Primaries, why?

I tend to get a kick out of news analysts who talk about how Democrats or Republicans need to do something.  For example the fiasco in Iowa has been typically depicted as a failure of Democrats as opposed to the Iowa people who ran it.

Maybe the National party should take over but I don't think that is practical or desirable.

Meanwhile we still have candidates moving on to New Hampshire, another small non-representative state that we assign significant meaning to.

Now the primaries are messy and the media maks them worse.  In past years certain candidates were eliminated after early primaries largely because donors gave up on them.  O fcourse we also know primaries are not actually representative of either party because of the relatively low turnout.

Our whole process takes too long, costs too much and produces bad candidates much of the time.

Last election the two nominees were both disliked by more people then liked them but they became the nominees.

A better system would simply be to let all registered members of a party fill out a secret ballot just before the convention and use those results to pick a nominee.  Not even sure we need a convention, but it does allow for negotiating platforms and kicking off the actual campaign.

Independents might object to being excluded, but of course if you want to participate, join a party.

I don't understand why the nominee for either party can be nominated because of non-party support.

Its unlikely to change because the current system is very profitable to some. 

Still, I can dream of a system where the nominee is actually the one preferred by the majority, of the actual party members.

Democrats Should?

In show after show about the upcoming primaries and subsequent election you hear pundits talk about what the Democrats should do.

They need to nominate a candidate who appeals to independent voters or who shuns far left policies or who can beat the incumbent.

Of course the advice is part of the new world we live in where cable has created so much time that simply needs to be filled with something.

Maybe years ago when party bosses decided who the nominee was going to be strategy like this could happen.

Today, however the decision is made in the primaries and those are decided by the people who vote.

The primaries have many flaws, participation is not what it should be and potentially we nominate candidates who don't really represent the party as a whole.

However the primaries are a form of Democracy which allows the voters to select the candidate.

The reasons any one person might vote for any one candidate can be complex, but I know we don't all get together and decide who to vote for.

The Democrats and the Republicans don't get to decide the candidate via back room deals.\\

Look at the last round of Republican primaries where the outcome was clearly not expected.

Democracy is simply a messy process, it will be who it will be.

Politicians

Politicians tend to be out of touch with their constituents.

In this country that shouldn't be the case, but it is more true than it should be.

Part of the problem is that politicians are mostly interested in getting elected or re-elected and knowing your constituents isn't important for that.

You need to garner enough support to win a primary, and that can sometimes be done by pushing a single issue.  It just has to be an issue that resonates with enough people to win.

Certain issues which are not the majority views in most of the country tend to be important in primaries.

Take abortion.  People mostly support a woman's right to choose.  It just isn't something that fires them up.  Those who oppose abortion tend to be much more fervent and will often vote based on a politicians position on that issue alone.  It has become one of the things you must be against to win a republican primary,

 Issues like these have become dominant in winning primaries and getting elected because of the small turnouts.

So we see politicians get nominated and elected that don't represent the majority opinions.

Democracy Should be Rule of the Prople!

The good news is that no matter how absurd things get in our Government, most things simply continue as always.

Things obviously change, we all have cell phones now, but the basic pattern of our lives doesn't.

Clearly what happens in the various forms of Government matters.

It just doesn't normally have an immediate impact.

It makes it easy to ignore for most of us and also easy to complain about.

One of the things that causes the Government to be dysfunctional is that our system allows small but fervent factions to have undo influence.

If you consider our primary system, it is supposedly more democratic than when the party decided who should represent it, but now, because so few actually bother to vote, you see it becoming less representative for most of us.

You also see games played in primaries as some allow open or crossover voting.

Shouldn't the candidates represent the actual party they run under?

We've developed a system where the primary voting is often more important than the actual elections.

We need a system of universal voting if we really want a democracy that represents us.

It might be difficult to implement, but its time to make sure our democracy is actually real and not one that can be stolen.

Extremism?

A lot of people are now talking about how the two parties have drifted further and further apart.  This is primarily the result of the way we select candidates via primaries.

Primaries attract a small percentage of voters and the ones who show up are often voters with an agenda.  So more progressive leaning people vote in Democratic primaries and more reactionary people vote in Republican primaries.  Once selected as the party nominee they get the votes of the more moderate members who would never have picked that candidate to be the nominee.

Take one of the more talked about Progressives elected to this congress, Alexandria Octavio-Cortez won beat the incumbent by garnering 15,897 primary votes to his 11,761.  This was a clear victory but I should point out that almost 700,000 people live in that district and the vast majority are registered Democrats.  Would the results have been the same if turnout was higher?  Maybe but also maybe not.

I'm sure the policies embraced by Ms Octavio-Cortez are popular with many, and they stir emotions which got people to vote in the primary.  It may or not be representative of the actual views of the district.

The same thing happens on the Republican side and primary success was the first ingredient that propelled Donald Trump to be the nominee.  His primary success was based on a number of factors but ultimately he generated more enthusiasm among his supporters then the more conventional candidates did, although in many cases his supporters would not have been a majority of the voters.  They were enough to win the primaries.

This impact has led to the divergence of the two parties as both parties nominate people with more extreme views.

