The way I see it is that we can go two ways with the nominating process. We can decide that the two major parties aren’t really parties. They are just brands. People stand for nomination, but the general electorate decides who wins by voting in an open primary process. Or we can treat the parties as actual parties with members. Those members will elect delegates to conventions (local, state, and/or national) who will choose the nominee. In this latter case, the delegates would be elected at a very local (small) level so that they all well-known and trusted by the people voting for them. And the delegates would not be bound by any electoral preferences.
But people probably don’t want to give-up their vote in the nominating process to some delegate, so this last idea isn’t likely to be embraced. Because of that, it seems to me that we ought to just get rid of delegates completely. Assign each state a point total, and whoever gets the most points, gets the nomination.
All I know is that the current situation is a joke. People think that their vote counts, but it doesn’t. They assume that whomever wins a caucus will win the most delegates, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will win any delegates. There were caucuses in both Maine and Iowa where none of the votes were even transmitted to the state party. Missouri held a primary that doesn’t count. The votes are insecure largely because they don’t really matter. Some primaries are open to everyone and others are only open to party members.
There are two ideas that make sense, but we use neither of them. One idea is that political parties are controlled by their members, who should participate in some way. And those parties can elect officers who will represent the interests of the party (or factions within the party) at conventions where important decisions are made.
The other idea is that the political parties are just loose confederations, open to anyone, incapable of restricting decisions to their members, and more interested in attracting the widest (yet, shallowest) participation.
Overall, for reasons both of practical politics and voter expectations, it is the latter idea that is more popular in this country. But that’s really only an artifact of our winner-take-all elections which make parties somewhat meaningless.
In any case, in the nominating process, whether we have primaries or caucuses or both, the elections should be real or they should be ditched. What’s going on now is a fraud.
I hear you, BooMan. I’d prefer all primaries myself. Go, vote, votes counted. It’s harder for them to pull the shyt that the GOP just did in Maine, where they decided to just not count 3 counties, because they want to cook the books for Willard. And, get rid of superdelegates.
Iowa wasn’t so great either. The management of the process is so convoluted now that even those who choose malinformation over reality must surely be noticing.
A bigger problem is voter registration and being allowed to vote at all. Normal countries have a record of your residence, keep an updated record at the polling place, and automatically register you.
I think that should be fixed before worrying about fixing the primary process.
Or we can allow ballots at the general election with 300-1000 candidates for President and independent of them 300-1000 candidates for Vice-President. The old Federalist Papers way.
And no primaries. Or caucuses.
What will drive the process is the attempts of candidates to obtain the greatest number of votes with the least cost and effort.
From the Adams Administration until sometime in the Republican hegemony over American politics that mechanism was political parties tied to media advocates. And they tended to be big tent parties with smaller special interest parties (even the variety of turn-of-the-20th-century Socialists were sorta special interest parties) nipping at their heels.
The direct funding of candidates by large donors bypassing the mechanism of party discipline (withholding of campaign funds) has caused the dissolution of the parties into essentially marketing campaigns. Field campaigns seek to address previous “customers” or institutional coalitions and advocates. The process has gone from debate and conversation to messaging.
The primary system has become the enemy of representative government. Under the current dispensation any early-primary state, no matter how ridiculous, anti-democratic, or corrupt its nominating process may be, has influence vastly greater than its electoral importance. If we really want reform, we face a harder path: uniform federal requirements for the nomination and voting/registration process in every state. Or better yet, look at what Tarheel said above and find a way to get rid of primaries altogether (or parties themselves).
one voted BooMan
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