If you like stats and maps, you should have a look at Nate Silver’s post on Sarah Palin’s chances in the primaries in 2012.
Silver doesn’t mention this explicitly, but what jumps out at me is the sheer irrationality of the primary process – so much depends on the order in which states vote and the nature of the vote (ie closed or open primary, caucus). Then there’s the unrepresentativeness of some of the states which are most important in the primaries by size and demographics, not to mention the fact that primaries tend to privilege an electorate which is closer to the ideological extreme than those voters who will actually decide the general election. All of that applies to the Democrats too, of course, but it’s unlikely they’ll have competitive Presidential primaries in 2012.
As bizarre as the primary process is, it survives partly because many of the suggested alterations have serious downsides. Take this line:
“Then there’s the unrepresentativeness of some of the states which are most important in the primaries by size and demographics,”
That’s true, but giving extra weight to small states does offer the advantage that candidates with less money, but a capacity to connect with voters in small groups can get their foot in the door. I think that’s a very worthwhile feature. Finding states that are both small and representative is not so easy.
The primary system is bizarre. As sparrowhawk mentions, there are downsides to changing it. Regardless, let’s forge ahead looking at some numbers.
Right off, the people voting in the primaries are party faithful in many (most?) states. That is, you don’t get to vote, in many, perhaps most, states, if you’re not registered with the party in question. Fewer than 30%, iirc, of the voting age population is registered by party. Certainly I’m not (didn’t matter when I lived in Illinois, which had open primaries, but does matter now that I’m in Maryland, which does not).
So when you look at the primaries, you’re looking at not more than about 30% of the voters for that state. And, as the linked-to article describes, each state can have rather different preferences, and bases for preference.
But then you have the question of how many people turn out for primaries. In off year elections (actual elections selecting who will occupy the seat in congress) you’re looking at 30% turnout from both parties plus non-party voters. Taking that as unbiased (meaning that Democrats are as likely to turn out as Republicans, and vice versa), and taking the number of primary voters to be comparable to off-year election voters, suggests only 9% of the voting population is turning out for a given primary election.
The candidate only needs to win the majority of that (most of the time, some states have more involved primaries, but take this simplification), meaning that they can win a state by turning out 5% of the electorate. Having rabid followers, at this 5% level, is sufficient. Hence McGovern being massacred in the 1972 election, and the Mondale and Dukakis massacres in 1984 and 1998, respectively. If it should be the Republican’s turn in 2012, which is far from obvious, then it’s really more of a matter of turnabout being fair play.
All this, of course, irrespective of how it is that ‘momentum’ and early press coverage changes subsequent voting, rendering two particular small states enormously important while leaving other small states, and some quite large states irrelevant as a rule.
The parties can change the system any time they like.
Does the primary system serve the purpose for which it was originally instituted? Probably not.
Does the primary system still serve a purpose that is congenial to important party interests? It certainly does.
@3 –
No, they can’t, Katz.
The US Supreme Court decided in the 1940s that primary elections were not private affairs of the parties but public institutions – the decision was prompted by a case which sought to strike down the Southern ‘white primary’ in the Democratic party.
So, in most states, primaries are regulated by public law – ie some states require ‘open primaries’, or ‘crossover primaries’, where anyone can vote regardless of party affiliation, or where you can change your party affiliation at the time of voting in the other party’s primary.
Similarly, the dates of the respective primaries are often set by state legislatures – this was the problem with Florida and Michigan, and why Obama didn’t participate in them – the states had infringed Democratic Party rules by varying the timing of the primaries. The parties can themselves determine what happens to the results, in the sense of how they translate into delegates at the convention and whether those delegates are seated.
Except, in some instances, some states legislate for proportional or winner take all allocations of delegates.
So, like most things to do with US elections, it’s absurdly complex, and any changes require the coordination of multiple state and non-state actors.
If the great weakness of the Democrats is their lack of discipline and, well, weakness, the great failing of the GOP seems to be their preparedness to elect charismatic buffoons.
You would think that at some point the hardheads of the GOP would realize that another grossly incompetent presidency would destroy their party’s reputation and electoral chances for a very long time, even in an electorate with such seemingly short memories as the US’s.
