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The [Jungle "Primary"] - A Bad Idea That Needs To Die
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, this story popped up, in which the phenomenon of self-funding millionaire candidates wind up pushing solid progressive candidates like Jay Chen out of Congressional races in California. The reason for this is California's "top two primary" elections, known colloquially as a jungle "primary". This system is routinely touted as a "good government" practice, meant to make elections more responsive to the electorate, but in practice has done the opposite.
To better understand why this system fails, let's start with why I use quotes in the name jungle "primary". This is for a simple reason - the system is not a primary election whatsoever. Instead, what we have is an open general election with legally mandated runoff. Because of this, anyone who wishes to run can, and the top two candidates move on to a runoff election, from which the winner then takes office. This is the heart of the issue with the system - nobody really understands that they've actually eliminated primary elections, which were created for a reason. Though they had existed in a non-binding form prior, the push for binding primaries really took hold after 1968, with the experience of the DNC more or less appointing Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic candidate contrary to popular opinion leaving a sour taste in people's mouths. As a result, people pushed for binding primary elections, so that the party rank and file would have a say in their flagbearers. The jungle "primary" does away with that.
Oddly enough, the system was proposed as a way to reduce the influence of parties. The argument was that instead of getting pushed out during the primary cycle, the open field would let them fight it out at the ballot box, giving them a "fair chance". The reality, however, has been that with the chance to split the field and give the race to the other party, parties are forced to do more behind the scenes machinations to win the race. Ironically, a system proposed to reduce the influence of the backroom instead increases it.
The splitting of the ticket is also a major issue with the system. Because the primary has been eliminated, parties no longer choose a flagbearer, which results in several candidates under the same party banner. This can result in the situation where a party has the higher percentage overall, but splits it so much that candidates from another party win the top two slots. This actually happened in the Washington state treasurer race, where more votes were cast for the Democratic candidates, but split across a field of three, resulting in the two Republican candidates going to the runoff. Amplifying this problem is the entry of self funded millionaire candidates, whom cannot be pushed out and whose wealth means they will pull in a good amount of the vote that splitting the race becomes an actual problem - hence why Chen dropped out.
The jungle "primary" is a bad system that not only causes problems, but makes worse the issues it purports to fix. It needs to go.
To better understand why this system fails, let's start with why I use quotes in the name jungle "primary". This is for a simple reason - the system is not a primary election whatsoever. Instead, what we have is an open general election with legally mandated runoff. Because of this, anyone who wishes to run can, and the top two candidates move on to a runoff election, from which the winner then takes office. This is the heart of the issue with the system - nobody really understands that they've actually eliminated primary elections, which were created for a reason. Though they had existed in a non-binding form prior, the push for binding primaries really took hold after 1968, with the experience of the DNC more or less appointing Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic candidate contrary to popular opinion leaving a sour taste in people's mouths. As a result, people pushed for binding primary elections, so that the party rank and file would have a say in their flagbearers. The jungle "primary" does away with that.
Oddly enough, the system was proposed as a way to reduce the influence of parties. The argument was that instead of getting pushed out during the primary cycle, the open field would let them fight it out at the ballot box, giving them a "fair chance". The reality, however, has been that with the chance to split the field and give the race to the other party, parties are forced to do more behind the scenes machinations to win the race. Ironically, a system proposed to reduce the influence of the backroom instead increases it.
The splitting of the ticket is also a major issue with the system. Because the primary has been eliminated, parties no longer choose a flagbearer, which results in several candidates under the same party banner. This can result in the situation where a party has the higher percentage overall, but splits it so much that candidates from another party win the top two slots. This actually happened in the Washington state treasurer race, where more votes were cast for the Democratic candidates, but split across a field of three, resulting in the two Republican candidates going to the runoff. Amplifying this problem is the entry of self funded millionaire candidates, whom cannot be pushed out and whose wealth means they will pull in a good amount of the vote that splitting the race becomes an actual problem - hence why Chen dropped out.
The jungle "primary" is a bad system that not only causes problems, but makes worse the issues it purports to fix. It needs to go.
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How do you kill it?
In CA and WA, it was implemented via initiative, so create a repealing initiative.
Make it so.
This is a situation common to a lot of other countries around the world, when multiple parties share an ideological space. In almost every place there is a phase of a negotiation where candidates end up publicly supporting each other. Compromise is actually not bad and I'd say it's one of the best ways to govern. If N "Democratic" candidates can't get together behind a common person, is it really a failure of the system?
That said, I can see how in the current US political environment such a setup produces awkward results.
Again, we used to do that, and the fallout of 1968 is why we went to binding primary elections - so that instead of relying on an internal consensus developing, the party rank and file pick their flagbearer.
And I'm not sure that doesn't lead to its own kind of problems - look at what the base has done to the GOP over the last ten years.
