On June 9, Rasmussen released a poll for the South Dakota U.S. Senate race. Larry Pressler, the former Senator who is running as an independent, is still in third place, but he is gaining and is at 18%. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
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The Fourth Circuit has set the week of September 16-19 for oral arguments in The Greenville County Republican Party v State lawsuit. The exact date within that week will be set soon.
This is the case in which the Greenville County Republican Party seeks to close its primaries to exclude non-Republicans. The lower court had said the county party does not have standing. The party is in a strong position because it pays for its own primaries, when the election concerns city offices.
Timm Herdt, state editor of the Ventura County Star and author of a weekly politics column that is distributed nationally by Scripps Howard Syndicate, says in this column that California’s Proposition 14, the top-two system, should be repealed. Herdt notes that he had supported it when it was on the ballot in June 2010.
Herdt does not mention the effect Proposition 14 has had on California’s minor parties, but he does point out that the system has not been kind to the state’s independent candidates. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
Last month, the Western Political Science Association gave the Charles Redd Award for the Best Paper on the Politics of the American West to political scientists Jack Citrin, Gabriel Lenz, and Douglas Ahler. The award was for their 2013 paper, “Do open primaries help moderate candidates? An experimental test on the 2012 California primary.”
That paper, which was published in 2013, concluded that California’s top-two primary in 2012 did not elect more moderate candidates, because the experimental evidence showed that most California voters were not informed about the ideology of candidates in their own districts.
Truthdig has this analysis of California’s top-two system, written by Ellen Brown, the Green Party candidate for State Treasurer of California this year. Truthdig is nine years old and has won many awards for journalism excellence. UPDATE: the article is now on Huffington Post. FURTHER UPDATE: the article is also now in Peoples Voice.