I think you’re kidding yourself, Robert.
I give you Reagan and both Bushes. (OK, Bush snr wasn’t a buffoon, but he wasn’t a spectacularly good POTUS either.)
But I believe that a party can decide whether or not to have a primary in any given state in the first place.
Reagan may personally have been a senile git, but I don’t think his administration was woefully incompetent the way Bush’s was, and the way Palin’s would be.
David #6, let’s not forget that Reagan’s second term and Bush Senior’s term happened to coincide with the tenure of a chap called Gorbachev who initiated a lot of good things in his country and globally which created a lot of glorious sunshine in which any US President could bask if s/he came to the party.
A Palin Presidency is not likely to benefit from any such lucky historical accident – perhaps with unfortunate consequences for us all.
@7 –
Sort of. They can decide they don’t want, or don’t want to take any notice of a primary. But a state can hold one regardless of the party’s desires, which is embarrassing because almost any other selection method for delegates to the nominating convention has less legitimacy than a popular vote.
So the point is that a party may choose not to recognise the results of a primary it didn’t want in the first place.
Presumably the Communist Party of America is equally free as the Democrats and the Republicans to ignore the results of a state-sanctioned primary that it didn’t want in the first place.
Indeed, Robert @ 8. I don’t think the pentecostals had quite the same influence as they’ve acquired since.
I think of Nate Silver as something like a god among blogging men, a combination of all the good features of Antony Green and the Ozpsephowriters, but he has lost me here.
No way is Sarah Palin getting the GOP nomination. Silver is shamelessly trying to create a narrative to help her, and that’s the equivalent of push polling as far as I’m concerned.
If he really wants to ensure the reelection of BHO he should quit the commentariat and go to work for one of the groups dedicated to that happening, he shouldn’t stay in the media and compromise his ‘I don’t endorse politicians’ by going down the ratf%@$er path of using his reputation to inflate Palin.
Neither of those jokers was reduced to scrawling ‘lift the American spirit’ on their palms, even if Reagan lost a lot of his ad hoc presentational skills when he died on the operating table.
Nickws @13: “Neither of those jokers was reduced to scrawling ‘lift the American spirit’ on their palms…”
I simply cannot believe that a large proportion of the US electorate are so daft as to elect that fruitcake as their President.
The trail of stories about how she has managed affairs in Alaska, and her truely daft answers to unscripted interviews, suggest she is indeed closer to a “hockey mom” than to leadership material for a major country.
Just watch replays of those interviews, and you will see it for yourself…right up there with Pauline Hanson, I reckon.
Palin is not bad as a cute sock puppet, with an autocue and some sharp cookie scripting lines for her. Assuming politics is just a puppet show? Can you just imagine Palin in meetings with foreign heads of state, on difficult policy issues, with no autocue to help? Oh yeah, she knows everything about Russia – why she lives right next door to them in Alaska. Sheesh!
They can’t be serious? The Republicans must have lost the plot even more comprehensively than our Liberal party!
Because I have American Revolution as one of my Google News categories (in the vain hope of getting some history news I might otherwise miss) I tend to get an awful lot of stuff on the Tea Party and the Second American Revolution. At times I’m up to my ears in right wing dingbat shit from the US. The point being that I’ve read an awful lot of this stuff, possibly more than most Aussies would unless they were specialists in American politics. They are talking to each other, not to the general American public, and a lot of it boils down to How do we get rid of that socialist black man (who is really an Arab) in the White House. In my view, whoever wins the Republican primaries (and I don’t think it will be Palin, if only because she’s a woman), the underlying RWDB racist message will not wash with the wider US electorate. (I hope.)
The point I was making, Nickws @ 13, is that the Rethugs’ choice of candidate has been spiralling down for quite a while. (Obvs not very clearly. Sorry.)
When your recent choices include Reagan and Bush 2, Palin isnt really much of a stretch. Their last decent president (for a fairly idiosyncratic definition of “decent”) was Nixon.
