind of large fields that bedevil our primary system.
With cable news eager to book prime-time town halls even for marginal candidates, and the parties willing to create double-bill debates, fringe figures have every incentive to throw their hat in the ring.
Paradoxically, the more candidates who enter, the greater the incentive for additional entrants, because each one reduces the number of votes needed to win.
Americans thus have good reason to dislike the current nominating system—and indeed they do dislike it. In a March Pew Research Center poll, just 35 percent of voters said primaries are a good way of selecting the best-qualified nominees. Studies also show that large proportions of Americans favor reforming the presidential-nominating process, particularly in states that hold their contests in the later stages.
Voters in both large and small states think Iowa and New Hampshire have unfair advantages and influence—which, of course, is true. The primary became a fixture of the American political landscape during the Progressive era.
Reformers believed direct elections were more fair, honest, and democratic. By , all but four states had adopted the primary for many statewide nominations.
One dissenter warned of unforeseen consequences. The party-boss system had its flaws, Ford argued, but it elevated candidates who could govern successfully, whereas primaries favored candidates who had the wherewithal to promote themselves. As he noted, changing the rules may simply hand influence to a different kind of elite—the real-world result of democratization can be to reduce representativeness. In , the political scientists Dennis C. They examined parties that empowered different groups—party elites, activists, or rank-and-file voters—in the nomination process.
The goal was to see which method picks candidates who are closest to the preferences of the average voter in a party. Volunteerism might sound like an unqualified good; the problem is that not everyone is equally likely to volunteer. Turnout in primaries is notoriously paltry, and those who do show up are more partisan, more ideological, and more polarized than general-election voters or the general population. They are also wealthier, better educated, and older.
When party insiders evaluate candidates, they think about appealing to overworked laborers, harried parents, struggling students, less politicized moderates, and others who do not show up on primary day—but whose support the party will need to win the general election and then to govern. Reducing the influence of party professionals has, as Shafer and Wagner observe, amplified the voices of ideological activists at the expense of rank-and-file voters.
No wonder these new elites favor ever more democratization, and less influence for party insiders. By contrast, the public is quite comfortable with insiders taking a role.
In a survey, one of us La Raja asked voters to allocate points to four different groups based on who they think should have influence in primary nominations. To judge by the survey results, Americans view a mixed system as a good idea.
They want the electorate to do about two-thirds of the deciding and parties and professionals to do about one-third, proportions that strike us as quite reasonable. The public is right. Two filters are better than one. Electoral and professional perspectives check and improve each other. Each provides the other with vital information that otherwise would be missed. Among the reasons:. Professional vetting emphasizes competence in governing.
Candidates now worry more about mobilizing die-hard activists and producing story lines for journalists than demonstrating their aptitude for governing. In reality, political influence in our system comes primarily from the soft power of relationships and political debts. Professionals judge the strength of those relationships. Despite their flaws, smoke-filled rooms did a good job of identifying qualified people who could unify their party and also exert broad appeal in a general election.
Roosevelt, and Harry Truman all emerged in large part from the haze of those rooms. Of course, the party elders did not always get it right. Warren Harding and Richard Nixon were both promising prospects who turned out to be poor choices. Again, the point is not that either filter is infallible but that both are necessary. Professional vetting deters renegades. The professional filter also helps exclude candidates who are downright dangerous.
Parties have blocked antidemocratic candidates in the past. In Henry Ford, the legendary carmaker, contemplated a run for president. In both respects, he was an antecedent to Trump. Lacking a pathway around the hostile party establishment, Ford declined to enter the race and contented himself with offering to serve if the nation summoned him. So, in reality, he never stood a chance. To stop him, party operatives leaned on other Democratic candidates to clear the field for Jimmy Carter, the only other southerner in contention.
LaRouche stood no chance of unseating the incumbent, Bill Clinton, but the refusal to allow him to compete signaled to other would-be disrupters that the party could and would stand in their way. Professional vetting checks the power of donors and the media. Thanks to court decisions such as SpeechNow. Federal Election Commission , political fundraising and spending by independent groups effectively have no limit. Seth Masket also argued that closed primaries do not result in more ideologically extreme nominees than open primaries.
The logic of the open primary is pretty straightforward. Under a closed primary, only people who are registered party members usually for some time are permitted to vote. Those party registrants tend to be die-hard partisans, and the candidates they pick will tend to be from the ideological extremes. Independent voters, who might legitimately want a more moderate set of nominees, are forbidden from participating. We looked at two decades of voting behavior by state legislators across all 50 states, and we compared legislators based on the type of primary system that nominated them.
