According to the wikipedia article on the Congressional Tea Caucus, that caucus has 60 members in the U.S. House of Representatives. Forty of them are from states that have either open primaries or top-two primaries. This observation is not meant to express any opinion about the Tea Party Caucus. Nor is it meant to express any opinion about different types of primary systems. Nor is it even meant to suggest any causation between type of primary system, and propensity of a state to elect Tea Party Caucus members.
Political scientists Boris Shor and Seth Masket have shown that there is no correlation between type of primary system, and degree of polarization and partisanship in state legislatures. Presumably that conclusion would apply equally to Congress, if they had studied Congress. But because the mainstream press regularly assumes that open primaries, or blanket primaries, or top-two primaries, produce more “moderate” politicians, this observation is being posted.
Michele Bachmann founded the U.S. House Tea Party Caucus, and she is from an open primary state.
This is exactly what I would have expected where the party differences are most clear-cut, namely at the National level. The Tea Party is capable of testing the flawed reasoning that indicates that Top Two Primaries necessarily favor moderates. What they favor in fact are third choices and hence also third parties.
The sad fact is that all Third Parties aspire to be major parties & and all Third Parties (except the AIP) believe that they can become major parties by aping them. They cannot!
Let me state the theorem: Given an election with K winners & an infallible prediction by polls of the top N vote getters and where K < N, a rational choice by a voter not wishing to "waste" his/her vote is best made by him/her voting for the candidate he/she most prefers in the highest K + 1 poll-predicted vote getters.
ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymanders in ALL major legislative bodies in the U.S.A — both houses of the gerrymander Congress, ALL houses of all 50 gerrymander State legislatures, and many, many local govt legislative body regimes — regardless of the brain dead SCOTUS math retards.
How many communist clone and fascist clone candidates win in the top 2 primaries ???
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
Demo Rep, “thanks” for the non sequitur, contributing only to the usually low, brain dead level of discourse on this issue.
Is there a serious thinker who wants to address the subject matter of this thread seriously?
(BTW, oh Demo Rep, the recent redistricting in CA made gerrymandering to any significant degree next to impossible.)
Now consider the Primary in the Top Two, Prop 14, scheme. How many winners? Two winners. In that contest how does the reasoning go? Remember my theorem? K winners, vote for the lesser of K + 1 evils. So if K = 2, K + 1 = 3. Conclusion? In the Prop 14 style Primary, vote for the least of THREE EVILS.
Now without taking off your shoes, count how many major parties there are. Finished with that difficult task? TWO! What was the choice between? THREE. So either some major party shoots themselves by splitting their vote with two of their candidates in the three most popular as infallible polls predict, or that third choice is a THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE.
Why is that relevant to the Tea Party Caucus’s disproportionate origin in Top Two & Open Primaries? Because in the current situation, the Tea Party is the equivalent of a Third Party, a potent one, drawing in a high proportion of cases in such primaries, the bulk of the Republicans, the bulk of independents & some dissatisfied Democrats.
First you need to have better ballot access for the possible candidates so that the open selection process (primary, caucus, etc.) gives the voters better choices. My complaint with the entire political process is many what to select candidates and not parties.
So opening a flawed process does not work. Many are satisfied with a open primary. But how do I vote for the candidate I want to select for the General when they belong to different parties. Only some form of OPEN where all candiidates for the General is on one ballot.
Parties should still have their internal selection process.
Candidates should be able to decide if they want a party logo but I also would like to see party endorsement logos in a one ballot system.
# 3 (BTW, oh Demo Rep, the recent redistricting in CA made gerrymandering to any significant degree next to impossible.)
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AUTOMATIC minority rule results with ANY districts (whoever makes the districts) —
1/2 votes x 1/2 districts = about 1/4 CONTROL.
NO party hack robot primaries are needed or wanted.
Direct ballot access via equal nominating petitions.
P.R. NOW – before it is too late.
