Blanket Primary

8 Key excerpts on "Blanket Primary"

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  State and Local Politics

  Institutions and Reform

  • Todd Donovan, Daniel Smith, Tracy Osborn, Christopher Mooney(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Chapter 5 152 voters to temporarily declare a party then. The top-two Blanket Primary is the least restrictive sys-tem, with voters permitted to vote for any candidate running for office, irrespective of their party. In theory, open primaries should encourage more participation among the electorate and more moderate candidates, as all voters, even indepen-dents (sometimes referred to as unaffiliated), may cast a ballot in the primary election. The costs associated with voting are much less in blanket and open primary systems than in closed systems. Yet, analyses of voter turnout levels across states with open versus closed primary systems do not reveal any significant differences in rates, as the mobiliza-tion of citizens goes well beyond the particularized costs or benefits of an individual’s decision to vote. Because open primaries diminish the control that parties and candidates have over who participates in the nomination process, parties and candi-dates may have less incentive to bolster turnout. Furthermore, although advocates of the top-two systems claim that candidates will be encouraged to moderate their ideological stance on policies, as they no longer must cater to the party faithful in a partisan primary election, there is little evidence to suggest that the Blanket Primary system leads to less partisan extremism. 26 Party Endorsements of Candidates The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that individuals are able to associate with a party of their choice.

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  The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age

  • Russell Muirhead(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The reform of the reform aims to succeed at what primary elections have tried to do from the start: get ordinary citizens to participate in the selection of nominees. The more specific aim is to moderate American politics by selecting for less ideological nominees. The current impulse is to strip primaries of their partisan aspect by forcing candidates in primaries to face a broader sample of the electorate. Voters in California attempted to do this in 1998, when they passed a referendum to institute a Blanket Primary. Any voter could vote for any candidate from any party in every office. The top vote-getter within each party would advance to the general election. Unlike the classic closed primary, a Blanket Primary is not restricted to voters who register with a party; a voter might vote for the Republican candidate for Congress and the Democratic candidate for governor, and so on. The task of the primary voter in this case is not to participate in a party contest, and thus to think like a narrow partisan; it is to pick out the best person from among all parties for each job.

  The California reform was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in California Democratic Party v. Jones struck down the Blanket Primary in 2000.32 In the Court’s view, California’s Blanket Primary violated the right of association by canceling a party’s ability to nominate candidates. The Court was motivated by the following kind of scenario: Consider an election where two Green Party candidates run against each other in the primary (and, of course, against a bevy of candidates from competing parties). The losing Green Party candidate might get more votes from registered Green Party members than the winning one—in which case the Green Party loses the ability to nominate its members and has been hijacked by voters who have no affiliation with the party.

  In a state where one party dominates, as the Democratic Party does in Massachusetts or the Republican Party does in Utah, it is quite possible that voters who sympathize with the minority party will vote for a candidate of the dominant party in order to have more influence. If the Blanket Primary were used in a state like Massachusetts, and two liberals were to split the vote of Democratic partisans, it would be possible for independents and Republican voters to vote for a more conservative third Democrat, even if this third candidate gets fewer votes from Democratic partisans than the two liberal candidates. Voters who are registered Democrats would lose control over which candidate gets to run in the general election as a Democrat. The Court worried that in a case like this the Democratic Party would no longer be associated with the goals, policies, and principles that voters who identify with the party would give it. Voters, in the Court’s view, lose the freedom to associate as partisans.

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  Voting at the Political Fault Line

  California's Experiment with the Blanket Primary

  • Bruce Cain, Elisabeth Gerber, Bruce Cain, Elisabeth Gerber(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  And gaining the exposure in June, rather than November, of an election year means that minor parties can actually become pre facto rather than post facto spoilers. With the June election serving as a straw poll for the strength of the major-party candidates before the fall election, the Blanket Primary gives minor parties an opportunity to reveal citizen dissent before the cam- 232 EFFECTS OF THE Blanket Primary paign begins—and a real opportunity to be heard once it does. With more voice comes more attention and, potentially, more incorporation of minor-party ideas into the political agenda. And with the incorporation of more ideas comes legitimacy. Candidates and other party pragmatists seem to sense this and offer the Blanket Primary support. Regardless of who is right, purists or pragmatists, minor parties can agree on one thing: in order to survive, they must adapt to the electoral system. Under a closed primary, minor parties can maintain a quiet existence as fringe ideological entities—as long as they have enough votes or registered members. But, as we saw under California’s short-lived experience with a blanket system, strategic opportunities grow as elections become more open. Rather than “maiming” or “destroying” them, a blanket system can entice a minor party toward the mainstream, heighten its visibility, and raise its electoral stakes. Following Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, those parties who are able to see their opportunities under a new system—and take ’em— are likely to be rewarded. NOTES 1. Independents have won recent elections to the State Senate (e.g., Quentin Kopp in San Francisco’s Eighth District and Lucy Killea in San Diego’s Thirty-Ninth). An incumbent Democratic Assemblyman, Dom Cortese, switched his party affiliation in 1996 to the Reform party, but lost a bid for election to San Jose’s Thirteenth State Senate District under that banner, garnering just 8.8 percent.

