Rigging Primary Rules Won’t Get Out Voters

Few of history’s great wars have been waged in the name of moderation. But that is precisely the cause for which the proponents of California’s new open primary law have been fighting, driven by the conviction that the electoral process will benefit from the participation of more voters from the center of the political spectrum.

Whether there is too little or too much moderation in politics is a matter of one’s own place on that spectrum. Republicans who favor abortion rights and gun control, and Democrats who want lower taxes and free trade, have come to believe that there are not enough candidates or voters like themselves in the process. So in an effort to give themselves more influence within their respective parties, a bipartisan collection of moderates last year qualified and passed a ballot initiative that allows voters to participate in the primary elections of a party of which they are not a member.

Moderates of both parties will almost always be at a natural disadvantage in most internal party disputes, including primary campaigns. The system rewards those who participate, and those voters with more intense ideological interests will involve themselves in greater numbers and with greater emotion. Moderate voters, by definition, tend to be less energized on the issues and less motivated to participate. As a result, they have less clout.

Both parties, however, have a vested interest in having two strong ideological factions to give them balance. The Republican Party’s strength, for example, is unquestionably drawn from the energy and passion of its conservative base. But its electoral successes come when it is able to reach out to the swing voters who populate the political center. Neither group can win without the other, so even the most conservative Republicans benefit from having a strong moderate presence within their party to help provide that reach.

But rather than expending the effort and resources that might help them regain some of their lost influence, moderate Republicans have spent most of their time in recent years grumbling about not being taken seriously within their party. While the moderates complain, the conservatives organize, and the imbalance of power continues to grow.

Nor is this challenge the sole province of the Republicans. For all the talk in recent years of a newly centrist Democratic Party, the influence of organized labor on Democratic politics has become so pervasive that barely three dozen of Bill Clinton’s fellow party members were willing to stand with him in his recent push for fast-track trade authority. If New Democrats were spotted owls or kangaroo rats, the fast-track debate would have caused the Department of Interior to declare them an endangered species. But by organizing such a broad coalition of opposition to the fast-track legislation, labor demonstrated that it has reemerged as the party’s most powerful political force.

Organized labor and the urban/minority coalitions dominate the Democratic Party because their members possess the same motivation and intensity that empower conservative activists to define the Republican agenda. So moderates of both parties, rather than committing themselves to the necessary grass-roots organizational work that leads to political power, have reacted by changing their parties’ structural rules in an effort to tilt the playing field toward the center.

They believe that moderate voters will turn out in primary elections if they are presented a wider selection of similarly centrist candidates from which to choose. But voters, moderate or otherwise, can become inspired to participate only as a result of ideological commitment. It’s not at all clear that two moderate candidates on the ballot instead of one will suddenly instill these voters with a greater enthusiasm for politics.

The reason people don’t vote has nothing to do with the way candidates are nominated. People don’t vote because they believe there are other, more important things in their lives on which to spend their time and attention. The challenge for politicians is to explain to them why their vote is necessary. Without that motivation, it doesn’t matter if the primary is open or closed, scrambled or poached.

If enough free-trade Democrats or pro-choice Republicans decide that their issues are of sufficient import to get them out to the polls, they can regain their lost strength in their respective parties. But only hard work and ideological passion will give them that influence. Trying to rig the rules of the game almost certainly will not.