Perhaps most strikingly,
Republicans nearly threw away a safe seat on – and thus the effective majority on
it – the Public Service Commission as the stealth
candidate phenomenon came calling to its District 1 contest. In the general
election, incumbent Eric Skrmetta
polled only 37 percent of the all-Republican field, one point behind Forest
Bradley Wright with the remainder of the vote but not enabling him to make the runoff going to perennial candidate Al Leone.
But Wright only two years earlier
had run as a Democrat in a different district (there is no residency
requirement for these), gaining just a fifth of the vote, and had not changed
his hard left environmentalist agenda. However, enough voters in the
heavily-conservative district became aware of this so that Skrmetta pulled out
a win by about 4,000 votes in the runoff.
With closed primaries, where in its
purest sense candidates of the same label run to win a primary election open
only to party registrants for a spot on the general election ballot to compete
with winners of other nomination contests and no-party entrants, a candidate
can’t misappropriate a label and then try to fool enough of that label’s
partisans that combines with the other party’s tacit support in order to get a
win. The blanket primary in fact is not really a primary at all, but a general
election where all voters may participate, with a runoff necessary only if no candidate
received an absolute majority of ballots cast.
Had pure closed primaries been in
effect (a relaxed version allows parties the option to let independent
registrants participate, although a party decision only to let its registrants
participate would create the same effect as a purely closed variety) for this
race, Wright never would have close to leading or defeating Skrmetta in the
first election with only Republicans voting. But as it was he almost leveraged
the ambiguity into a win by facing the entire electorate, his liberal
supporters included, in the first as well as second election.
A similar dynamic might have
allowed the least-preferred GOP candidate in the Fifth Congressional District,
current Rep. Vance McAllister,
either to win there or, worse from the party’s perspective, would have let
Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo triumph. Prior to the general election, with several
Republicans in the field but only Mayo as a Democrat, it was possible that the
GOP candidates would have fragmented the vote enough that McAllister, whose
personal comportment had embarrassed the party, did so further when he reneged
on a promise not to run for reelection as a result of that comportment, and
also was the least conservative of the Republican bunch, could make the runoff
against Mayo, banking on his name recognition from incumbency to come out ahead
of all other Republicans. Indeed, Democrats could have figured to cut their losses by abandoning Mayo for McAllister and then his Republican label plus their
votes probably could have gotten McAllister reelected in the runoff.
But instead they stuck with Mayo
and the GOP vote wasn’t so fragmented enough as to prevent a couple of
Republicans from surpassing McAllister’s total, with the higher-ranked of them,
Dr. Ralph Abraham, advancing to the
runoff with Mayo and defeating him to become representative-elect. Yet, as the
results showed, McAllister never would have had a chance to make it to a
general election had he been forced to compete in a Republican-only primary,
and like Wright use crossover votes in both elections to secure a runoff place
and then a victory.
Finally, while Rep. Bill Cassidy won
convincingly to deny Sen. Mary
Landrieu reelection, a scenario could have unfolded where she could have
held the seat for Democrats – as unpopular as she is – that would have been
impossible under a closed primary system. This is because of the presence of
another Republican in the contest, Rob Maness, who secured 14 percent of the vote
in the general election. It appears that most Maness voters showed up and most
of them voted for Cassidy in the runoff.
However, in politics one would
rather win sooner than later, as the longer an election is dragged out, the
more costly it becomes and the more risk is borne by the frontrunner, as Cassidy
was for about a year. The more time is available, the more chance there is
that luck can intervene significantly to the advantage of the underdog (bad
luck for the underdog still means she loses, but bad luck for the frontrunner could
reverse his position from winning to losing). Maness long before would have been wiped out
in a party primary, and if to avoid that he had not run as a Republican he
would have received significantly fewer votes under some other label or as a
no-party candidate in the general election. In other words, in a scenario like
this, the clearly stronger candidate of a party faced unnecessary risk by having
the weaker prolong matters.
The Constitution requires Louisiana
to have their runoffs after the national first Tuesday after the first Monday
in November, so a date change to have the runoff during everybody else’s
general election under current U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction is impossible.
And, from a practical perspective, this delay can prove disadvantageous to
winners of federal runoff contests in terms of acquiring staff resources in
Washington and even putting them at the end of the seniority line.
Even though there are other
beneficial theoretical reasons for the political system as a whole to
switch back to the closed primary system (which was used from 2008-10 for
congressional elections and for all prior to 1975) and for contests at all
levels, in particular the majority Republicans in the state should recognize
how elections this fall where their preferred candidates won might have turned
out differently because of the blanket primary system. With state elections
looming too soon to make a change to apply immediately, it’s not too much to
ask that they should use their majorities to have closed primaries universally
in place for 2016 and beyond.
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