The primary season begins, and thoughtful watchers of the passing scene are reminded yet again of one thing that has stuck in our craw for over 50 years now:
Why do outsiders get to choose a party’s nominee for the general election?
I know, this has gone without saying for so long that it may seem like a foreign concept, but it is worth reconsidering – because it wasn’t always like this.
For almost the first two centuries of our Republic, there were two kinds of candidates in any election: independent candidates and those selected by a political party.
You could run completely on your own as an independent candidate, or you could campaign for the nomination of an established party, thereby gaining that party’s volunteers, financial support, and the voters’ existing allegiance (party identification) in the process.
Since a party is an organization united around a shared philosophy of government, only members of that party naturally have any right to have a say in the selection of their champion in the fall election.
If the party has three or four, or five or ten, qualified candidates, seeking their nomination, this gives the members of that party the opportunity to choose the one who best represents their shared positions, the one they believe to be the most effective champion for their views.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? And it worked.
Can’t have that.
As the ongoing avalanche of governmental destruction that began in 1913 gained steam during the 20th century, the corruption and eventual end of this practice became one of the progressives’ top goals.
The first to go was the concept of a caucus or convention, in which only official party activists, such as precinct captains and committeemen, and local, state, and federal officeholders, would have a say in their party’s nominee.
Can’t have that; their choice might represent the party platform. Their choice might be tied to an unwavering position, rooted in the Founding documents of America, and committed to his understanding of Western Civilization and the Free Market. The Left just had to find some way to break that intransigence in the nominees who made it onto the general election.
So first, they came up with the primary election. Instead of a deliberative meeting of activists, such as a caucus or convention, with speeches and discussion, voters would have to do their research on their own (or not), show up at a polling place, fill out a ballot and leave.
A primary could minimize the ability of party leaders to nominate one of their own. It could open up the possibility of more flexible, perhaps even unprincipled, candidates, who might appeal to the non-activist voting population. And some of the party leaders might even favor this, thinking they could win elections more frequently if they started right out rewarding electability rather than principle.
But of course, even this wasn’t enough for the progressives. They had to expand the franchise more, much more, to accomplish their goals. While the early primaries were limited to members of each party – people who at least identified as believers in that same set of time-honored principles – this commitment too had to go down the drain as fast as possible.
Look, for example, at the State of Illinois. It used to take four years to change parties here, to make sure you were serious about the change, to make sure you had truly identified with a new home. You had to skip a primary in order to change registration and participate in the other side’s primary. That means that if you took a Democrat primary ballot in 1964, you would have to have skipped the 1966 primary entirely, in order to take a Republican primary ballot in 1968.
Incidentally… don’t say this infringed on anyone’s rights. We have a right to vote in the selection of the actual officeholder in November. We don’t have any moral right to participate in some other group’s selection process if we’re not a member of that group.
Should the members of the Chicago Bears be able to choose which quarterback the Green Bay Packers use against them? Should members of the Milwaukee Brewers be able to select which pitcher on the Chicago Cubs will pitch against them in the next game? Here’s a throwback: Should NBC be able to choose which shows ABC and CBS schedules against NBC’s “must see TV” night?
The original idea of caucuses and even the early primaries was that your choice to participate in a party’s primary should be based on your identification with that party and its platform, not by personal excitement about one particular potential candidate.
When these rules ended – when the left succeeded in defanging the very concept of party affiliation – the time limit required for changing party registration grew so short as to be laughable. From two years prior, to one year prior, to six months prior, to one month prior. In many states today, you can re-register and switch parties on the very day of the primary election.
Wake up a Democrat, take a Republican ballot in New Hampshire or Illinois, and go home a Democrat again, having successfully done your part to meddle in another group’s selection process.
This is how we got to where we are. We have candidates who don’t identify with their parties’ platforms, with their parties’ fellow nominees for other offices, with their parties’ active volunteers and donors. But if they have millions of dollars of their own to spend, or millions given to them by lobbyists, PACs, unions or foreign billionaires, they can capture a primary and become representatives of a party with which they have no affinity, no love, and no respect.
2024 is shaping up to be an excellent, tragic, example of the disasters that open primaries can cause.
Countless thousands of offices across the country have no primary challenges. As a voter in a district in which your own party’s state and federal legislative races, and even presidential candidates are uncontested, why not meddle in the selection process of the party you oppose? What’s stopping you?
The Democrats are keeping Joe Biden’s challenges off the ballot, and in many states, the other offices that matter are uncontested on the Democratic side as well. The teachers’ unions, the public employees’ unions, the service employees’ unions, and all of the other shock troops of the modern Left all need practice for the general election. They need something to do in the spring – and they have it.
Expect Democrats to participate in Republican caucuses, Republican primaries, Republican conventions, throughout the cycle. When the law doesn’t stop them from meddling, they will meddle, in the hope of forcing their opponents to run a weak candidate in the fall. It’s what they do.
One can hope, of course, that they make the wrong choices. One can hope that if they tip the scales in favor of forcing the GOP to nominate someone they think weak, perhaps they will be wrong, and the candidate they help win the primary will wind up beating them in November after all. But that’s a lot of luck to pin your hopes on.
It’s possible.
But it sure isn’t optimal.
If we call ourselves a constitutional republic, we need an honest electorate to choose our government.
It’s time to return to honest elections, in every way. And that should begin with closing off the primary and caucus structures to enemy combatants.
Let the Democrat primaries be for the Democrats alone, and let the Republican primaries be for Republicans alone, as they once were.
Our nation had a much smaller, less costly, less intrusive government, back in the days when this practice was sacrosanct.
Copyright 2024 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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