[EL] NY Times story on Tea Party success in US Senate Republican primaries

[Richard Winger]

As Rick has already noted, the NY Times for August 2 has a front-page story "Tea Party Trains Its Influence on Reshaping Senate GOP".  The story says Tea Party-type Republicans have won US Senate primaries this year in Texas, Indiana, Nebraska, and are somewhat likely to do so in Wisconsin and Missouri.

I notice that of these five states, four have classic open primaries, and in the 5th, Nebraska, independent voters are permitted to vote in any political party's primary of their choosing.  

In a classic open primary state, there is no such thing as registration into a party; the registration form doesn't ask a voter to choose a party, and on primary day any voter is free to choose any party's primary ballot.

The reason this observation is interesting is that proponents of top-two systems frequently say that the reason conservatives dominate Republican primaries is that independent voters can't vote in those Republican primaries.  I had already noted in another comment last year that a majority of members of the Tea Party caucus in the US House are from open primary states, even though open primary states are a minority in the U.S.

I am not claiming that Tea Party success is correlated with open primaries; I am just saying type of primary system doesn't matter.  This is what Boris Shor found, when he studied polarization and partisanship in the state legislatures of all 50 states, and what Seth Masket concluded, when he looked at the Shor data.  It also matches what Todd Donovan found when he studied the Washington state legislature; he said top-two didn't change the Washington legislature's behavior or the type of people who get elected to that legislature.

Richard Winger

415-922-9779

PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20120802/39fb99e6/attachment.html>