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Partisan primaries motivate legislators to keep in lockstep with a narrow and extreme slice of the electorate rather than govern in the public interest.
Why did so many Republicans—147 of them—object to the Electoral College result on January 6?
Most voted to overturn the election out of fear. Not fear of the angry mob that had invaded the Capitol hours earlier, but fear of the voters who might threaten their reelection––specifically in their next party primary.
This is the “primary problem” in the U.S. political system today: A small minority of Americans decide the significant majority of our elections in partisan primaries that disenfranchise voters, distort representation, and fuel extremism––on both the left and, most acutely (at present), the right. The primary problem helps explain the stunning incongruity between Congress’s average 20 percent approval rating and its more than 90 percent reelection rate: There is a disconnect between what it takes to govern and what it takes to get reelected.
The problem stems from the fact that most members of Congress represent districts that have become reliably Democratic or Republican; some districts have been gerrymandered that way, but most are now “safe” for one party because of the electorate’s own self-sorting, driven by our growing rural and urban divide. Without any real competition in the general election, the only election of consequence in the large majority of congressional districts––and the only mechanism for accountability––is the primary.
January 6 should be the kick America needs to abolish partisan primaries. Some states have already started.
Under the reform, rather than both parties holding separate primary elections, all candidates will instead compete in a single, nonpartisan primary in which all voters can participate and select their preferred candidate. Then the top four finishers will advance to the general election, where voters will have the option to rank them. Whoever earns a majority of votes wins. (If no candidate earns a majority after first choices are counted, the race is decided by an “instant runoff”––whereby the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and voters who ranked that candidate first have their second-place votes counted instead, and so on, until a candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote.)
Not only do few voters participate in these elections, but those who do tend to be the most partisan and ideological––skewing election outcomes and governing incentives.
In 2018, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated the incumbent Joseph Crowley by fewer than 5,000 votes in a closed primary election in which less than 8 percent of the district’s age-eligible voters participated. In 2020, Representative Denver Riggleman of Virginia caught flak for officiating a same-sex wedding and was tossed out of office by just 2,500 Republican delegates at a drive-through party convention held in a church parking lot.
Though losing a primary is relatively rare for an incumbent, researchers at the Brookings Institution and the R Street Institute argue that those losses “have an outsized psychological influence on members precisely because they are so unexpected.”
The polarization produced by partisan primaries has been a driving force for their reform. In 2004, a century after the introduction of the direct primary election, Washington became the first state to adopt a nonpartisan “top two” primary for all elections, which expanded to California in 2010. (Nebraska has used this system only for its state legislature since 1934.) Under this system, all candidates appear on a single primary ballot, and the top two finishers advance to the general election.
Nick Troiano is the executive director of Unite America, a coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and independents that aims to foster a more representative and functional government by enacting nonpartisan electoral reforms.
Congressman "Primaried" by 0.4% of His District
Former Congressman Denver Riggleman’s (R-VA-05) 2020 primary loss is particularly notable given the nature of the election. Rather than a primary, the Republican Party opted to use a closed convention whereby only 2,500 delegates participated by casting ballots from their cars in a church parking lot. Riggleman lost by a margin of 8% and was tossed out of office “largely because he officiated a same-sex wedding last summer,” according to The Atlantic. In effect, just 0.4% of the district’s eligible voters elected Rep. Bob Good, Riggleman’s challenger, though over 69% of voters cast ballots for the seat in the general election.
Riggleman reflected on his loss:
"I’ve learned the hard way through my own political career that Democrat and Republican political party machines exert their own perverse influence on our already broken primary process. These machines make money off of the political process, and they’ll only nominate the candidates that they think will play ball with their money-making schemes."
