No major political party likes the idea of letting members of
any other party or even voters with no affiliation help choose its
candidates for office.
No major political party likes the idea of letting members of any other party or even voters with no affiliation help choose its candidates for office.
That’s what the blanket primary election law California voters passed in 1996 allowed, and the state Republican and Democratic parties went to court together and got the U.S. Supreme Court to throw it out.
As a sop to the ever-increasing number of independent voters whose backing each desperately needs in runoff elections, both major parties then decided to let independents vote in their primaries, while allowing registered members of any party to vote only in their own party’s primary.
Now even that small bow toward openness is threatened by the same Supreme Court that held in 2000 that if they wish, parties have the right to close their primaries to all but their own registrants.
If the current threat becomes reality, independent or decline-to-state voters would be confined at primary time to voting only for ballot propositions and candidates for non-partisan offices. It’s a formula guaranteed to make a fast-growing segment of the electorate feel unwanted. The threat comes in the form of a Libertarian Party challenge to Oklahoma’s closed primary system, which is almost a carbon copy of what California has today.
The Libertarians want to open up Oklahoma’s system entirely.
This is precisely what the Supreme Court ruled out in the California case just a few years ago. The question: If they’ve already decided the issue, why would the court take on a new case?
Past history indicates reasons may range from a desire by some justices to reverse their earlier ruling or a determination to improve that ruling.
If the justices reverse themselves, then California could soon be back to an open system where voters from all parties can participate in whichever primary they wish, and the top vote-getters from each party make the general election runoff.
More likely is that at least some justices would like to refine their California ruling. And since they almost certainly won’t make changes toward opening up the system more, maybe they intend to close it completely.
That’s what Justice Antonin Scalia indicated as the Oklahoma case was argued recently. “Political party systems are about parties electing candidates who share their views,” he lectured the lawyers on the case. Scalia authored the decision ending California’s blanket primary, and may feel he left more of a loophole than he intended.
And what happens if California’s primaries are closed completely? Both parties are already dominated by extremists of left and right, with few besides extreme liberals ever winning contested Democratic nominations for Congress or the state Legislature. On the Republican side, there are perhaps three or four moderates in office, but once they are termed out, chances are extreme conservatives will take over.
With independents and decline-to-states now able to vote in both major party primaries, there’s at least the hope for moderation, for at least some representation for the moderate middle that makes up the electoral majority.
Keep them out of primaries, as Scalia has hinted he might like to do, and you make every election a contest between extremes, with the majority never feeling properly represented.
That’s why any changes the court may order in the Oklahoma primary system could be at least as significant here.