Quite a few state parties have changed their primary rules one way or another over this time period, allowing us a good deal of leverage on the question. What we found was somewhat surprising. Legislators elected from closed primary systems are no more or less extreme than those from open primary systems. In November , the group Open Primaries Education Fund filed a lawsuit against New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver D arguing that states should not fund closed primaries because those primaries are exclusionary and benefit political parties.
Oliver argued that primary elections, including closed primaries, are essential government functions meriting state funding:. Election Code provisions govern virtually every nuance of the primary election process, including a chapter devoted specifically to primaries.
Our primaries are administered and run solely by the Secretary of State and county clerks Polling place locations are determined and administered by county government All expenditures made from the public fisc for the purpose of funding primaries are allocated to, and expended by the Secretary or county clerks. No public monies are paid to political parties for the conduct of primary elections.
The government runs and controls primary elections, and maintains complete control over taxpayer funds expended for that purpose. Indeed, in determining that U. Five arguments against closed primaries are that they disenfranchise voters not affiliated with a major party, that primaries should be open to all registered voters because they are publicly funded, that closed primaries could produce more ideologically extreme nominees, that primary elections often decide races in some locations, and that instances of sabotage in non-closed primaries are rare.
In a piece for The Orlando Sentinel , columnist Beth Kassab argued that closed primaries disenfranchise voters and that open or hybrid primaries would be an effective remedy to this issue:. Think about that. More than a quarter of the state's voters are left out. They will be forced to sit on the sidelines — completely disenfranchised — during one of the most contentious primaries in recent history.
The group Open Primaries Education Fund referred to publicly funded closed primaries as "taxation without representation. Primaries are funded by the public. But the parties — private organizations — decide who can and cannot vote. Open Primaries Education Fund filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state of New Mexico in November alleging that the state should not fund closed primaries.
Its complaint included the following:. By qualifying as a major political party, the party receives the substantial benefit of inclusion in the statutorily required, state-run and state-funded primary elections, a benefit that minor political parties and independent voters are deprived of. Only major political parties may participate in the state-funded primary election.
A minor political party, in contrast, must spend its own funds to nominate its candidates according to internal procedures. Independents may not run for nomination or vote in the primary election.
The election code thus establishes a closed, exclusionary system in which the major political parties are relieved of the financial burden of choosing their own representatives, thereby receiving an improper benefit of the expenditure of public money. Dave Denslow, retired University of Florida economics professor, argued in The Gainesville Sun that open primaries could lead to more moderate nominees. Open primaries intuitively offer a major advantage. Presumably people who bother to vote in primary elections are more extreme ideologically than those who vote only in general elections.
In closed primaries, it was thought, candidates have to tailor their platforms to those more extreme voters, resulting in greater polarization. Most party leaders favor closed primaries, which give them more control and favor candidates who reflect their relatively non-centrist views. Open primaries could help reduce political polarization.
The evidence favoring the view that open primaries encourage moderation is at best mixed, however, with some studies finding it does and others that it does not. In state elections, it turns out, voters in primary elections are neither more nor less ideologically motivated than those in general elections, or at least any difference is small.
Legislators chosen through open primaries are neither much more nor much less polarized that those chosen through closed systems. At the local level, not here but generally, there appears to be no convincing evidence about whether open primaries reduce polarization. Lacking information, we can still hope open primaries would give us more pragmatic candidates.
State Rep. The bill, which died in committee, would have allowed independent and non-affiliated voters to cast ballots in party primaries. Reed argued that many races are decided in primary elections, such as those in which only one major party has candidates running.
Mark Z. Barabak, staff writer with the Los Angeles Times , argued against the idea that closed primaries are necessary to prevent non-party members from sabotaging the nominating process. Extensive research in California, a proving ground for various voting permutations over the last two decades, shows that that type of electoral sabotage is just about as prevalent as black-lagoon creatures bidding for a seat on the City Council.
In brief, the study said it was too soon to draw definitive conclusions but suggested voters would have to be more engaged and attentive for the change to work as supporters hoped.
He found an exceedingly low rate of crossover balloting: Just 5. Most of those who voted for a candidate from the other party did so not to undermine the opposition, Nagler found, but because registration was so heavily weighted against their own party it was pointless to support one of their own. In 14 states and the District of Columbia, at least one political party conducts closed primaries for congressional and state-level offices. The map below identifies states in which at least one political party utilizes closed primaries for congressional and state-level elections.
Hover over a state for additional details. The maps below detail voter participation rules for the Democratic and Republican parties in the presidential nominating process. Hover over a state to see additional information. Please note that this information is tentative and subject to change.
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