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  Guide to State Politics and Policy

  • Richard G. Niemi, Joshua J. Dyck, Richard G. Niemi, Joshua J. Dyck(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  23

  FROM Blanket Primary TO TOP-TWO PRIMARY

  The Blanket Primary, first instituted in Washington State in 1935, provides voters with a ballot listing all potential nominees, regardless of party affiliation. Voters are allowed to select one candidate for each office, and the highest vote-getter from each party receives its nomination. Promoted by the Washington State Grange, a nonpartisan good-government organization, it was intended to give independent voters a voice in nominations, to prevent a return to machine-style politics, and to promote the selection of moderate candidates.

  Blanket primaries were controversial. Opponents argued that they eliminated a party organization’s right to define its members and control participation in its internal affairs, including selecting its nominees. In California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000),1 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that blanket primaries were unconstitutional because they restrict the party organization’s freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment.

  In the aftermath of the Court’s decision, California, Nebraska, and Washington modified their Blanket Primary procedures by adopting the so-called top-two primary (also referred to as the nonpartisan primary or the jungle primary). Rather than resulting in the selection of one Republican and one Democratic nominee for each office, top-two primaries reserve a place on the general election ballot for the top-two vote-getters, regardless of their party affiliations. Louisiana has used a similar system since 1975, with one modification: if a primary candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, he or she is sworn into office, and no general election is held for that position. The top-two primary is unique because voters can select two nominees from the same party to compete in the general election. During the 2012 primary in California’s 31st district, Pete Aguilar, a Democratic U.S. House candidate and a favorite of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, failed to win enough votes to advance to the general election. This resulted in two Republican candidates, Gary Miller and California state senator Bob Dutton, competing against each other in the November election.

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  Law and Election Politics

  The Rules of the Game

  • Matthew J. Streb(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  period . Whoever finished first and second in a single, overall vote count would go on to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.

  Running in one's party's primary election is the first step toward winning elective office in most states in the United States. Evidence from scholars who have studied the issue supports the plaintiffs' claims that primaries do affect the outcomes of elections, and they often do so in very dramatic ways. Primary electoral rules can help determine the winners and losers of elections. We should not be surprised, then, that disputes over primary laws often, as was the case in Washington and in California, end up in courts of law. In this chapter, we detail how primaries work, describe the most common types of primaries in the United States and discuss how the type of primary used affects electoral outcomes. We then explain relevant case law regarding primaries, focusing on how courts must answer the question “What is a party?” to resolve cases involving primary election law.

  What is a Primary?

  Simply put, a primary is the means by which parties select candidates for the general election. According to Article 1, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, states are responsible for passing laws governing the “times, places, and manner” of holding all elections for federal offices. This rule also applies to primary elections, which began being held in the early part of the twentieth century as part of a tide of Progressive reforms (Key, 1956). States can determine when primary elections will be held, whose name can go on a primary ballot (most states have signature requirements or filing fees or both), and who is allowed to vote in a primary. As may be expected, states vary a good deal on the rules they have implemented to govern how primary elections work.

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  The Promise and Challenge of Party Primary Elections

  A Comparative Perspective

  • William P. Cross, Ofer Kenig, Scott Pruysers, Gideon Rahat(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  referred to these as “direct votes” (Cross 1996). A year later, a different article in the same journal referred to the Alberta Conservatives’ membership ballot as a “premier primary” (Stewart 1997). Other terms that have been used in academic work include “membership

  ballots ” (Carty and Blake 1999; Quinn 2010) and “one-member-one-vote systems ”

  (Courtney 1995, 233). In other words, both journalistic and academic works have given a variety of names to similar processes. It is therefore important to determine a common definition of primaries – that is, to establish an umbrella term for these similar, yet not identical, processes.

  The challenge for this chapter is to propose a useful conceptual framework to decide which methods of intra-party elections should be regarded as primaries and which should not.

