Let me put in a bad word for partisan primary elections, which attract almost exclusively the regulars, activists, loyalists, militants, and zealots in each party, resulting in the Democrats mainly preferring their leftmost contenders and the Republicans mainly preferring their rightmost contenders, so by the time the general election rolls around, the sensible majority in the moderate middle is understandably disgusted at the choices they have to make.
The solution to this is obvious and has been known for decades: Do away with the partisan primaries altogether, let anyone who can gather enuf signatures on a nominating petition run in the general election, and use preferential balloting (AKA instant-runoff voting AKA ranked-choice voting) to sort out the results. Under test cases, this approach almost always eliminated the extremists in the early going, resulting in elections of candidates who were at least acceptable to both sides and much favored by the centrists.
Yeah, that’s the solution that’s known to work. The problem — as with obscene amounts of big dark money in politicking — is that the only people in a position to do anything about it are the very ones who’ve been successful under the status quo. It’s an uphill fight to get them to budge, but it’s one worth fighting. Those who fight may lose; those who do not fight have already lost.
Let me put in a bad word for partisan primary elections, which attract almost exclusively the regulars, activists, loyalists, militants, and zealots in each party, resulting in the Democrats mainly preferring their leftmost contenders and the Republicans mainly preferring their rightmost contenders, so by the time the general election rolls around, the sensible majority in the moderate middle is understandably disgusted at the choices they have to make.
The solution to this is obvious and has been known for decades: Do away with the partisan primaries altogether, let anyone who can gather enuf signatures on a nominating petition run in the general election, and use preferential balloting (AKA instant-runoff voting AKA ranked-choice voting) to sort out the results. Under test cases, this approach almost always eliminated the extremists in the early going, resulting in elections of candidates who were at least acceptable to both sides and much favored by the centrists.
Yeah, that’s the solution that’s known to work. The problem — as with obscene amounts of big dark money in politicking — is that the only people in a position to do anything about it are the very ones who’ve been successful under the status quo. It’s an uphill fight to get them to budge, but it’s one worth fighting. Those who fight may lose; those who do not fight have already lost.