NickWS Nate Silver has a bet with a fellow blogger that Palin will win the Republican nomination. From memory he has odds of 3:1. I doubt he’s doing this because he’s trying to talk it up – right or wrong he sees her as a better than one in four chance of getting the Republican nomination, which is probably better than any other candidate with the possible exception of Romney. Most senior Republicans don’t agree, but I think she is leading in opinion polls of those likely to vote in the polls. It’s a long way to go, but I don’t think you have to be biased to think she has a shot.
Unclear, Mark, why primaries would preference extremists or ideologues.
This could only be based on an insurgency, like the Tea Party, which is to the right/left of the party mainstream.
Generally primaries encourage centrism (relative to the state in question). Because they are open to anyone who registers, and are not limited to party activists.
I have American Revolution as one of my Google News categories (in the vain hope of getting some history news I might otherwise miss)
Paul – that is absolutely magnificent!
Substitute ‘preferential voting’ for ‘primary process’; and ‘Senate’ for ‘primaries’ and you’d have a statement that’s true for a lot of people.
And also – correct me if I’m wrong – illegal to charge any kind of membership fee for. It’s incredibly democratic.
Presumably, but the attitude probably won’t help get their candidate’s name on many state-sponsored presidential ballots come November (Olympic (summer)).
@13 Gee, if that’s someone talking up Palin’s chance, I hate to see someone talk them down. Seems to me that he’s saying that timing gives her the edge on Huckabee (or similar), but she starts a long way behind Romney.
Oh for pity’s sake.
1. You can all relax, Palin isn’t going to be president. I think it’s highly unlikely she’d get the nomination (though I suppose in the wake of the twin sleepyheads GWB and BHO, nothing’s impossible), but even if she did, she wouldn’t win. Too divisive, too many liabilities. She does however have enormous usefulness for her sheer nuisance value. For some pitch-perfect reason she drives leftists crazy (BIRM), forcing them to show all their manifold ugly weaknesses — hey, not unlike many comments on this thread! Don’t underestimate the importance of nuisance value — history has been altered more than once on its account. Palin if she’s smart will play the role of a sort of figurative Thermopylae… or Fort St. Elmo/Mdina, for you Siege of Malta geeks. Personally I think the optimal GOP front-runner hasn’t emerged yet. And an awful lot will depend on how Obama’s next two years play out (Lawd, is it only one year so far? It feels like a century).
2. The primary system may be bizarre and may seem irrational, but guess what. Any system covering hundreds of millions of people will show its flaws handsomely. Design the most rational Denis Diderot system you please — when you input 300 million interests from enormous geo-eco-ethno diversity (hey, remember diversity? I thought you guys liked diversity) I guarantee you, the weak spots will show. Besides, the primary system, like the states’ individual historical identities, grows out of an odd peculiar unique historical situationism. Why give up organic nature for top-down rationality, when the total flaws will be merely parallel changes?
3. Many of the comments here, esp. the ones about Reagan, are very silly.
Some of you might find this intertesting.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/editorial/93031/palin039s-tea-leaves
Check out this FOX poll: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/02/09/think-tea-party-movement/
You can even vote if you wish.
I think you’ll find the option I voted for.
Palin would be a weak presidential candidate with no distinct cross-over appeal. But weak candidates can win in the right circumstances: Harding in 1920. The frustrating thing is how Republicans seem to be given a free pass by the media on promising to ensure lower taxes, more military spending, a smaller deficit and preservation of social programs for the elderly. in Australia it’s more difficult to get away with this.Much depends on the Congressional elections if the Republicans do well Romney might enter the race.
American political parties aren’t public entities, but aspects of their internal operations form essential parts of the US electoral system(s) and are subject to various constitutional provisions, such as a the first and forteenth amendments.
Mark refers above to Smith v Allwright in 1944, which ruled that primaries are part of the electoral process and the Democrats internal rules restricting voting to white voters violated the 14th amendment.
On the other hand, California Democratic Party v Jones in 2000 struck down California’s new ‘blanket primary’ law, which was enacted through one of those citizen initiated things. The blanket primary was a single primary election for all parties, with every party’s candidates listed on the one ballot, but the court held it violated a political party’s 1st amendment freedom of association.