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That isn't a problem with the system, though - it's a problem with the party and their getting backed into a corner. And this happens all over the world, in all sorts of political systems.
hey look another problem ranked-choice voting would fix!
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Then, in any district with a significant partisan swing (a huge amount in the US due to gerrymandering) you effectively end up with a choice between a hard right Republican who is absolutely going to win, and a democrat who cannot possibly do so. Or vice versa. Effectively meaning that the candidate who will win the race in a majority of US races is selected by a small group of easily swayed elderly voters who are aware of the fact there are two elections to be worried about.
In the US system as it is right now, the Jungle primary system gets more candidates onto the final ballot who might be able to actually win the election. Considering first past the post exists, this is the only way that people in the minority in a large fraction of US house districts see any kind of representation, as they can decide which Republican is most tolerable to them.
Consider this. There are 435 seats in congress in the United states. Only 72 of those seats lie between R+5 and D+5 on the ballot. Only 181 lie between R+10 and D+10, meaning that in 254 states the party primary decides completely who will win the election. That's almost 60% of seats decided by an election which is even LESS well attended than the main election, and is inherantly exclusionary to a large swath of voters. I would rather that those vast numbers of republicans and democrats who live in heavily weighted seats get at least some influence over who their representative is. Rather than being presented with a choice of ...
Has already won the race [R]
Cannot possibly win [D]
Many states don't allow you to vote in both Primaries. Meaning that any attempt to 'modify' the Republican candidate by voting as a Democrat in the other primary means that you lose the ability to vote in your own primary and try to push it towards views which represent your own.
Of course the Jungle Primary system should be reformed. But just because its flaws are obvious and silly doesn't mean that the other most commonly used system is better. Honestly I think a simple reform would be to say that if one party has two candidates, and the other has 10, then after the votes are counted the losing 8 candidates one by one from the many candidate party can then assign their votes upward until there are only two candidates left on each side.
Republican
Terry = 9000
Bill = 8000
Democrat
Jenny = 7000
Claire = 6001
Bruce = 3000
Jose = 3000
Jennifer = 3000
Sarah = 3000
Mariah = 2000
Right now Republicans get both seats, which is silly.
Mariah -> Bruce
Democrat
Jenny = 7000
Claire = 6001
Bruce = 5000
Jose = 3000
Jennifer = 3000
Sarah = 3000
Sarah -> Jennifer
Democrat
Jenny = 7000
Claire = 6001
Jennifer = 6000
Bruce = 5000
Jose = 3000
Jose -> Jenny
Democrat
Jenny = 10000
Claire = 6001
Jennifer = 6000
Bruce = 5000
Bruce -> Jennifer
Democrat
Jennifer = 11000
Jenny = 10000
Claire = 6001
Claire -> Jennifer
Democrat
Jennifer= 17001
Jenny = 10000
So Jennifer and Jenny make the ballot, Terry and Bill don't. And our main election represents a real choice for the most people.
So you want to return to the system which explicitly has all the problems which you think that the Jungle primary has, just for more people? The classic primary system got Donald Trump elected president. And Devin Nunes got a house seat.
Because if you live in 60% of Americas house districts, the only choice you get in who represents you occurs in the party primaries. Which you might not be allowed to vote in. You can argue that the Jungle Primary has issues, but how can you fairly argue that the other option you present is any better for most people? The only weakness I see to the Jungle primary would be best addressed by having the candidates have an instant runoff between each other if there are the same numbers of them.
Really IRV or multiple primaries (drop the lowest half of vote getters, repeat until 1) solves the issue. The second probably isn't tenable thanks to lack of voter engagement though.
I don't see how giving me two Republicans is giving me a choice, any more than having a race between a Republican and a Democratic candidate in a district that leans Republican - and the argument applies in reverse as well, with Republican voters not seeing a choice between two Democrats as a real one. Your argument has an unstated basis - that the system will moderate the candidates in a single party runoff - that the actual evidence doesn't support. Not to mention that in order to 'fix' the jungle "primary" system, you had to go to a sort of ranked voting system to get around the split ticket issue, but didn't do it honestly - such a system would have every candidate rolled up, in which case we have...a runoff between the top Democratic and Republican candidate.
I'd love for federal elections to follow a system like he describes.
True, the ability to just have one candidate would be a weakness for the other side (in which case, it simply becomes the system we have right now, with the bonus of more choice in heavily weighted districts). In order to address that, I would suggest that the side 'rolling up' only continued doing so if the bottom candidate in their system was not ALREADY on the main ballot.
Republican
Terry = 11000
Democrat
Jenny = 10000
Claire = 9000
Bruce = 3000
Jose = 3000
Jose -> Jenny
Bruce -> Claire
Stop rolling, Jenny and Clair on ballot.
