Answer to closed primary problems: more of them

The semi-closed primary is not a problem for, but a prime solution to fix, Louisiana’s lagging policy-making system.

In its session, the Legislature will vet a couple of bills to remove from the closed primary roster Board of Elementary and Secondary Education contests. Currently, all federal offices plus the multiple executives of BESE and the Public Service Commission, plus the Supreme Court, fall under the semi-closed primary system (“semi” because true closed primaries don’t allow unaffiliated voters to choose a party’s primary in which to vote, which gets tricky given the jurisprudence involved). That means all local, state legislative, state single executive, district court, and appellate court races remain under the blanket primary system.

Proponents of this small rollback argue for it by saying BESE elections are the only ones on the year-before-presidential-elections calendar by which all other state non-judicial elections except the PSC occur, which creates an extra set of elections with additional costs and could confuse voters with no other blanket primary races on primary election days (the remainder of the bunch all occur during even-numbered years at the state and federal level where only closed primaries are). But this is a backwards way of considering the issue. It’s not that BESE closed primaries add cost and may confuse, but that the extra cost should absorb all state races as well in replacing the blanket primary system for all contests at every level with a closed primary of some kind.

For a major impediment to quality policy in Louisiana government is the blanket primary system. It creates incentives for atomized individual legislators to make policy more controlled by personal and special interests at the expense of the public, because the blanket primary system makes it easier to avoid accountability to programmatic agendas based upon ideas.

While in some quarters it may be fashionable to denigrate parties, in any representative democracy parties are extremely valuable mechanisms, because they can achieve what really no other formal or informal government institution can: they integrate people and ideas and become a lever to hold accountable elected officials to that agenda. Parties are the optimal entity by which to stitch together the intentionally-separated powers of all branches of all levels of government by electing people who adhere to a roughly similar agenda imposed upon them by the electorate who then may have their records in fidelity to that agenda used in the decision whether to reelect them.

But this method of integration and accountability breaks down if a party cannot control the most important decision its members can make: whom to nominate for offices. Certainly, a closed primary system does well in creating the environment, for mainly party members decide whom to advance to represent them in a general election. Open primaries, or ones where any voter can participate in just one party’s primary, dilutes this, and Louisiana’s blanket primary is the worst of all because in essence voters can jump back and forth in party preference by office when all candidates regardless of label run together in what really is a general election without party nominations with a runoff potentially attached.

The more that non-affiliates of a party are allowed to influence election of a party candidate, the less able is the idea of partisanship to integrate and demand accountability. By way of example, let’s use a current issue and officeholder.

Republican Sen. Pres. Cameron Henry has been in the news for his opposition to expanding Louisiana’s GATOR education savings account program, by not giving it more funding. In fact, he has said he’d like to tear down the whole thing and try something different.

Henry, like all legislators who ultimately are the ones who would decide whether to expand or contract the amount of elections subject to the closed primary, runs under the blanket primary system. His district in reliably Republican and, not having any insider knowledge of his 9^th senatorial district, I would guess its electorate on the whole favors the idea of educational choice as reflected in the GATOR awards, and may even favor expanding the program with more dollars as GOP Gov. Jeff Landry wants.

Yet he can get away with somewhat forceful opposition to the whole thing despite being a Republican because he doesn’t have to depend heavily on Republican voters to gain office. Opposition to ESAs typically comes from Democrats because they strongly colonize teacher unions that oppose accountability because it demands better performance out of public schools. As it stands, even if GOP voters dislike his preference against ESAs as now defined, that may not hurt his reelection chances because Democrats may take up whatever electoral support slack disaffected Republicans might remonstrate.

However, note how the equation changes if Henry had to secure a GOP nomination. Possibly a challenger could emerge hammering him on his no-expansion stance but even more on his burn-down-GATOR view to an electorate more receptive to that insurgent’s message. That enhanced possibility of losing enough votes to lose could have had him hold his tongue and be less receptive to whatever special interests whisper into his ears at present to fight GATOR and thereby increase the chances of program expansion. After all, to make it to the general election, he has to first pass muster among disciplined voters that largely agree upon an agenda that their nominees should follow that he bucks at his own electoral peril.

Now multiply this by 143 and across a range of issues and it becomes apparent that partisanship is the glue that binds together legislators that otherwise follow more personalistic agendas and those of whatever special interests swoop in to fill the void left by reduced partisan voter influence. Louisiana often is criticized for being behind the curve on issues where other states have led – Texas (open) on ESAs, Arkansas (open) on welfare policy, Mississippi (open) on shedding income taxes, Florida (closed) on subjugating diversity, equity, and inclusion overreach, etc. – where all of these at least have a party primary process that gives those choosing to affiliate with a party the upper hand in making the most important decision that a party can.

Not Louisiana for the most part. Of course, the main reason for legislator hesitancy for expanding closed primaries is they got elected under the blanket primary system and don’t want to take a chance on something different for reelection or future ambitions. Yet surely for most of them enough recognize that their agendas are winners when it comes to an intra-party contest, especially among Republicans when it comes to single executive contests (Democrats, even as they lose all such races presently, still may dream their chances are better to elect a more moderate Republican or even moderate Democrat under the present system and thus would be more likely to oppose ending the blanket primary), at least enough to secure the simple majorities needed to make closed primaries universal.

The solution to the “problems” of administering and funding closed primaries is to have more closed primaries. That’s why these bills need defeating, and Landry, who was the main instigator behind what closed primaries exist, would do well to communicate to legislators not to pass these along as they will meet with his veto.