A Party might be able to ignore the results of a primary, depending on its own rules, or the law in its State. In the past, some states electoral laws have required that party candidates can only be candidates in the general election if they have won the party’s primary.
d
Was the California decision by a Californian or a Federal court, Darryl? Because the system struck down is how they do things in Louisiana, I believe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary
Though the wiki article says the Californian initiative failed.
But I think a read of it makes the point about how endlessly confusing this stuff can be!
Smith v Allwright was determined in favour of the Afro-American complainant only because it was deemed that the segregationist Democratic Party of Texas derived its right to exclude non-whites from a State of Texas Statute deemed in 1944 to be in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment.
This result was an artifact of the status of Democratic Party membership rules being more or less an extension of State of Texas segregationist legislation. This legislation was designed to prevent any party in Texas from conducting a valid primary if it allowed non-whites to vote.
IF this legislation had been repealed and then the Democratic Party established exclusionary rules as a voluntary organisation, then almost certainly the SCOTUS would have allowed the continuation of exclusionary practices in voting in primaries.
But of course this is a BIG IF. Such legislation was just one part of an aggressive, deliberate and self-conscious program of government-implemented institutional racism that was designed to establish a segregated social system intended to last more than a thousand years.
Little did the proponents of this system think that the US Constitution could be used to penalise them for their own overweening arrogance.
The California decision was US Supreme Court. The blanket primary was from Proposition 198 (http://www.calvoter.org/voter/elections/archive/96pri/props/198.html) which was approved at the 1996 election.
It was not a ‘non-partisan’ blanket primary, where the top two candidates move forward to the general election regardless of their party affiliation. The california system was that the top vote getter from each party would move forward.
The opening summary of the California decision is:
“States play a major role in structuring and monitoring the primary election process, but the processes by which political parties select their nominees are not wholly public affairs that States may regulate freely. To the contrary, States must act within limits imposed by the Constitution when regulating parties’ internal processes.”
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=99-401
d
@31 and @32 – like I said, it’s a veritable mishmash!
Confusing is not, I think, the same thing as irrational. There are many potential ways of deciding these things, each more-or-less rational, and since the USA takes federalism seriously there actually are a lot of ways these things are decided.
What is even more confusing is the precise legal standing of the parties. The cases refer to above hold that the parties are not “wholly public” entities, and yet they state that most of their most important processes are significantly public in nature and capable of being regulated. For example the case that Darryl refers to does not hold that the regulation was necessarily unconstitutional, but rather that there would need to be a tightly defined public interest needed to justify it. It was the absence of this that lead to the decision of it being unconstitutional.
I’m not saying there isn’t a certain rationality to it, Martin, but being rational is also not akin to being sensible.
Not capable of being regulated but are in fact regulated in their political functions.
The questions that the SCOTUS determined in Smith v Allwright were:
1. Were political parties regulated in their political functions by Texas law? YES.
2. Was this a compulsory and unavoidable condition of political parties anywhere in the US? NO.
3. Was the regulation exercised by the State in contravention of the 14th Amendment? YES.
4. If the legislation in question were repealed would the 14th Amendment still apply to the Texas Democratic Party? NO.
It seems that US political parties are private organizations except insofar as they are public. I know that law often involves shades of grey, but the level of subjectivity here seems ridiculous.
“Besides, the primary system, like the states’ individual historical identities, grows out of an odd peculiar unique historical situationism. Why give up organic nature for top-down rationality, when the total flaws will be merely parallel changes?”
Yup. One of the US’s great strengths has always been it’s immense, freewheeling and often chaotic nature as a collection of often barely united states. Even religion, patriotism/historical/racial pride and economic ideology, the traditional glues used to bind nation states together, have failed to stop America’s restless motor of individuality.
And given the way it all works now, it would be pretty much impossible to impose from the top down a new electoral machinery that everyone would regard as ahem…fair and balanced.
Besides if it did happen, the rest of the world would be deprived of some great entertainment.
And yeah, like a political-media-entertainment-complex soap opera starlet such as Palin would ever be allowed by the corporate machinery to get within spitting distance of the levers of power these days.
Her kinda of tribalist politics based on archaic frottage just ain’t gonna click with likes of Google, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and General Electric playing in a globalised world.
She’s like Reagan without his brains. Whereas Obama is like Reagan without his convictions.