Over at The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini argues that the Virginia GOP needs to stop picking it’s nominees at conventions:
More often than not in Virginia, the GOP primary is meaningless. Many high-profile races, like the Jim Gilmore squeaker over relative unknown Bob Marshall for the Senate, are decided by nominating conventions.
Virginia also does not have party registration. The only way they know who you are is which party’s primary you voted in. Because I have availed myself of the opportunity to select the opposition’s nominee and have not voted in the (meaningless) GOP primary while living at my current address, I only get Democratic mail and door knocks.
This is a problem. The Republican Party of Virginia is losing an opportunity to turn out ID’d voters in the fall. Because of anemic primary turnout, they can’t possibly have a good handle on who their turnout universe is, beyond the die-hards who show up in uncontested primaries and conventions. With Virginia billed as the new Ohio in the Presidential race, the GOP in the Commonwealth is flying blind when it comes to turning out the voters John McCain needs to defeat Barack Obama.
And a big part of the reason is nominating conventions.
In a response to Patrick’s post, though, Rick Sincere argues that conventions serve a purpose as well:
The best argument for having nominating conventions, especially large ones like the Virginia GOP had in 1994 and 2001 (for instance), is that they provide unparalleled opportunities for (1) networking with fellow activists; (2) meeting candidates and potential future candidates face-to-face so they can be compared and evaluated; (3) drumming up excitement among the troops who will be manning the phone banks (in the Internet age, I use this metaphorically) and going door-to-door on behalf of candidates.
They also offer opportunities for training and comparing notes with people from other jurisdictions who have faced similar (or dissimilar) campaigns in the recent past.
Moreoever, as Rick notes and yesterday demonstrates clearly, primary elections typically have low voter turnout to begin with so it’s unclear just how much they help in identifying voters for the fall campaign.
I’m not sure where I come down on this one, but it’s fairly clear that the Virginia GOP needs to find a way to reach out beyond it’s base and identify voters that might be attracted to Republican ideas. So far, at least, they don’t seem to be doing that great a job.
