How Republicans targeted by Trump escaped his wrath

WASHINGTON — In a country that seems to grow more politically divided each month, lots of people have ideas for taming the partisanship they blame for getting in the way of solving national problems.

Many of those ideas are silly — such as Andrew Yang’s proposal for a third party that deliberately lacks any ideological content and doesn’t stand for anything other than not being one of the main parties.

But sometimes, a reform comes along that does what backers intended. That doesn’t happen often, so when it does, it’s worth taking note. Today’s topic: the top-two primary.

Partisan primaries provide the main way political candidates get chosen in the vast majority of states. They’re also powerful drivers of political polarization.

Especially when one party has a lopsided majority in a state or district, elected officials fear losing their primary far more than losing the general election. Because of that, members of Congress, state legislators, governors and others tailor their positions to appeal to the voters who show up for

primaries. Those tend to be the most committed partisans — people on the right in the GOP and the left among Democrats.

Gerrymandered election districts, which are drawn as nearly as possible to guarantee one party’s success in the general election, worsen that problem in much of the country by making the primary the only election that counts.

That results in the election of officials who are more ideologically extreme than the average voter. That’s one of the biggest reasons why compromises that have broad appeal across party lines often get blocked in Congress or state legislatures if they involve any of an ever-expanding list of issues on which the parties have staked out opposing positions.

Sometimes, the power ideological extremists have to dominate primaries backfires and produces candidates who can’t win a general election. That problem can hurt either party but has especially bedeviled Republicans in recent years. It appears to be cropping up again this year.

In primaries for Senate and governor in at least half a dozen competitive states, Republican voters have chosen nominees with troubled personal histories and ones who stand far to the right of their state’s average voter — most often, candidates endorsed by former President Trump. At least some of them probably will lose this fall, depriving the GOP of seats it might otherwise have won.

Pennsylvania provides the clearest example: The GOP nominee for the Senate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and for governor, Doug Mastriano, both trail their Democratic opponents by sizable margins in recent polls. Mastriano has a strongly rightwing voting record as a state legislator; Oz, a celebrity TV doctor, has no previous political experience and has been easy to ridicule as being out of touch with voters.

The likelihood that Democrats will win the Pennsylvania seat held by Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey is a big factor in making strategists in both parties, as well as independent analysts, think the party has a better-than-even shot at keeping control of the chamber this November.

Even when primaries don’t trip up parties that way, they do routinely produce candidates far away from the ideological center of the electorate.

Take Wisconsin: The state is so closely divided between Democrats and Republicans that just 1 percentage point separates the two parties’ shares of the electorate. But although the state’s voters are evenly balanced, “the candidates they have to choose from tend to be substantially to the left or the right of the average voter,” said the state’s leading pollster, Charles Franklin of Marquette University.

The state’s two senators — Ron Johnson, one of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans, and Tammy Baldwin, one of its most liberal Democrats — illustrate the point.

Reducing the power of the ideological extremes was one of the main selling points in California when former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, mostly moderate Republicans, asked voters in 2010 to approve a ballot measure, Proposition 14, that set up the top-two primary system the state has used for the last decade.

The idea, borrowed from Washington state, is that all candidates appear on the same primary ballot, and the top two vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election. Because candidates can get votes from anyone, not just their own party members, they have an incentive to moderate their positions and appeal across party lines.

The results for candidates targeted by Trump this year delivered powerful evidence that the reform works as advertised.

Eleven Republicans who voted to impeach Trump were up for reelection this year: 10 in the House, plus Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Of the seven whose states have traditional partisan primaries, not one has survived — four bowed out without even trying. Most famously, Rep. Liz Cheney lost her primary in Wyoming on Tuesday by 37 percentage points.

But four of the pro-impeachment Republicans come from states that have ditched the partisan primary: California, Washington and Alaska, which this year began using a top-four system that also includes ranked-choice voting.

Three of those four — Murkowski and Reps. Dan Newhouse of Washington and David Valadao of Hanford in the Central Valley — made it through to the general election. The primary structure allowed them to appeal to voters beyond the Trump faithful who dominate GOP primaries.

The top-two system didn’t accomplish everything that backers wanted: Schwarzenegger and his colleagues hoped it would provide space for moderate Republicans to survive in an increasingly Democratic California. That hasn’t happened, although the system does appear to have made life somewhat easier for moderate Democrats in the Legislature.

Nor does the system guarantee success for centrist candidates: In Washington state, Newhouse won his primary, but Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who also backed Trump’s impeachment, lost. Like any system, it has features that clever politicians can manipulate, as Democrats have proved in California, most recently in the June primary for attorney general in which they spent money to boost a conservative Republican, believing he would be easier to beat in the fall than a more moderate candidate.

And, of course, not everyone sees reducing partisan sway over elections as a worthy goal. In Washington and California, organized parties fought hard against the top-two system, opposing it on the ballot and challenging it unsuccessfully in the Supreme Court.

For those who think voters may benefit from less partisan choices, however, this year’s results have provided powerful evidence that top-two is a reform that works — enough to win over some analysts.

“I’ve been a skeptic of it,” Franklin said. “But the evidence is increasingly coming in that it works.”