Public Would Win With Open Primary, Wilson Says

The political establishment -- most of it -- is apoplectic about Proposition 62, the open primary initiative. But Pete Wilson says he’ll vote for it anyway because of personal experiences:

* The former governor and mayor has seen, close up, both partisan and nonpartisan primary election systems. And the latter, he contends, is far better for the public.

“Candidates are inclined to be very partisan in order to win a [partisan] primary and then be very partisan when they get to the Legislature,” Wilson says. “I’ve seen them play a lot of partisan games. Not that either party is immune from this ....

“If legislators had been on the [recall] ballot they would have been thrown out. The public is justifiably sick of their performance.”

* As a resident of L.A.’s Westside, he is tired of wasting his Republican vote in gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts that are safe for Democratic candidates. Not only safe for Democrats, he complains, but for liberal Democrats. He wants to give moderates a shot.

“I’m effectively disenfranchised,” he asserts.

Wilson, 71, now a Hoover Institution fellow, thinks Sacramento needs a major shakeup and Prop. 62 would be “a good first step toward reform.”

Actually, Prop. 62 would far exceed a mere step. It would be a historic leap -- to not only an open primary system, but also to a nonpartisan primary. It would dramatically change how people get elected to the Legislature, statewide office and Congress.

It’s not a radical concept for California, however. Local officials traditionally have been elected in a nonpartisan manner. So has the state superintendent of public instruction.

As a three-term mayor of San Diego in the 1970s, Wilson recalls that “I was able to get Democrats to vote for Republican policies. There wasn’t partisan discipline. There were no Republican and Democratic caucuses.”

Under Prop. 62, political parties still could endorse, work for and bankroll state candidates. They just wouldn’t own the primary elections; the public would.

Parties wouldn’t be nominating candidates for the November election. Candidates’ party affiliations would be listed on the primary ballot, but the two top vote-getters -- regardless of party -- would meet in November.

In Wilson’s Century City area, that might mean two Democrats running off. “With my vote and with other Republican votes, we might get a less ideological Democrat,” he theorizes. Wilson now is represented in Sacramento and Washington by three liberals: Assemblyman Herb Wesson, state Sen. Kevin Murray and Rep. Henry Waxman.

Around Irvine, there could be two Republicans competing; in San Francisco, a Democrat and a Green. But in most places, the likely matchup still would be a Democrat versus a Republican.

The aim, however, is to produce a November candidate crop that’s more moderate than the contemporary crowd. Prop. 62 is sponsored by political pragmatists who are trying to elect more problem-solving centrists, regardless of party. They’d do this by widening the ideological base of the primary electorate.

This would be achieved by opening the nonpartisan primary to all voters, regardless of their party registration. Currently, the major parties close their primaries to nonmembers, with one exception: Both allow “declined to state” independents to vote in their contests.

California briefly had another version of an open primary: one with a single “blanket” ballot that listed candidates of every party and allowed, for example, Republican voters to help choose a Democratic nominee. The parties sued. And the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in 2000 that they had a constitutional right to bar nonmembers from their nominating process.

Open-primary advocates responded with Prop. 62, which would scrub party nominating altogether and make the primaries nonpartisan.

The very term open primary drives Prop. 62’s opponents batty. In the strategy of semantics, “open” connotes good; “closed” is bad. Opponents use the word “blanket” -- and harp about “Louisiana-style,” treating “Louisiana” as a pejorative. The Deep South state has a system similar to Prop. 62.

Opponents -- the parties, partisans and politicians -- are desperate to protect the status quo, which tends to elect partisan ideologues, the kind that dominate the Legislature. For them, this is about survival. Lawmakers were so alarmed they concocted a gimmicky status quo measure, Proposition 60, and rammed it onto the ballot hoping to confuse voters. Whichever proposition gets the most votes prevails, assuming both pass.

In a mid-September poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, likely voters supported Prop. 62 by 49% to 33%, with 18% undecided. There was much more indecision about Prop. 60: 34%, 24% and 42%.

No. 1 on Wilson’s reform list is to seize redistricting from the Legislature and give it to a nonpartisan panel of retired judges. But “until we can get a fair and honest reapportionment,” he says, “the next best thing is to try to moderate what gerrymandering has created, which is a polarized Legislature....

“Hell, I believe in political parties, but when you’re trying to make headway on serious policy problems, this kind of Legislature is not very good.... Even with an energetic, reform-minded governor, there’s only so much he can achieve.”

Pete Wilson is no political Pollyanna. He was elected 10 times. When this career pol says the system urgently needs a shakeup, he’s worth listening to.