Closed primaries corrective to what ails LA

Some Louisiana special interests and media outlets entirely miss the point when they criticize Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s inclusion of instituting closed primaries in the ongoing special session of the Louisiana Legislature.

This subject matter invites the Legislature to replace the state’s blanket primary system, where any voter regardless of party label can vote in what’s actually a general election where all candidates run together regardless of any label, with a closed primary system. The system used nationally for presidential elections, in a closed primary only voters who record affiliation with a party, or who are unaffiliated with any party but who are allowed by a state party to participate, may vote only for a nominee from that party. The general election then features nominees and no party candidates.

Particularly for Louisiana, advantages of closed primaries are many and supposed criticisms are unconvincing. Perhaps the most overwrought is that voters who don’t affiliate with a major party are “disenfranchised.” This is ludicrous: any registered voter would be able to participate in a general election comprised of party nominees and any no party candidates, just not able to participate in the most important decision a party can make of which candidates to present to voters. And if a voter felt it important to influence a nomination, he simply and easily can register with that party to participate in that process.

It's no accident that the blanket primary has made Louisiana political parties the weakest in the country, with little ability to coordinate who gets into office using their label. Indeed, the racist David Duke’s electoral successes beginning 35 years ago came because he disproportionately drew his support from white Democrats and unaffiliated whites, all the while using the Republican label that gave him greater credibility and ability to subsume his extremist issue preferences by concentrating on articulation of mainstream GOP ideas. In a closed primary with a discerning Republican-only electorate, Duke would have had much reduced chances of making it to the general election if running under that label.

More to the point, as closed primaries give parties greater ability to produce electable candidates, they also enhance coordination among winners as victors will tend to run on more convergent agendas. The blanket primary system more than any other encourages personalistic politics that prompt candidates to make campaigns about faith in politicians more than about ideas, since there is no incentive to appeal to a set of voters who largely share the same worldview on politics who serve as gatekeepers to compete in a general election. Policy cooperation becomes more accidental than by design.

The common complaints often heard about Louisiana politicians – they kowtow too much to special interests, they become too detached from the electorate’s worldview, they view politics transactionally in a parochial way that discourages tackling pressing big issues – directly stem from an electoral system that incentivizes undue emphasis on individuals selling themselves as the loci of political action rather than as carriers of a set of political preferences that voters clearly can understand and evaluate. By contrast, a closed primary system encourages disciplined and higher-quality candidates to adhere to an agenda, vetted by voters largely congruent ideologically and more attentive to candidate quality and issues than the mass public that doesn’t participate in the primary whether registered with a party, who then together determine the ultimate winner.

As a state left adrift particularly in the past eight years while others didn’t shed population and jobs, or had disproportionately fewer people wanting to work, or had incomes rise more slowly than in most states, and with its longer history generally of policy failure, no state more than Louisiana needs coherent and coordinated leadership between and within its majoritarian branches of government to fix this situation. Closed primaries much more likely would enhance institutional capacities to reverse this further falling behind than would the blanket primary system.

With great irony, one critic of closed primaries as part of the call decries “why this issue [should come] before so many other pressing problems …. Solving those critical concerns likely would have more impact on any future election than changes to Louisiana’s primary system” – apparently blissfully unaware that instituting closed primaries makes it more likely the problems listed attain satisfactory solutions, at present unsolved as a consequence of too many elected officials practicing transactional politics without any coordination from an organization like a party or lacking coherence from pursuing a common agenda, in using party nominations as a tool to overcome uncoordinated and incoherent politics.