San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
GOP forgets its own primary history
Republicans are really down on open primaries these days.
That’s because supporters of former President Donald Trump, the party’s standardbearer, believe open primaries are impeding his seemingly inevitable romp to this year’s GOP presidential nomination.
Open-primary states have no party registration and allow voters to cast their ballots in whichever party primary they choose.
In New Hampshire, one of 16 states with an open primary, Trump won by only 11 points over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. But exit polls indicated that Trump dominated among self-identified Republicans by a 3-1 margin. Haley made the race competitive only with the help of independent and Democratic voters.
An internal memo from Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney cited upcoming openprimary elections — including the March 5 primary in Texas — as “fertile ground” and suggested that Haley’s strength with independent voters proves she is more electable than Trump.
Texas Republican Party Chairman Matt Rinaldi denounced the memo as “a very obvious call for Democrat crossover voting in the Republican Primary.” He added, “The Texas GOP must prioritize closed primaries.”
The notion that Texas Republicans want to exclude anyone without established party credentials would be highly confusing to the late Ronald Reagan, the godfather of modern Republicanism.
Reagan’s insurgent 1976 primary campaign against Gerald Ford foundered until the Texas primary, in which Democrats crossed over in large numbers and carried the Gipper to a clean sweep of the state’s 100 delegates.
Reagan actively courted Democrats, utilizing a conservative George Wallace loyalist in Texas radio ads to urge Democratic voters to cast their votes in the GOP primary.
While we might look back and view Reagan as more of a
true Republican than Ford, the reality is that Ford generally won the states in which only registered Republicans could vote, while Reagan thrived in open-primary states that allowed crossover voting.
Pro-Trump Republicans tend to argue these days that any independent or Democraticleaning voter who participates in a GOP primary is attempting to create mischief, but it’s more accurate to say these voters simply want to have a voice.
If you’re a Democrat in a Republican-controlled state such as Texas, you’re fully aware that the Republican nominee in any statewide race will likely win the general election.
With that in mind, you might have voted in the 2022 Republican
primary because you thought Eva Guzman would be a better attorney general than the thoroughly unethical incumbent Ken Paxton. That’s not an attempt to sabotage the GOP. It’s an effort to root out corruption.
For decades, Texas Republicans voted in Democratic primaries because that’s where the real political action was in this state. Republicans shouldn’t be appalled if contemporary Democrats sometimes flip that script.
The only serious effort that I can remember to use crossover voting to sabotage a party’s nomination process occurred in 2008, when radio host and Republican loyalist Rush Limbaugh encouraged GOP voters to participate in the Texas Democratic
primary.
Limbaugh’s maneuver, which he called Operation Chaos, was designed to help presidential contender Hillary Clinton slow down Barack Obama’s march to the Democratic nomination, partly because Limbaugh thought Clinton would be easier for a Republican to defeat, and partly because he wanted Democrats to keep fighting with each other for as long as possible.
The key consideration when we think about these things is that party affiliation is fluid. Trump used to be a Democrat. Reagan was a Democrat for decades before switching parties. Rick Perry began his political career in the Texas House as a Democrat and ended up this state’s longest-serving governor, as a Republican.
Political parties should embrace the idea of attracting more voters to their primaries. If the Republican Party were not so consumed by the kind of cult-ofpersonality purity tests that Trump has inspired, its leaders would understand that.
In 2016, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, exhorted the Democratic Party to open all its primaries, so independents, a major source of support for him, could participate.
“The world has changed,” Sanders said. “More and more people are independents, and I think it makes no sense for the Democrats to say to those people, ‘You can’t help us.’”
A closed primary makes sense if you want to exclude people and make sure your ranks don’t grow. But that’s no formula for long-term political success.