Electoral reform is badly needed. I suggest that, if we use a top 2 runoff system, we have the following system. Hence, voters would be able to vote for either a candidate or a ticket. For example, in a race between Clinton, Bush and Perot, voters could choose the following options:
– Vote for Clinton
– Vote for Bush
– Vote for Perot
– Vote for Clinton-Bush
– Vote for Clinton-Perot
– Vote for Bush-Perot
#7 Having a VP who is opposed to a Prez is like asking for murder — see the many murders in the early English monarchy regime after 1066.
See the now quite forgotten War of the Roses in the 1400s — Feudal oligarchs killing each other off to get control of the monarchy — allowing the English House of Commons to rise in power in the 1600s.
Demo Rep,
You didn’t get my proposal. It would mean that the set of candidates with the most votes wins. Nothing to do with VPs. If say a set with only 1 candidate wins, that candidate wins all the EV at stake. If a set with 2 candidates wins, those candidates split the EV equally.
The following sets face each other:
Clinton vs. Bush vs. Perot vs. Clinton-Bush vs. Clinton-Perot vs. Bush-Clinton vs. Bush-Perot vs. Perot-Clinton vs. Perot-Bush.
Monomial sets versus binomial sets.
Abolish the timebomb Electoral College.
Count the dead in 1861-1865 due to the 1860 E.C. machinations.
Nonpartisan Approval Voting — pending MAJOR public education about Condorcet number votes and Yes/No votes (as a tiebreaker).
Better yet, why not a multiple-choice voting system? What I propose is that voters, for Presidential elections, get to decide how their state’s Electoral Votes should be allocated.
I propose a limited approval voting system. Voters can decide whether to vote for one candidate or a set of candidates.
In a 4-candidate race, there would be 13 sets of candidates. The rules are as follows: the set with the most votes gets all the Electoral Votes.
So, if a 2-candidate set wins the state, they split the Electors 2 ways. If a 3-candidate set wins the state, they split 3 ways.
I even thought of how to allocate remaining Electors. Simple, these go to the candidate with the most votes (votes are calculated by adding all the single votes, plus half the double votes and plus a third of the triple votes).
For Maine and Nebraska, no problem. The Congressional District Electors would still go to the candidate with the most votes. The at-large votes would go to the set with the most votes.
What percentage of all representatives are from open primary states (Louisiana, California, Washington) or where a voter may choose a party on election day (Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Idaho, Montana, etc.)
The question in #13 appears to be an attempt to confuse the issue. A primary “where a voter may choose a party on election day” is an “open primary” by standard definitions. The “top two” primary system used in Louisiana and Washington isn’t what is normally called an “open primary” (and, in any case, it has only been used to elect one member of congress in California, in the CD 36 special elections earlier this year).
Re #1 and #4: even if you accept the logic of the argument made (and while it is plausible, I’m not sure to what extent it is how people really vote), it’s really only an argument that under a “top two” system in which the major parties have one candidate each, third party candidates (or Tea Party Republicans candidate as a proxies for a third party opposing establishment Republicans) can do better than they would in a plurality-winner general election.
If a major party splits its votes among several candidates, those candidates would typically push the third party candidate(s) out of the top 3, not give the third party candidate(s) a chance to move up.
Note also that making it into the “top two” is far from a guarantee of a win for third party or equivalent candidates. The “top two” system in Louisiana allowed the Edwards/Duke runoff, and the two round runoff system in France allowed the Chirac/Le Pen runoff, but in both cases the outsider candidate lost the runoff.
I wonder what would happen if voters could actually vote to see who should be in the runoff.
Imagine a 4-candidate field, where the following options are on the ballot:
1) Candidate A
2) Candidate B
3) Candidate C
4) Candidate D
5) Candidates A&B
6) Candidates A&C
7) Candidates A&D
8) Candidates B&C
9) Candidates B&D
10) Candidates C&D
The ballot line with the most votes wins.