Officially, it isn’t even a primary at all, with it
technically being a nonpartisan general election with a runoff should no
candidate receive a simple majority of votes. All candidates regardless of
party affiliation (if any) participate. A trio of other states have similar systems,
except they are of the “top two” variety where a primary prior to the general election
sorts out which two appear in the general election, regardless whether one
receives a simple majority in the primary.
Rumblings among state politicians on this issue caught
the attention of my colleagues at the Baton
Rouge Advocate (I am a contracted to write a weekly opinion column for it),
who produced a story about whether the state should change. It has used the
blanket primary since 1975, except for all political party and presidential preference
primary or caucus elections since then and in 2008 and 2010 a closed primary system
for Congress.
Unfortunately, a couple of my colleagues in academia quoted in the piece didn’t quite give accurate information in their explanations for the blanket primary’s genesis and support. One inaccurately called it favored by dominant parties; in fact, political parties universally have loathed this or top two systems, regardless of relative strengths, with the 21st century state-level changes challenged by both state major and minor parties all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Louisiana’s case, state Democrats had nothing
to do with the move made through the prodding of then-new Gov. Edwin
Edwards. He won in 1971 first through a bruising Democrat primary, then
eked out a narrow runoff win against future Sen. J. Bennett Johnston for the party
nomination, and then finally defeated Republican future Gov. Dave
Treen in the general election. Chafing that Treen sailed to the general election,
Edwards muscled through the change in time for his next election. This is
contrary to what another interviewee said, that Edwards wanted this mainly to discourage
other Democrats; in fact, Edwards saw the future with a growing GOP and wanted to
prevent its nominees from having an easy road to a matchup with him.
Understanding correctly this past enables accurate
analysis of the present on this issue. Which is this: individual legislators
who came into power because of this system won’t change it until environmental
conditions change that elect those not dependent upon it for their offices.
In essence, the system deemphasizes ideology and
its heuristic partisanship while magnifying the personal characteristics of a
candidate. Party nominations aren’t there to help sort out the confusion caused
by candidates masquerading, with the two prominent examples being
Republicans-in-Name-Only who really have issue preferences more like national Democrats
but adopt a GOP label to disguise that and some Democrats who follow a playbook
of hyping their social conservatism while trying to hide their economic liberalism
and big government preferences.
This obscuring of candidate issue preferences
leads to reduced congruence between district voters’ majority views and the
people they elect. This has two electoral effects: increasing votes for
charismatic candidates and allowing more moderate candidates to gain election,
which sometimes work interactively.
An environment like this works to the disadvantage
of the majority party on issues and ideology, with more of its voters fooled
into favoring candidates who legislate against those voters’ issue preferences.
Thus, it’s no accident that while the state Republican chairman recently railed
against the system, the Democrats’ executive director admitted that his party
leaders looked only towards changing the system for congressional elections.
Democrats don’t mind giving away their systemic advantage
in that case because those elections already operate in an environment where candidate
views on national issues can’t be cloaked. These elections typically have more information
more easily accessible about candidate issue preferences on usually more
easily-understood issues (at least of the domestic variety). The same transformation
eventually will occur concerning races for state offices, as technology advances
to disseminate more information more inexpensively and educational attainment
of Louisianans improves to permit them to do a better job identifying
candidates who truly share their views.
Yet that won’t happen in the near future, and as a
result enough obscurant Democrats and RINOs will continue to win legislative seats
and to oppose efforts to reform the system that got them into office. Until conditions
evolve to let more ideological candidates, particularly conservative Republicans,
win more often, the critical mass in the Legislature needed to induce this
alteration won’t exist.
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