Our current process provides a lot of money to people involved in running campaigns and lot of news opportunities, it doesn't provide majority approved candidates in many instances.

It might be better if we had less theatre and more participation in our selection process.  In today's age it should be easier for the parties to provide their members more input into the process.

Just not sure they want to.

Fringe Candidates

Watching the blame game over who is responsible for the current impasse over the wall is typical of the way politics is played this year.

There is plenty of room for disagreements over what the best policy should be on issues but we now have moved to an all or nothing nothing strategy.

Politics have changed in this country as the fringes have undue influence.  A relatively small but dedicated group of supporters can exert tremendous influence in setting policy because they can control the primaries.

This is why you see the current incumbent cater to a small segment of the population. This strategy worked the last time as he amassed enough delegates to become the nominee which led to many voters voting for him because he was the candidate of their party despite his many flaws.

The strategy depends on who the opponent is in the general election. Last time he lucked out as his opponent was a person hated by many republicans and attacked by their PR machine and congressional committees.

A good candidate is key but the primaries give fringe candidates the same edge as the fringe from the other party.

The end result may very well be that we have two candidates representing the extremes while the majority in the middle ends up voting by party and the winner doesn't really represent them.

Better Candidates?

If the Government were a business, we would be selling its stock.

You have a management in turmoil, parts of it shut down, policies that seem influenced by certain media instead of analysis and an erratic and irrational CEO.

You can't short it, although I guess you can short everything else, i.e. the big sell off.

The problems are not insurmountable, yet, but they aren't getting better.

The next two years will mostly be preparation for the next elections, as the desire to compromise is going to be seen as weak by the voters who control the primaries now.

It seems pretty clear to me that as we made the primaries more open we lost control of the process.

The we I am referring to is the great majority of Americans who disagree over a few issues by really agree on most.

Unfortunately one of the things they tend to agree on is that voting in the primaries is inconvenient.

We therefore turn over the candidate selection process to the angry people on both sides.

The angry people are the ones who show up and vote in the primaries.

The candidates selected often don't reflect the mainstream views of their party, but the mainstream members are faces with a difficult choice.

It gets easier when both sides select extremists.

Until we fix the candidate selection process, it will just get worse.

It will become more and more partisan, not less.

We need to find a way to make the primaries truly representative and not easily controlled by a determined angry minority.

If 100% of a party voted, we would really have much more representative candidates.

The Center Cannot Hold

Yesterday's primaries as well as other recent ones have revealed the new reality in party politics, angry people sway them.

The difficulty facing both major parties is simply "who is in charge?"

They both evolved in a system where certain broad values were effectively shared and the differences were more related to how to achieve shared visions on what America was and what it should be.

"Establishment" people accepted as their premise that the great majority of American voters shared certain fundamental values related to the institutions of this country.

Racism and hatred were wrong, capitalism is good, a strong safety net is needed, etc. etc.

However, even if that is true, the apathy of the middle has led to a situation where angry people get out and vote in primaries, leading to more divisiveness in our politics.

It really started with some "conservative" causes such as abortion, gun control, taxation, where they took an all or nothing approach.  Not being angry enough about those issues became a death wish in primaries where only those who had drunk the Kool-Aid got selected.

It reached a sort of fruition in the last presidential election where one of the most anti-establishment candidates was able to win an electoral college majority largely because the Democratic candidate was so establishment that she had little appeal to the progressives, despite her gender.

It also put a certain onus on the party itself which was viewed, correctly, as supporting the establishment candidate over the progressive one.

So now we are seeing establishment candidates losing in primaries in record numbers as the motivated voters are the angry progressives who realize they gave the election to the most non-progressive person possible.

Its clearly going to move the party and most likely the country further left as we go through the election cycle and ramp up for the next presidential one.

Unfortunately it will be most likely another congress unable to accomplish much, at least until a new center can be established.

Right now there is little if any of it left.

Do Nothing Congress

When one considers how vehement all the political arguments are, the real reason is that the people doing most of the arguing have fairly extreme views.

Take something like gun control.

Most Americans agree that some common sense controls should exist to prevent letting guns get into the hands of dangerous people.  We know that from every poll out there.

But the argument gets framed by the extremists as all or nothing.  One side argues that the Government is planning to take away everyone's guns.  The other side paints gun owners as troubled individuals who may be compensating for other inadequacies.

Now neither of those views represent a majority but we allow those extreme position to frame the political argument because it is those groups that are most fervent.

Meanwhile we don't have sensible gun controls and unfortunately the next school massacre may only be delayed by the summer recess.

Now we have always had extremist views but they are more prevalent now because of what we did in the political parties.  Not too long ago most candidates were selected by party insiders and the primaries were a way to simply endorse the right candidate.

This may sound undemocratic, but it was probably more democratic than the system we now have where so few vote in primaries that whoever has the most upset supporters can win.

You see candidates energize a relatively small group over a specific position and ride that to victory in a primary since the turnout is so low.

You see people win primaries that really are not close to representing the majority of the people in that party, but they are now the standard bearer.

It has led to more extreme candidates who get elected in safe districts and who are non-compromising in the issue they represent.

So nothing gets done.