1904 Republican National Convention
Yesterday, I started volume three of this training post in which we say that the state's GOP is fighting out what Republicans may or may not believe or do and Democrats are being saddled with yet another My Special Own Pretty Unicorn as a candidate for office.
Lots of people in both parties are frustrated with their own local parties. And this of course extends to the national level. Lots of Republicans nationwide have been unhappy with their national party for years and years, and particularly since the election season of 2016. Lots of Democrats grit their teeth every general election as their candidates engage in a foot race to the left until they're so far left, you actually have find them through a long range telescope set to 1917 Moscow.
What's a party to do?
Well, there's a simple solution.
End the Primary System.
Primary elections are one of those democratic reforms that was incredibly poorly thought out and which as a result doesn't serve democracy at all. The general gist of it was "golly gee whiz, wouldn't it be super if we got the opinion of the party rank and file by holding a party election at public expense!".
Well, anything held at public expense become public, and pretty soon that isn't a party anything.
This should be particularly obvious to Wyoming Republicans who have been grousing that the public doesn't actually elect tea party people. They usually come around to "those darned Democrats are crossing party lines", but if there's any truth to that they did that during Bill Clinton's first term and they're Republicans now. Indeed, one of the real things in favor of the local moderate Republicans is that they haven't demanded that the tea party element shut up for being disloyal to the party. If your positions keep failing, it may be your position, after all, that's out of sink.
Well, anyhow, all of this or most of this could be easily cured simply by doing away with a system that never should have come into existence in the first place.
At one time party's picked their candidates in conventions. The conventions themselves were dominated by back channel and closed door meetings in which overweight men smoking cigars cut unsavory deals with each other. Through processes like that, we ended up with characters like Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland. Of course we also ended up with Woodrow Wilson and others that we'd rather not recall, but the primary system isn't doing a lot better.
Indeed, recently it's been doing so poorly for both parties that there's open year along dissension from the results and grumbling here and there that the whole system is broken. So it is. Go back to the one that worked.
Of course, that would mean less public participation, including less by people whose association with the pure blue or red stream of a party's philosophy was weak, but if you want wide participation, that's what you must accommodate and even adjust to, just as under the convention system, if you don't like things, your real remedy is to start a new party. And it would likely mean that it could never become the case that one party became dominant for long.
In terms of that last example, if the tea party elements that are struggling for control of the Wyoming Republican Party, presently nearly the state's only political party, were able to do that in a convention system, pretty soon the Democrats would react by fielding middle of the road candidates and they'd start winning statewide elections.
All of which generally points out, once again, doing away with the primary system in favor of a convention system is, quit frankly, a better approach all the way around. It'd result in more, and more reflective, democracy at the general election level, where it's supposed to be.
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