Below The Beltway

An article from Sunday’s Washington Post points out what the authors claim are the problems with the way America chooses Presidents:

For one thing, caucuses can be highly undemocratic. They eliminate the secret ballot, forcing voters to declare their loyalties publicly, and are thus vulnerable to intimidation and manipulation. They also shut out many citizens who have to work during caucus times. If you can’t show up at a specific hour, you can’t vote — a particular problem for people with fixed shifts, including many of the working poor. (The supposedly democratic caucuses can also discriminate, as happened to Sabbath-observant Jews who couldn’t get to Nevada’s Saturday caucuses.) And there are usually no absentee ballots, of course.

They’re right on this one. Every four years, there’s always effusive praise for the so-called democratic nature of Iowa’s caucus system — although this praise seems to die away once the caucuses themselves are over — but the truth of the matter is that caucuses are probably the most undemocratic way we choose candidates today. For one thing, the ballot isn’t secret, meaning you have to stand up in front of friends, neighbors, and family and take your stand. Sometimes that’s not easy. Moreover, the rules themselves are so byzantine that someone might walk in supporting one candidate and end up being forced to support another because enough of his or her neighbors didn’t agree. Finally, the turnout is usually so low that caucuses are usually more advantageous to candidates with vocal and committed supporters, even though there relative share of the population isn’t that high. This, I think, is why we’ve seen candidates like Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul perform relatively better in caucus states than in primary states.

“Open” primaries and caucuses (in which anyone can vote, not just registered party members) let voters from the other party cause all sorts of mischief. A Republican convinced that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is too divisive to win in the fall could vote for her in some Democratic contests in the spring, hoping to saddle the Democrats with a losing nominee. Or, as Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign did in Nevada, a candidate can openly appeal for votes from people outside his or her party in order to stop a rival. The winners are outsiders hoping to game the system; the losers are rank-and-file party members whose choices count less.

I’ve said before that I am in favor of closing primaries, I obviously agree with the authors on this one.

Primaries tend to favor highly committed voters from the extremes of both parties, who are much more likely to turn up than moderates. So candidates have strong incentives to pander to their extremist flanks, throwing red meat that they may well regret in November or in the White House.

This is largely true for both parties, but it’s largely unavoidable. A Presidential candidate is asking the members of his or her party to select them as their nominee, and he’s going to have to “pander” to them to achieve that. If anything, closing primaries is going to make that even more necessary because independents, who are usually more moderate, aren’t going to be able to participate. I don’t think there’s anything you can do to eliminate this, it’s just part of the system.

Finally, while the primary system took power away from the party barons, it gave much of that clout to the news media — now driven by national outlets that prefer sensationalism, scandal and sound bites to substance, nuance and balance. While retail politics survives in states such as New Hampshire, the real kingmakers today are the national media, which determine how most voters see the candidates. The seriousness of the candidates’ debates, in both the primaries and the general election, has nose-dived since the famous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates — let alone the Lincoln-Douglas debates of exactly 150 years ago, when no journalists were onstage.

True perhaps, but the media is merely giving the public — which has shown that it cares more about Laci Peterson, Anna Nicole, Smith, and Natalee Holloway than about the details of a political debate. Besides, if the kind of debate that the authors are talking about is the bland, boring thing that we saw from the Des Moines Register in December for both Republicans and Democrats, even policy wonks like me are going to get bored.

Are there things that need to be fixed ? Yes, but let’s not delude ourselves into believing that we’re going to perfect a system that we’ve been retooling pretty much every four years since the election of 1800.

H/T: Vivian Paige