Jan
30
What’s the point of a closed primary
January 30, 2008 |
If it’s not closed?
Rich Lowry notes that the CNN exit polls had Romney beating McCain 33-31 among GOP voters, with McCain’s margin of victory coming from independents.
Wasn’t Florida a closed primary, meaning Republicans only?
What am I missing?
And why should non-Republicans choose the Republican nominee? This has nothing to do with last night’s results. I’ve always maintained that primaries should only be open to members of the political party.
Update: Captain Ed explains what is happening here:
This depends on registration, of course. Florida requires any registration changes to take place at least 29 days before an election. In my experience in California, independents would often re-register as either Democrats or Republicans in order to participate in primaries, and then re-register again as independents for the general election. It’s perfectly legal, and it is part of the normal primary process. Most of the time it makes no difference at all, because most primaries of late have not had the same wide-open quality of this one after the first three or four states.
In this case, exit polls show “party identification” statistics that put 20% of the voters outside of the Republican Party. That’s their stated personal identification, not their actual party registration for last night’s primaries. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s unavoidable — unless major parties want to stop re-registering voters altogether. I’m actually a little surprised that only 3% of the vote came from re-registered Democrats, considering the uselessness of their own primary this year, which still attracted over 1.6 million voters to the 1.8 million who voted in the GOP contest. Three percent of that vote would have been 54,000 voters, and yet McCain won by almost 100,000.
That makes a bit more sense, and he has a point about re-registrants - you can’t really just block people from changing their party affiliation.
More at Michelle Malkin’s site.
Comments
1 Comment so far
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to have an Open Primary.
What bugs me about the primary process is that the states pay for it at all.
There seems to me to be something fundamentally unfair about taxing those who choose not to participate in the two-party system to help the GOP and Dems figure out who has the best chance of winning the General. Frankly, I couldn’t care less how the two major parties select their candidates: internet, straw-pole, Rock-Paper-Scissors…
That the states will not let third parties utilize the same mechanisms and that most states bar input from other than those registered in the parties make the many millions spent on the Primaries free money to support a system that intentionally excludes a sizable minority of Americans. Add to the injury the insult of local and state primary “contests” that are largely unapposed and we have a real injustice.
Anyway… no chance it will ever change, so I am merely stating a worthless opinion.