McCain faces closed-primary hurdles in ’08

January 31, 2006

In the 2000 presidential campaign, John McCain excelled in states with open primaries — in which anyone can vote — thanks to support from independents and Dems who preferred the Arizona senator to Bush.

Six years later, some Republicans are considering steps that might make McCain’s 2008 effort a little more complicated.

Republicans in states that gave Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) victories or near victories in the 2000 GOP presidential primaries are looking to bar non-Republicans from voting in their primaries in 2008, which would make it even more difficult for the Arizonan to win the nomination should he run in two years.

Michigan’s Republican Party Central Committee more than a week ago approved a plan that calls for holding the Republican and Democratic primaries on the same day, forcing voters to cast ballots in either a Republican or Democratic primary but not both, GOP executive director Saul Anuzis said in an interview.

The expectation is that there will be fewer so-called crossover ballots if voters can only participate in one primary, Anuzis added. The GOP head must now confer with his Democratic counterpart, Mark Brewer. Democrats are thought to support the change.

In Washington state, where Republicans chose the presidential nominee in 2000 through a combination of local caucuses and a statewide primary, the party is looking to shift more power to the caucuses. Traditionally, conservative activists, from abortion opponents to gun-rights proponents, have dominated caucuses, in Washington and elsewhere.

In 2000, McCain won Michigan’s primary with hundreds of thousands of votes from independents and Dems, and he did nearly as well in Washington state. If these plans move forward, he may have a tougher time in the next go-around. Regardless of what one thinks of McCain, this idea of limiting participation strikes me as a good idea.

Maybe my opinion is in the minority on this, but I’ve never understood the reasoning behind open primaries. If Republicans are going to choose a party nominee, it makes sense to limit the choice to other Republicans. The same holds true, of course, for Dems. Allowing others to participate in a primary opens the door to manipulation — outsiders can vote for the worst candidate in order to hurt the party.

Sure, allowing everyone to vote in an open process may help highlight candidates with broad appeal, but that seems like the kind of quality primary voters should be considering anyway when choosing a nominee. Am I wildly off base here?

I hope they succeed in closing all the primaries.

McCain is not a moderate. He is a very conservative and religious politican. He may be regarded as a maverack by his pork-corrupted collegues, but that does not mean he shares most Americans’ views or positions. Nor does it mean he will not happily use the threat of congressional regulation to suck money out of business, as he did a few years ago with the Airline Industry over passengar satisfaction 😉

That said, if the Republican party is not smart enough to nominate McCain in 2000 or 2008, then let them answer to GOD for their iniquities.

…offering us two Texas oilmen in 2000 and telling us that would solve our energy problems. Bloody twits (that would be the whole Republican party)

  • I hope they pull it off too. A primary is a party election and should be limited to party members. I’ve never really understood the reasoning behind the open primary concept.

  • I don’t think you’re off-base, but the partisan mischief in open primaries can backfire. I’ve heard that a lot of Democrats in 1980 thought Carter would beat Reagan easily, so they hoped he’d win.

    Also, I agree on the general principle that people in the party (or at a *minimum*, *not* people from the opposing party) should choose their candidate. I don’t want a bunch of Republicans infiltrating Democratic primaries to tell us who our leaders should be. This strikes me as a corollary of the appropriate reaction to the Clinton impeachment: don’t tell *us* who we should have run our party.

  • Open primaries can really change the outcome.

    Can you imagine what would have happened in 2000 if New Hampshire had been a closed primary?

    Bradley would have received a lot of votes that went to McCain. Bradley probably would have won New Hamsphire and….

  • As a fairly moderate person, in politics as well as many other things, I do think you are off base. The goal of this country, partisanship aside, ought to be to pit the two best candidates for President against one another.

    Country before party, and all that.

    For example, if I were able to vote in both primaries, I would prefer Hagel to McCain as a Republican candidate, because I believe the country would fare better under Hagel than McCain. And you never really know until it’s over (see: election, 2000) who will end up in the WH, I would want the best candidate in either party.

    If there are those on either side of the partisan divide that would prefer to have a weaker candidate as one of the possibilities, I believe such people ought to be marginalized.

    Imagine if candidates in the primaries had to appeal to the entire country — what a concept.

  • Open primaries are a poor attempt at a solution to the idiocy of voters being registered “independent”. Every voter is independent, regardless of their party affiliation, in that they can vote for whomever they damn well please (or not vote at all). All being an independent does is lock you out of voting in primaries, effectively limiting yourself to only partial participation in democracy.

    Primaries are a means by which a party selects the candidate it is going to choose as its nominee in the general election. It makes no sense to allow members of another party to influence a party’s choice.

    If we’re going to have open primaries, why have primaries at all? Just have a free-for-all general election, followed by a run-off between the top 2 vote getters.

