California voters aren’t nostalgic for ‘old’ primaries
SACRAMENTO — The home stretch of California’s statewide primary election is here, and all the big questions in this political season have one thing in common.
They begin with the disruptive nature of the top-two primary, an electoral juggernaut that party leaders hate and candidates treat, at best, with lukewarm praise.
Voters, though, aren’t looking back. They seem happy to be rid of the traditional way of running primaries.
In a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, just 10 percent of registered voters gave a thumbs up to what we now call a “closed primary” — the vintage system where the members of a political party pick their own nominee to appear on the general election ballot. Outsiders, be they voters who belong to another party or unaffiliated “independents,” aren’t welcome.
That system was in place for most of California’s modern history, but even at the beginning, its flaws were well known. A reporter covering the California Legislature in 1909, Franklin Hichborn, wrote at the time that the “direct primary,” as it was known then, “made it smooth sailing for the mere partisan and extremely hard for the independent Republican or independent Democrat to secure (the) party nomination.”
In 1996, voters replaced it with an open primary system that allowed all voters to pick the nominees of the political parties. Democrats and Republicans challenged it in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and won, saying it was unfair to force them to allow nonmembers to pick their party’s anointed choice. The toptwo primary, enacted by voters in 2010, got around that problem by stripping the parties of a guaranteed spot on the November ballot altogether.
Fifty percent of registered voters in the poll said they like the top-two primary. But political parties would regain at least some of their power under a scenario preferred by 40 percent of voters who were surveyed: A primary where independent voters were the only ones who could play in a party’s June election. It’s unclear, though, whether such a system would meet the constitutional standard set 18 years ago.