Chaotic GOP primaries show need for new primary system
According to current polling, the winner of the Republican primary for Pennsylvania governor will receive less than a third of the vote. And on the U.S. Senate side, no major poll has a single candidate winning more than a quarter.
This means that QAnon darling state Sen. Doug Mastriano, RFranklin, will likely win the GOP nod for governor, while election denier Kathy Barnette has a strong chance to pick up the Senate bid.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In an age of polarization and fringe candidates, when a radicalized minority can commandeer a party’s nomination, it shouldn’t be this way.
Pennsylvania could avoid these outcomes by arranging our primaries in one of two ways. The first is ranked-choice voting, the second is runoff elections.
In ranked-choice voting, the voter chooses a number of candidates in order of preference. The candidates with the lowest number of firstchoice votes are eliminated, and those votes go to the candidate ranked next on the voter’s list. Eventually, someone wins 50% plus one. This system is used in some way in several states, but statewide only in Maine.
In a runoff system, if no candidate reaches 50% plus one, the top two candidates move on to a second round of voting. This is how the French select their president, and how many southern states handle their primaries -— a holdover from the days of single-party Democratic rule, when the primary determined the race every time.
In either of these systems, Mr. Mastriano would likely not get a majority. His base of support is significant, but outside his core fans, his popularity drops significantly. In a ranked-choice election, he would likely receive many fewer second- and third-choice votes than
his competitors. In a runoff, he would bump up against a ceiling. The same would probably be true of Ms. Barnette.
But this isn’t about one candidate. It’s about a system that by its chaotic nature encourages too many candidates to run, and thus encourages the most demagogic instincts in those candidates, who can vie for the minority of most committed, more radicalized voters who can determine a race at only 25% or 30% of the vote.
This is how parties get radicalized even further, in a cycle hard to break. While some Democrats may be licking their chops at the idea of a Mastriano or Barnette candidacy, they should watch what they wish for. Donald Trump wasn’t supposed to win either. And they could easily face the same problem themselves.
No matter how Tuesday’s primary election turns out, Pennsylvania needs to change its primary system. The most important election reform will not be in how we vote, but in how we count.