Should California Take the Party Out of Politics?

Steven Hill’s excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times usefully corrects sloppy media descriptions of the “gang” primary measure that Sen. Abel Maldonado extorted out of the Legislature as the price of doing his budget duty. I would go one step further: this measure would end the idea of “party primaries” as we know them.

A little history: Primary elections were one of the first flowerings of big government. Alarmed by the strength party machines, whose captains and bosses controlled the selection of candidates for election, Progressive reformers succeeded in many states, in the first decade of the 20th century, in getting government to regulate the selection of party candidates for office.

The primary election was a key instrument of that change. It took the power to select a party’s nominee out of the party caucuses and nominating conventions and put it in the hands of voters at the polls. It thereby reduced the power of party activists and machines.

But at the same time, the primary––along with the switch to the Australian ballot in the 1890s (before that, voters carried their own, often party-printed, ballots to the polls)––cemented the party system into law and practice. For a century, general elections have been contests among the nominated candidates of the parties that meet the government’s qualifications to be on the ballot.

The Maldonado gang primary would take a big step toward extinguishing the role of parties in elections. General elections would no longer be among candidates offered by each party but between two individuals selected in the "voter-nominating primary." As Steven Hill points out, except in extraordinary circumstances, third-party candidates would disappear from the general election ballot. In some elections the ballot would offer voters candidates from only one party, as in the days of cross-filing, abolished in California a half century ago, when candidates often ran, and were sometimes nominated, in both party primaries. Party organizations, and their registered voters, would no longer have any official role in putting candidates before the voters. And it’s not hard to see the next step; a couple of legislative candidates in the November election advocated moving to nonpartisan elections for state office.

Americans have long been ambivalent about political parties. The Founders denounced the spirit of faction and party, then set about creating a party system and an expanding democracy linked to it. In practice Americans have always given in to the reality, recognized around the world, that political parties are an essential component of large democracies. But the other-worldly idea that we ought to approach politics as unattached citizens, making all our voting choices with only reason and the public good as our guides, has never died.

There may be a modern case for further weakening the already enfeebled role parties play in California politics. But so far the proponents of the gang primary have yet to make it effectively. Instead, holding a shotgun to the head of the whole state, they pushed their idea onto the ballot in the dead of night, without any public discussion or debate, in brazen violation of anyone’s notion of good government or democracy. It was not an auspicious beginning.