  As we will see, the term “primary” refers to a broad set of intra-party selection methods. In this regard, the methods found in the primary umbrella are analogous to the study of electoral systems. The most common and accepted way to study electoral systems is to group them into different categories, often referred to as “families” (Farrell 2011). Three broad families can be identified:

  plurality/majority , proportional, and mixed (Reynolds, Reily, and Ellis 2008). The defining characteristic for this categorization is typically the degree of proportionality.

  Despite grouping them together under a common label, there are often significant differences between electoral systems in the same family. Take, for example, the group of electoral systems that fall under the umbrella of proportional representation (PR ). This family of electoral systems includes those ranging from panachage , to open and closed list PR , to the single transferable vote (STV ). Some countries, such as Israel, use a single countrywide district while others, for example Argentina and Portugal, have a number of smaller districts (usually along the lines of sub-national units). Likewise, STV asks voters to rank candidates in order of preference, while closed list PR

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  Congressional Primary Elections

  • Robert G. Boatright(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There was little crossover voting. Congressional primaries were actually less competitive than is the norm in California, voter turnout was down, and candidate spending remained similar to what it had been in 1996 (Tam Cho and Gaines 2002). There was little evidence that the Blanket Primary affected the fortunes of moderates, racial minorities, or women, although one study contended that it might have aided Latino Republicans (Gerber 2001, 2002; Caul and Tate 2002; Segura and Woods 2002). A study of the election conducted several years later argued that the Blanket Primary aided moderate candidates running in competitive districts, but the authors cautioned that this finding was more robust for state legislative races (because there were more of them) than for congressional races (Bullock and Clinton 2011). Perhaps most consequentially, most voters said when asked that they approved of the Blanket Primary, but the Blanket Primary appears not to have changed their feelings of political efficacy or approval of elected politicians (Gerber 2001). 12 The consensus among researchers, then, was that the Blanket Primary did not live up to the predictions of either its supporters or its opponents. Perhaps this was a consequence of the dynamics of 1998, and perhaps politicians would have adjusted their behavior as they grew accustomed to campaigning in blanket primaries (Petrocik 2002). California’s experience with cross-filing suggests that incumbents might have changed the way they campaign, using their position in office to reach out to voters of the other party

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  The Personalization of Democratic Politics and the Challenge for Political Parties

  • William P. Cross, Richard S. Katz, Scott Pruysers(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • ECPR Press

    (Publisher)

  Despite the past involvement of delegates in the party, one of the factors involving selection by delegates is the nature of the choices made by delegates. Elected officials have something personal at stake in the selection of the leader, but this is not quite the same for delegates. Delegates traditionally have been long-standing party members and a study of Canadian party members by Young and Cross found that ‘ideological or policy related commitment to the party is by far the most important reason for joining’ (2002, 549). Choice by convention affords the distinct possibility that the choice is made by a more ideologically driven group and may result in the election of more extreme candidates than would selection by the legislative caucus. Indeed, in a review of leadership decisions made by major Canadian parties in the early 1980s, Johnston found that ‘the decisive factors in both Liberal and Conservative delegates’ behavior seemed to be ideas about policy’ (1988, 215). Cross and Blais note that convention delegates might be more ‘ideologically extreme’ and that ‘electability might be less of a factor among the activists as, for the most part, their jobs are not dependent on the electoral success of their party. While activists surely prefer their party to be in government, they may not be as willing as MPs to sacrifice ideological concerns for electability’ (2012, 151–52). In this sense, personal considerations relating to the candidate may take second place to policy considerations.

  Selection by Primary

  The broadening involvement of ordinary members, supporters or voters in the selection of party leaders obviously changes the nature of the process. Using the Kenig et al. definition that ‘primaries are those selection methods in which the cumulative weight of influence of party members, supporters and / or voters, is equal to or greater than all other more exclusive selectorate(s) combined’ (2015, 152) provides a useful device for assessing the potential implications of this model for personalization of power. As leadership candidates attempt to build support with a wider electorate and distinguish themselves from their opponents, an emphasis on individual attributes seems likely to grow.

  In assessing the impact of primary models, the focus will be largely on the Canadian experience. As Cross and Blais explain

  While none of the Westminster parties have moved to primaries of the US sort, in which party membership is not a requisite for leadership voting, some of the Canadian parties have come close. They have done so by allowing any interested voter to join the party up to the last hour, typically well into the leadership campaign and just prior to voting, and still be eligible to participate (2012, 169).

  Late and easy entry of participants limits the ability of candidates to determine the electorate and to reach out to all voters. Candidates may not know who voters are in many cases, and there are likely to be substantial elements of the selectorate who are uninvolved and untouched by candidate mobilization efforts.

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