Last updated on 2018-02-02
Still no word from Pierre on which if any of the eight initiative petitions submitted this fall have enough signatures to make our 2018 ballot. One of the iffier petitions (by signature count, not by proposal merit), the open primaries proposal, is getting some national discussion thanks to a new book by former Pennsylvania Congressman Jason Altmire. The former Congressman sees open primaries as one way to tamp down rampant political polarization:
In recent congressional and state legislative elections in California, extremist candidates who in the past would have easily won their party’s nomination in closed primaries have been forced to moderate their message in order to appeal to the wider voting bloc which decides the outcome of open primaries. For the first time in decades, California has seen numerous ideologically driven incumbents lose re-election because they could no longer compete in the broader primary electorate.
Until more states implement similar voting reforms, ideologically extreme voters like your crazy uncle will continue to have a disproportionate influence in our nation’s elections. You can’t change your uncle’s mind, so this holiday season don’t even bother trying. Instead, think about how you might help move your own state in the direction of open primaries, which would level the playing field and give more thoughtful voters a much greater voice in choosing America’s leaders. Such an endeavor would be time well spent [Jason Altmire, “Vote Down Your Crazy Uncle,” U.S. News & World Report, 2017.11.24].
Altmire seconds the testimony former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shared with South Dakotans in 2016 in support of the first, failed open-primaries initiative. Former Clinton advisor and pollster Mark Penn agrees that open primaries promote the moderate candidates that Penn’s polling suggests 91% of Americans want.
Altmire’s thesis doesn’t convince Denver political science professors Seth Masket and Rob Preuhs, who think Colorado’s newly open primaries won’t result in major changes:
With the new primary system, which opens it up to unaffiliated voters, there has been an idea that in both parties there will be more moderate candidates rising to the top. Yet both Masket and Preuhs were skeptical that it would lead to a significant change in the candidates coming out of the June inter-party contest.
“Some research I’ve done, along with others, suggest opening up the primary doesn’t change all that much in large part because the voters who show up for the primary would show up if it’s a closed primary, the hard-core partisans,” Masket said. “There’s certainly a chance for some more moderation in the field but it’s not probably going to have huge effect” [Kara Mason and Ramsey Scott, “Party Favors: A Year Away, All Sides See Hope in Race for Colorado Guv, AG, and Aurora’s Seats in Congress and State House,” Aurora Sentinel, 2017.11.16].
We should note that Colorado’s new primary system is not the fully open, top-two primary petitioned by Joe Kirby and De Knudson here in South Dakota. The Colorado open primaries, passed by initiative in 2016, preserve separate ballots for party candidates but allow non-affiliated voters to choose to vote in either the Republican or the Democratic primary. The South Dakota proposal would put all candidates of all parties, along with any non-affiliated candidates, on a single primary ballot, open to all voters; the top two vote-getters would then advance to the general election.
One study of California’s first go-round with the top-two open primary in 2012 found that the election didn’t produce a more moderate crop of winners, largely because voters didn’t know enough to identify moderates. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the California Assembly voted more moderately following that first top-two primary in 2012. A 2016 study found California Democrats moderating slightly in this decade but not California Republicans, but that relative moderation appears to result as much from implementing independent redistricting in 2011 as from the new open top-two primary system. (South Dakota also has an independent-redistricting petition in the hopper again, but that petition has fewer signatures and thus less chance of making the ballot than the already iffy open-primaries petition.)
Altmire expresses the good intention of open primaries: to elect more moderate, practical, compromise-oriented legislators who will better represent the desire of the vast majority of voters to get things done. Whether open primaries, particularly the top-two flavor that may make our ballot again in 2018, carry out that good intention is unclear. But I’ll support the open-primaries proposal just as I did in 2016, because open primaries give all voters a chance at pursuing that practical moderation in a way that they cannot under the current system of separate partisan primaries.
I’m not sure about the statistics or apocraphial observations, but getting more people involved here in SD is essential to breaking the stranglehold of one-party government that we currently have.
Among those we need to reëngage: the 100K SHS voters who checked out after the 2008 election.