Purposeless primary
Today is New York’s presidential primary day, but in a move very uncharacteristic for this Editorial Board, we will encourage you not to participate. Why? Because this isn’t really about making your voice heard. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are running unopposed for the GOP and Democratic tickets and have already received enough delegates to each be their party’s nominee.
Worse still, this ceremonial primary runs the risk of impacting the substantive primaries that will take place in June. Multiple state Senate, Assembly and congressional seats will be solidly competitive in the summer, but some percentage of voters who turn out today will assume that they’ve done their civic duty until November’s general elections. The more separate elections voters have to keep track of, the more they’ll feel overwhelmed and run the risk of checking out of the system entirely.
As for today, the only real question is one of turnout rather than electoral outcome. Even there, it’s not a useful metric of participation; what’s the point of heading to the ballot box for a useless election where everyone knows the results?
While nonvoting has often been taken as a protest against particular candidates or policies, here we encourage it as a simple protest against waste. We don’t need this primary and its $25 million price tag just to reaffirm that we’re headed for a rematch this November between the 2020 presidential candidates.
There are a few other names on each party ballot besides Trump and Biden, but the others have all dropped out so why waste the time, money and effort on this exercise? Even if someone else somehow prevailed, it won’t change the results so far, which are enough to determine the outcome. We’ll never argue against the public expressing its political preferences, but there’s no decision to be made here.
Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who was crushed by Biden in his own home state, has folded and endorsed Biden. Flakey Democrat Marianne Williamson has also quit and then seemingly unquit.
On the Republican side, Vivek Ramaswamy is not just no longer running against Trump, he’s endorsed the former president. Nikki Haley and Chris Christie have long abandoned their longshot campaigns. What’s left is procedure, and a rather arduous and expensive procedure at that.
With New York’s already abysmal turnout rates — no surprise that this primary’s early voting is already historically anemic — it would behoove us to do the most we possibly can to ensure participation, not confuse voters with more primaries than they need.
Albany should consolidate elections, including moving off-year elections to on-years, as a pro-democracy measure. Imagine the ease of telling voters that “the primary” — state, federal, presidential — is happening on a single day, and they can express their voice without having to remember successive dates or taking more time off work.
If these sensible steps have fallen on deaf ears, it’s because politicians often benefit from this chaos, allowing them to ensure that a core of supporters can keep voting them in year after year as most constituents are checked out. A useless and expensive election here and there is a small price to pay for this incumbency insurance, though of course it is the voters that are left with the bill.