Primaries vs smoke-filled rooms

[Gatsby]

True... But again, that's not because of primaries. It's because of gerrymandering.

Oh? When was the last time you voted for a party official?

Did you vote for Ken Martin to lead the DNC, or Michael Whatley to run the RNC?

Those aren't necessarily the people who I'm envisioning picking the nominees...it would be the elected officials themselves (e.g. senators, representatives). I guess a senator could delegate his task to Ken Martin if he wanted to. And I guess Ken Martin might become influential in this process if he was especially good at picking winners compared to everyone else in the room. But it would be driven by the elected officials themselves, and their votes could be weighted toward those who had a good track record of picking winners in the past.

We could also let state legislatures pick Senators.

I am not opposed to letting the voters pick their own senator. I'm mainly just opposed to letting Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters each pick one of the only two viable candidates. (Or the only viable candidate, depending on the partisan lean of the state.)

And again, the reason why primaries are less representative are because fewer people vote in them.

You don't need any sort of special permission to vote in a primary; any eligible voter can do it. Most Americans just can't be bothered to do so. Having party bosses pick candidates is not going to make voters more engaged in the process.

This solves the problem of voters only having a choice of two candidates who do not represent them particularly well. It does not solve voter turnout, or dark money, or gerrymandering, or lawlessness in the Trump Administration, or any other unrelated topics which probably deserve their own thread and which I do not aspire to solve here.

Yeah, I doubt that's how it will work. You're going to have potential candidates sucking up to and bribing bosses for their support, while anyone who puts loyalty to the people or to principles above loyalty to the party will be left out in the cold.

It's a self-correcting mechanism. If candidates bribe the candidate-pickers for their support in the smoke-filled room primary, and then lose the general election badly because they were bad candidates, then the candidate-pickers who vouched for them are going to have a smaller share of the vote in next year's smoke-filled room. Over time the most influential people in the smoke-filled room will be those with the best track record of picking winners/overperformers.

Plus, why would I want a Senator from California to pick New York's candidates? That just doesn't make any sense.

I propose we just limit the smoke-filled rooms to the states/districts that normally vote for the other side (at least at the beginning). So for Democrats, it might be limited to states/districts that are R+5 or redder, or states/districts where the party has already lost twice in a row under the primary system. I don't think it's necessary for Democrats to do this in places like New York, where the primary system seems to be working fine for Democrats.

So to modify your question slightly: Why would I want a Senator from California to pick Utah's candidates?

Because Democratic primary voters in Utah have failed over and over again in the task to which they were assigned (i.e. field a Democratic candidate who can win the election), whereas the senators from California at least have some knowledge of electioneering. Maybe it will turn out that the California senators are great at picking candidates who can win (or at least overperform) in the Utah Senate election, in which case the California senators will have more votes (compared to other worse candidate-pickers) in the next smoke-filled room. Or maybe they are even worse at this job than the primary system, in which case they will have fewer votes in the next smoke-filled room.

The other thing is that it doesn't necessarily need to be the full body of the US Senate picking the candidates, if people would really prefer someone in-state doing it. That's just the example I used here. It could be (for example) the Democrats in the Utah State Legislature, organizing their own smoke-filled room entirely in-state, to field candidates for their US Senate seat as well as all the state legislature seats that Democrats don't already hold. I don't think it's particularly important *who* is in the smoke-filled room (as long as they're members of the party)...the more important thing is that the system rewards people who are good at picking winners/overperformers, and penalizes people who are bad at it.

 

[Moderate Right]

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the modern primary system is one of the main causes of polarization in America today, and it hasn't even produced an obviously-better crop of candidates than the old "smoke-filled room" system (where the party just handpicked their candidates and told the voters who the nominee was).

I think the biggest objection is that the smoke-filled room system was less democratic than the modern primary system...but I'm not sure even *that* holds up to scrutiny. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where there are only 97 swing House districts (meaning they are between R+5 and D+5), and only 14 swing Senate states. The rest are totally non-competitive. Aside from rare instances where the in-party forfeits the seat by nominating a criminal or a nutcase, the outcome of all the other congressional seats is predetermined. If we consider the more democratic system to be the one that provides an outcome that better represents voter sentiment, then the smoke-filled room would seem to be the better approach.

Probably the worst aspect of the modern primary system is that bad political decisions are self-perpetuating instead of self-correcting. Let's say that a party drops the ball and the voters nominate a bad candidate for a Senate seat, who loses the election badly. In a healthy system, they would learn their lesson and nominate someone better next time. But the primary system doesn't allow for that. If they lose enough elections in a row, the voters will simply come to associate the party with those unpopular candidates, stop identifying as party members, and stop voting in the primaries. This leaves only the true ideological believers to vote in the primaries, who are even *less* in touch with what the voters want than before.

I think our parties (and our democracy) would be better served if one or both of them unilaterally decided to abandon the primary system for congressional races, and go back to the smoke-filled room system...at least for the districts/states where they normally lose. Obviously the primary system is not working for them or for the voters. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome.

Somewhere in there I agree with some of what you said, BUT, I'm not sure you realize we still have the smoke filled rooms right now. Often times the party apparatus goes out and finds a candidate to run, backs them with millions and million of dollars, and the electorate winds up voting for the candidate brought to us and financed by the smoke filled rooms. So, things really haven't changed much from the old days. They just pull a fast one on the voters, making them think they are the ones deciding on the candidate.

 

[Gatsby]

Somewhere in there I agree with some of what you said, BUT, I'm not sure you realize we still have the smoke filled rooms right now. Often times the party apparatus goes out and finds a candidate to run, backs them with millions and million of dollars, and the electorate winds up voting for the candidate brought to us and financed by the smoke filled rooms. So, things really haven't changed much from the old days. They just pull a fast one on the voters, making them think they are the ones deciding on the candidate.

I agree that that does happen now, but the party is constrained in who it can recruit since the threat of a primary is still looming over their handpicked candidate. If they pick someone who can actually win the election in a state where they're the out-party (i.e. someone in ideological step with the general election voters but out of step with the primary voters), that might piss off the primary-voters who could throw in their lot with someone else. And so the actually electable candidates often just take a pass because it's not worth it.

I think it would lead to more competitive general elections if the out-party primary voters simply were not able to exercise (or threaten to exercise) veto power over the party's preferred candidates.