[T]he right to vote, and for each vote to have equal weight, is not something we should still be “experimenting” with in this country. Yet we persist in letting states control virtually every aspect of our electoral machinery...I'd like to see much a much more active role for the federal government in insuring that state-administered elections actually work properly.
I don't agree so much about the nomination process, however, which Kilgore would also like to be more federalized. First of all, the fiasco in counting Nevada caucus ballots? Yes, it was silly, but the consequences were basically none -- and even the consequences of the initial miscount in Iowa were probably zilch, although I doubt if you could convince Rick Santorum of that. It's not like a presidential election in which vote-counting delays really might matter in some way (such as a shortened transition).
Moreover, Kilgore argues that "The national parties could instantly create a more rational (and less expensive) system for nominating presidential candidates if they mustered the will to do so." Could they? I'm not at all convinced of that. In my view, the current system seems to be doing a reasonably good job of what a nomination process should do. I suppose it's not exactly "rational" in that it's certainly not a designed system, but I'm not sure that's turned out to be a problem.
Since things settled down in the 1980s, the most significant nomination "mistake" either party has made is, in my view, the Republican choice of George W. Bush in 2000 -- and that was a party mistake, not a process error. One certainly can argue that in some sense Hillary Clinton "should" have won in 2008 or Lamar Alexander should have won in 1996 or, well, of course there's always a case for one or more losing candidate. But at least in my view, there are no real obvious errors caused by the process, at least not given the candidates who ran (it's certainly possible, but very difficult to analyze, whether some different process could have produced a very different field). And it's easy to imagine disasters: Gary Hart perhaps in 1984, Steve Forbes in 1996, Howard Dean (probably) in 2004, Newt or Bachmann or Prince Herman this year.
OK, maybe all of that is subjective. But the theoretical point here is that party nominations aren't the federal government's business, at least to a large extent. And if the party is structured so that state parties are autonomous and in large measure get to decide their own rules, as is the case for the Republican Party? Again, that's pretty much their business. If the parties want federal government help, I have no problem with it (either directly, or through state governments), but I'd want government at every level give very wide leeway to the parties about how they want to conduct their own affairs.
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Parties can decide their nominees in smoke-filled back rooms, for all I care. The real problem is that the general election is a state free-for-all just like the primaries are.
ReplyDeleteIf there's one thing that the federal government should take sole responsibility for, it's federal elections. But with right-wingers forever fomenting hatred of the federal government - and GOP lawmakers doing their best to eliminate public trust therein - I guess there's just no chance of that happening.
(Oh, would you please elaborate on the "Bush 2000 was a nomination mistake" thesis? My intuition is straining to make sense of that one...)
Yup, I agree about the general election.
DeleteBush? Oh, just that he was ill-equipped to be a decent Republican president. It's not clear to me that he was a particularly good candidate in terms of electoral results, but you really don't want to nominate someone who will be a damaging president (for the party), and I think Bush was exactly that.
I think Bush's nomination in 2000 was inevitable once McCain took the position that there should be no reduction in the top rate of income tax. That by itself was enough to convince me to vote for Bush over McCain in the 2000 primary. Clinton had increased the top rate from 31% to 39.6% in 1993 without support from a single Republican in either house of Congress, and in 2000 there was a large budget surplus. To advocate that high income voters, whose tax increases had generated that surplus, should receive no tax cut at all was an odd choice for a candidate for the Republican Presdential nomination, and was a factor in conservative Republicans uniting around Bush, who as we later found out was not much of a fiscal conservative himself.
DeleteAnonymous, you must be confused. As any true fiscal conservative will tell you, raising the top marginal rate does not increase revenue; in fact, it reduces revenue by stifling the economy! So it couldn't have been Clinton-era Democratic tax policy that generated the surplus....
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DeleteAnonymous,
DeleteYou make it sound like a budget surplus is something to be avoided (which was also Bush's position), but how is it fiscally conservative to eliminate the necessary means to reduce the public debt?
In 2000, the surplus was large and growing, and everyone wanted to cut taxes, including Gore. However, the dispute was over whether high income taxpayers should be included in the tax cuts, and whether the top marginal rate should be reduced from the 39.6% that Clinton raised it to in 1993 without a single Republican supporting it in either house of Congress. The Democratic position was that domestic spending should be increased substantially and tax cuts be limited to those with moderate incomes, while the position of the overwhelming majority of Republicans not named John McCain was for across-the-board tax cuts that included a reduction in the top marginal tax rate. As a high income Wall Streeter who was paying that top rate, I was with the Republican majority. Clearly, the question of redistribution through the tax code is a defining difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, and McCain taking the side of liberal Democrats on such a core partisan issue was harmful to his prospects of becoming the Republican nominee. I do not think that is a controversial statement. I was not really looking to start a partisan debate about the top tax rate, merely noting that it is a highly charged partisan issue, and that a Republican who sides with liberal Democrats on this issue has a harder time winning a Republican nomination than one who lines up with his party on the tax issue.
DeleteAnonymous,
DeleteI'd hate to see how you respond when you're actually attacked.
Nothing wrong with that Anonymous said. I thought his response was perfect - factual, sincere and without rancor.
DeleteThe current nomination system is actually the equivalent of smoke filled rooms. The party selects every candidate, but puts on a show for the media to get some free publicity and to make party members feel they are part of the process. It's straight out of "1984".
ReplyDeleteYou could switch to a rational system-- a national primary. Then voters would decide, because small state caucuses primaries in sequence are far easier for party elites to control than a national primary. But the tradeoff would be that the public is going to choose some candidates that the elites hate and think are unelectable.
What tips me in favor of national primaries is the need to strip Iowa and New Hampshire's influence. There are already way too many instruments in government for funneling subsidies to rural states and pumping them up with the belief that they are somehow the "real Americans". A national primary cuts them off the teat.
Dilan,
DeleteIt's certainly consistent with the evidence that party actors have a lot of influence with voters, but it is not consistent with the evidence to argue that primaries and caucuses are just for show.
One reason: there are no smoke filled rooms because there are far too many party actors to fit into a room. Part of what happens in the primaries and caucuses is party actors reaching agreement -- or fighting it out when they disagree. Sometimes they're able to do that pre-Iowa (e.g. both parties in 2000), but sometimes it takes a while, and party actors want to take into account what voters will do.
I agree that there are too many actors to fit into a room. But what isn't generally understood is that the slow process with the small states and caucuses going first is a method of doing the same thing, because the party actors can more easily control that process.
ReplyDeleteAnd the problem is that rather than seeing it in that light, the media pretends that the current process is actually a system where well informed salt of the earth politically committed early primary voters who make so much better choices than those of us on the coasts are doing their civic duty and narrowing down the field, which is a completely false narrative.
My point about a single day national primary is that if you do that, there's no way party actors could control the process. It would be much more voter-controlled, for good or bad.
Dilan, I strongly disagree. To the contrary: if any group of voters are going to actually make up their own minds unfiltered, it's going to be those early states. But in reality, voters are going to be influenced. Currently, the biggest influencers are party actors, at least as I read the evidence. In a national primary, the biggest influence might come from party actors, but it also might come from the press, or it might be just random.
DeleteI like party influence over nominations a lot more.