  • “The goal of this country, partisanship aside, ought to be to pit the two best candidates for President against one another.”

    I believe this is a fundamental misunderstanding of American democracy. The purpose of a candidate in a representative democracy is to represent the voter. I don’t want the “best man for the job”. I want someone to represent me.

    The reason this is such a dangerous misunderstanding is that it puts the power and decision making implicitly in the hands of the elected official, who presumably “knows best” because he’s the best man. In fact, the power ought to lie with the voters, not just to pick a good man (or an autocrat, in Bush’s case), but to participate in democracy through their representative.

    Although it was not what the founders thought would happen, we very early on developed a two-party democracy. It would be one thing to amend our political system to something else, but when voters try to tweak the system by voting for third parties, crossing primaries, registering as independents, etc, they fundamentally damage the system. I think this is a major contributing factor, if not the effective cause, of the dysfunction in our political system today.

  • I think that manipulation on a very large scale is very unlikely. But I don’t remember anything about 1980, so maybe my experience is too limited. But I think it’s a general rule that state-wide open primaries fit well within.

    As a result, it’s more likely that the parties nominate candidates with more popular support across the spectrum, as opposed those who are only popular to the party’s base, ie the McCains rather than the Bushes.

    As for whether primaries SHOULD be opened or closed, I guess that is a function of the strength of the independants as a faction, which definitely has been on the wane in the last decade as partisanship has become more strident. My opinion is that the parties should NOT be an us-vs-them mentality. I should be able to feel as comfortable under either tent. So I very much agree with what Kathleen said. I would want the best candidate from either party, not the left-winger from the Democrats and the right-winger from the GOP.

    I was a Washington Dem in 2000 and I voted for McCain in the primary too.

    And, y’know, about McCain being a right-winger, the only people I can recall hearing that from have always appeared themselves to be left-wingers. I’ve yet to be convinced of it.

  • I totally agree with you, CB. An open primary will be manipulated. Period. A party candidate should be chosen by that party and no other. It’s the only way for the process to be reasonably fair and consistent, which is the only real issue that matters to my way of thinking.

  • People wake up, the whole premise of voters choosing their leaders is as dead as the US Republic. The 2000 “election” was a bloodless coup. The vote is a joke. The 2004 election just verified it. The exit polls were in sharp contrast to the final results and nobody said a word. John Kerry disappeared the day after the election.
    When I saw him pontificating against Alito yesterday, I was assured Alito would become chief justice as he is another republican in democratic clothing. This is a one party government and our corrupt leaders are getting richer, and they don’t care what the citizens think.

    This crap of closing primaries is just another step to total dictatorship. Now that Alito is confirmed by the gutless losers in the senate, there will be no appeal for any opposition to the New World Order. For those who don’t remember, Nazi Germany was built on such ideals.

    As a historian, I find it ironic the 13 colonies fought the repressive King George for our freedom. Now we have lost it forever thanks to another George(s) .

  • If we’re going to have open primaries, why have primaries at all? Just have a free-for-all general election, followed by a run-off between the top 2 vote getters.

    As a matter of fact, that is by far the best solution. I see no reason at all why the government should even recognize political parties, let alone formalize them in the process.

  • As someone who crossed party lines to vote in the 2000 Michigan Republican primary, I did so because John McCain was a better potential president than George Bush. I figured that either Al Gore or Bill Bradley would be fine as Democratic nominees. Maybe I’m just an idealist, but the idea of open primaries is probably predicated on good citizenship–you know, embracing the theory that who ever votes is doing so because they genuinesly believe in supporting the best candidate. Unfortunately, in today’s climate, partisanship rules and it’s probably better now to have the Republicans as beholden as possible to their most extreme elements, as long as it’s clear to the general public just how extreme they are… Thus, count me in as someone who now reluctantly supports closed primaries.

  • I was surprised when I moved to Michigan that they had open primaries as the concept was foreign back east. People I know here openly discuss voting Democratic at the primary to attempt to select the candidate least likely to beat the Republican on the ticket at the general election (unless there is a tightly contested Republican primary where their vote is needed). I thus have to agree with Mary Jo–I reluctantly support closed primaries now that I’ve been exposed to them.

  • “Closed” primaries are an abomination, in my view. They are an effort by the activists in both parties, a small fraction of the general public, to control the choices for the general election.

    The result is that maverick candidates, who don’t hew to either party-line, are forever locked out of the system, although many might be very successful in general elections.

    As an example, in Texas, closed primaries have given us total government by right-wing Republicans, despite the fact that even here they make up only 40% or so of voters.

    Should that 40% dominate every state-wide elected position, as they have for almost the last decade?

    Fortunately, in our governor’s race this year there is some hint of breaking this pattern, in that it looks like there will be two serious independent candidacies. Unfortunately, there is no runoff system, so a mere plurality will win the election.

    • Comments are closed.