One way to a better politics: get rid of party primaries
We can look at results in the few states that have tried it so far
This is the third post about Nick Troiano's book The Primary Solution, which will be released Feb. 27. The first post on why this book matters is here. The second post, on how our current system blocks good people from politics and breaks those who do make it into office, is here. The fourth and final post, which features an interview with Troiano, is here.
In January, I went through The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life by Michael Wear, which was released Jan. 23. The final post of that series is here. If you want to see a schedule of every book I'm going deep on this year (one a month), I explained that here.
Before I move to what a different political system would look like, here's one more example of how party primaries have come to distort our current politics.
Politico Playbook has a story this week about a U.S. Senator who is trolling Vice President Kamala Harris this week. He's sent a letter that has no substantive intent. It's all for show, to demonstrate to Republican primary voters — that 10% of voters who choose the choices for the rest of the nation — that he's a "fighter." It's all based around the GOP's impeachment of the Homeland Security Secretary, an act which is clearly also all for show and will do nothing to actually solve the problem at the border.
Most Americans would roll their eyes at this sort of gamesmanship, as they should.
But this senator knows what he's doing. He has three audiences in mind. The first are the Republican voters in his state who participate in primaries. He's running for reelection this year, and while he is in no danger of losing his primary, he'll want to have a strong showing in the Aug. 20 Florida primary, to gain a head of steam heading into the general election in the fall. The party primary is kind of a test run for the general in a sense, giving you a chance to practice mobilizing your most rabid supporters, to lock those votes in and then turn in the fall to winning over the voters closer to the middle.
The second audience is the national Republican electorate — voters in every state who are hardline GOP voters who participate in primaries. This senator has already toyed with running for president in the past, and would also like to be a leader of the Senate Republicans. To gain either of those positions, he'll want to be gaining favor with hardcore Republican voters across the country, and especially — when it comes to the 2028 Republican presidential nomintion — to GOP primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and the other early states.
And what better way to be introduced to more primary voters around the country than to be featured in partisan, right-wing media outlets and by social media personalities as a "fighter" for trolling Kamala Harris. That's the third audience: the partisan media that elevates an ambitious politician and brings them to the attention of the small group of party bosses: primary voters.
Does all of this go away if you get rid of partisan primaries? No. But you exert pressure in the other direction, away from the fringes and toward the middle. It’s centripetal force, pushing back against the overwhelming centrifugal force of our modern politics.
Here's how that would work, as outlined in Nick Troiano's book The Primary Solution.
How does it work?
Right now, "the more likely a politician is to do their job, the more likely it is for them to lose it," (103) Troiano writes.
The solution is simple. The complicated part is actually figuring out how to implement it.
But the idea of how to make our politics better boils down to getting rid of party primaries. There are variations on how to do this, and on what to replace it with, but this is the basic idea.
Troiano outlines five "main benefits" of this reform (154):
All voters' voices will be heard.
Elections will be decided by a majority of voters, not as few as 8%.
Elections will produce less ideologically extreme outcomes.
Incumbents will face all voters without fear of being primaried.
The positive consequences will compound.
Troiano has a preference for what to replace the party primary with, but he is open to a few different outcomes.
You could do away with primaries entirely. Louisiana is the one and only state to have done this already, and we'll come back to that case study in a moment.
Or you could have a primary but allow candidates from all parties to take part. This is called the nonpartisan primary. There are three states who have done this for all their elections: Washington, Alaska, and California. A fourth state, Nebraska, uses nonpartisan primaries for its state legislature elections (84).
The question in a nonpartisan primary is how many candidates are allowed to progress past the primary, to compete in the general election. In California and Washington, the top two candidates advance to the fall election. But in Alaska, the top four primary finishers go to the fall election.
Alaska has added another wrinkle. After the open primary narrows the field to the top four candidates, the elect their winner in the fall election with ranked choice voting, also known as an instant runoff.
Reformers generally think that a final four or final five primary (as Katherine Gehl has advocated for) is better than a top two, because it creates more space for multiple candidates from one party to advance. That way, both a hardliner and a moderate can advance, and the final decision is made by the larger group of voters that takes part in the fall election. Under our current system, moderates or politicians who are open to working with others to solve problems are usually eliminated by the small group of hardline voters in the party primary.
How it works in real life: Alaska and Louisiana
Some of the most compelling material in Troiano's book are the examples he provides of how getting rid of party primaries has paid real dividends in the states that have done so to date.
In Alaska, he tells the story of Cathy Giessel, who was state Senate President in 2020 when a group of reformers — including Troiano's group Unite America — pushed for Alaska voters to approve a ballot measure getting rid of the party primaries. Giessel opposed the switch. Giessel was "worried that conservative voices would be drowned out" in such a system.
But Giessel lost her seat in the Senate in the summer of 2020 to a more hardline Republican who faulted Giessel for working with Democrats to pass state budgets. She began to see the merits of moving to a nonpartisan primary. She ran again in 2022, and advanced past the primary in the final four system, and then won the general election in the fall.
Giessel is now again in Senate leadership, where a coalition of 29 Republicans and 28 Democrats have formed a coalition and "decided ... to stay on the ideas that we can find agreement on — which is the economy, public safety, education and a balanced budget," (179) she told Troiano.
Louisiana is a majority-Republican state. But because the state does not have primaries at all, that created space for a conservative Democrat to run for governor. In a party primary system, Democratic activists, interest groups and hardcore partisan voters usually push the party nominee so far left that they are unable to win a general election.
That Louisiana Democrat, John Bel Edwards, won the governorship in 2015. He made Louisiana the first and only state so far to accept federal funding for an expansion of Medicaid. "Within the first year, 433,000 residents gained coverage ... cutting the uninsured rate among adults in half from 23% to 11%" (150) Troiano writes.
The move was overwhelmingly supported in the state, and Edwards campaigned on it. In 2019, Louisiana voters rewarded Edwards by electing him to a second term. Louisiana's Republican lieutenant governor at the time, Billy Nungesser, said that the lack of a party primary meant that politicians running for office have "got to speak more to the greater good of your state" (153).
However, in other Southern states where Medicaid expansion is also viewed positively, party primaries mean Democrats can't nominate anyone who can win, and Republican primary voters oppose Medicaid expansion, and whoever can win the most of that small pool of voters becomes governor.
In Mississippi, right next door to Louisiana, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves declined $2 billion in federal funds even though one survey found that 80% of Mississippians favored Medicaid expansion. As a result, Troiano writes, "more than 100,000 Mississippians who would have qualified under Medicaid expansion remained without any realistic pathway to health insurance" (151).
"The ways we choose our leaders," Troiano writes, "can literally mean the difference between life and death" (153).