Regarding the 'not a choice' statement. You're just plain wrong there. People might 'think' that disenfranchises them, but it does not. All that matters is who gets to vote on your behalf, and how many like minded friends they get to send. They get to vote and they get to pick from two candidates who can win. Even in an 70%-30% district those minority voters are a HUGE potential swing factor. Sure, the candidates might suck, and decide to just compete extra hard for the far right, but there would be a TITANIC potential advantage for whichever candidate could believably present themselves as the 'least bad' candidate to the minority. Perhaps lots of candidates haven't realized that yet. Perhaps the polarizing environment of the national stage makes that hard to do. But that's a different fault which would weaken first past the post just as severely. It can't be 'worse' for choice since the choice to cast your vote for the person who cannot win is not a useful choice in a Democracy.
Honestly, I think that we should replace the whole thing with party lists, possibly the German system. But first past the post with a primary is awful. Minority who cannot win vs Majority who already has is the choice most voters get in this country. And thats not a choice.
The "moderating effect" you keep claiming exists has been shown in analysis of actual real world races to actually not exist, and it's not difficult to see why. One, party platforms do actually matter to the base, and two, crossover votes are unreliable. So it's more reliable to rally the base than make a bet on voters who may very well not come out for you.
As for why they won't come out, that comes back to my earlier point - for a lot of voters, a choice between two candidates from the same party isn't really a choice for them. And no, you don't get to say they're wrong, given that one, this is a personal opinion, and two, candidates from the same party are going to agree on a lot of the same base points, because that's why parties exist. A lot of what people call "polarization" is really issues sorting out - for example, it's only very recently that choice became a de facto Democratic plank.
I do think there is a bit of an advantage to the way FPTP systems tend to 'give people a chance' to have enough power to enact their policies, and do think there is a level of granularity where things start to become disfunctional again, but I'd love a system much more like the one described. Honestly in local races its absurd that we don't have this.
No, it's an explicit problem with the primary system. By depriving parties of control over their candidates, it weakens the party structure and turns the reigns of any movement over to it's most vocal and extremist elements who are the most likely to vote in primary elections. And parties are the main line of defense against things like populist authoritarians or extremists.
It is not a coincidence that the GOP looks the way it does today, with Trump in charge and the House full of insane nutters. It's a direct result of the primary system. The Republican party lacks the power to assert control over it's own members, so the inmates take over the asylum.
And yet we're only seeing this issue with one party, the one that made a Faustian bargain with white supremacists 40-odd years ago.
So far, yes. And he system is what lets it happen.
It's the same way jungle primaries don't always go badly. But it's a system that creates a huge opportunity for really bad shit to happen.
No, they would have found other ways to take control - look at the rise of Momentum in the UK Labour Party if you want an example of that. The GOP doesnt have a problem with the "inmates running the asylum", they have the problem that they have two choices - embrace white supremacy, or embrace irrelevance.
You will only see a run-off between the Republicans and the Dems:
- In the event where one party does not net like 2/3rds of the vote entirely for themselves
- Because your country would initially vote in a completely partisan fashion, and not consider giving votes to some Dems and then some Republicans.
The primary system ensures that you guys will have at least one nutter party.
All the moderates have been pushed out of the Republican party as the mean Republican preferred candidate skews further and further right.
The Republican candidates have to play for that, which causes moderate voters to look elsewhere, which causes the mean to move right again.
The primary system purity tests the Republican party, and all the moderates appear to be fleeing into the Dems.
Uh, Momentum taking over Labour happened because they opened up the party voting. It's exactly an example of what I'm talking about. You are wrong here. When you open up the primary voting system, you remove power from the party structure and put yourself at risk of populist takeover.
The jungle primary system's primary failing is an example of a similar phenomenon via slightly different means. The jungle primary lets anyone run and prevents any party from winnowing down their own field to avoid spoiler effects.
That way the moderates can reign in extreme candidates without giving up their chance to influence the politics of the party they will most likely vote for.
This is a failure of the People though, not of the system. If we're designing a system that tries to infer the Will of the People when they mostly don't care to show up, what are we doing? Just a more mathy version of restricting the vote to landowning men.
If we had 75% participation in the primary, we'd see more moderate candidates in it, but we don't. That's not a flaw in the primary system, it's a flaw in American civil engagement.
It wasn't just "opening the party voting", but that you had a specific courting of a coordinated faction to bring into the fold, which then promptly did what most coordinated factions do to larger groups - take them over. Again, this was the same as the Southern Strategy - we just didn't realize it as quickly because of the long-term acceptability of white supremacy in the US, as well as their cloaking in religion. Neither were "populist takeovers", but the result of the specific courting of groups that were well coordinated and ready to take over.
OP not sufficient for D+D.
Geth, close the thread.