Re-engineering the process

Here is my question then, because I mostly agree with you. Is the central problem the party power structure, or the candidates we're nominating? In other words are we better off trying to do what we can within the existing structure, or fighting to minimize the importance of that structure/

The reason I bring this up is there is an interesting post by Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight. com today about how California wants to introduce a "jungle primary". The gist of it is that instead of having two closed primaries with the the winners taking each other on, a number of candidates from both parties enter this primary and the top-two vote getters, regardless of party go head to head in the general.

On its face this sounds like an appealing idea to me. It seems fairer in that candidates would obviously not be nearly as indebted to the traditional party structure. In practice it seems to lead to more appealing republican candidates and less appealing democratic ones because rather then being the centre of the democratic party and centre of the republican party going head to head, it ends up being two versions of the centre of everybody. So in that sense it wouldn't appear to meet our goals. Yet, it seems to me this inherently weakens the importance of party affiliation. If we were going to institute this system, for sure in the short term it would lead to less appealing, more conservative democrats but I wonder if in the long term it would lead to wider acceptance of outside views. If the primary is truly open it would seem to lessen the stigma of "fringe" third-party candidates.

The other option is to go in the exact inverse direction, which is to use the primary and two-party system against itself. In practice that means not being afraid to go after our own party hard in the primary and try to push the democrats to left through nominating and supporting progressives like crazy. I guess the question is do we want to drastically change the system, even though that will have to happen by degrees or work within it. I tend to think the latter is the better option, as much as it pains me.