It's time to tear the fence down
I was frustrated with our political system. I was frustrated with our politicians. I was frustrated with myself because I felt powerless. But my frustration stemmed from ignorance.
The Economist this week ran a story ('Partied Out') about the ongoing political races in the United States and the role of the parties in the primaries. Citing polls from Gallup, it describes an electorate that is increasingly independent (43%) while an overwhelming majority of adults across America are dissatisfied with ‘the way democracy is working in this country’. The reality, it concludes, is ‘muddled and dispiriting’.
We are at our most polarized since the Gilded Age. Bipartisan support for legislation has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, and the representatives we send to Congress do an increasingly poor job of representing us. All of this happens despite the electorate remaining moderate, sane, and stable.
There have been calls for changes, but many of these have gone nowhere. For some, the culprit is gerrymandering. For others, money in politics and Citizens United. Still others propose “voting dollars” or penalties for failing to vote. The Economist floats a third party as a potential option. But all of these suggestions avoid addressing the underlying problem. “The reformer is always right about what’s wrong,” quipped G.K. Chesterton, “However, he’s often wrong about what’s right.”
The problem is our primary system, and the solution is altering the rules around primary elections.
The Play of States
In this country we run partisan primaries. This means that registered Republicans get to vote in state Republican primaries to nominate Republicans, and registered Democrats do the same in state run Democratic primaries. In theory this is a good system that provides individual voters a voice in nominating candidates for the general election. In practice, the system has departed significantly from its original intent in 1904. Rather than adapting our election systems as the country changed over the last century, we have maintained a status quo – to the detriment of ourselves, our legislature, and the country at large.
To illustrate this further, look at recent Congressional races.
If you’re a Republican in Massachusetts, your vote hardly matters. In 2022, Democrats won all nine of Massachusetts’ House elections. The smallest margin in the general election was 19 points. The largest was an incredible 69 points. We’re told this is because Massachusetts is a staunchly liberal state, and so these results may even represent the will of the majority. But, if we dig a bit deeper, the reality is more complex, which makes these landslide general elections disturbing.
In August 2022, Massachusetts had 4.8 million registered voters. Of those 4.8 million, 1.4 million were registered as Democrats. 436,000 were registered as Republicans. And a whopping 2.9 million were registered as Independents. The Massachusetts Secretary of State reported a 21.8% voter turnout in the primaries. That’s just over 1 million voters. But what matters is not the low voter turnout in the primary. What’s significant, buried beneath those stats, is that participation in the Democratic primary is the only thing that matters. In several districts the Republicans chose not to even run candidates for office.
Massachusetts is a rare case where Independent voters are able to vote in a primary of their choosing, a so-called ‘open partisan primary’. Eleven states have open partisan primaries, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wyoming. In these primaries non-affiliated voters can participate in the primary of their choosing. While this represents an improvement over closed primaries – where one must be registered as a Democrat or Republican to participate in their respective primaries – it still leaves many voters with less competition and less choice.
Similarly, to be a Democrat (or Independent) in a staunchly Republican state strips your voice in any general election because, again, the only race that often matters is the primary. Primary voters, who are often more ideologically extreme, exert a disproportionate amount of influence on our political system, resulting in unrepresentative outcomes for the entire country.
In total, forty-five states have partisan primaries. In ten of those states, independents are barred from voting in those primaries, representing 13 million Americans. If the primary is the only election that matters, as it increasingly does across most states, that ultimately means the disenfranchisement of 13 million Americans.
Two Paradigm Shifts
Americans are disillusioned with our political system. That disillusionment extends to our political parties, but most of us are unsure of what to do or how to affect change. This is one reason nearly half of Americans have registered as independents – they’re desperate to find a sane, moderate middle. The partisan antics of our representatives and the dreaded ‘gridlock’ of Washington, D.C., is further and further from the positions, desires, and wishes of the majority of Americans. The question is how? How did it come to this?
In order to truly understand what’s really going on, to really understand why those reforms mentioned earlier – like third parties or voting dollars or redistricting laws – are ultimately ineffectual, it’s necessary to understand two things.
The first is history. We have to understand how our current system evolved into what it is today. A true understanding of the historical context gives us both perspective and hope.
The second is to alter our thinking to systems thinking. Only when we view our current election apparatus as a complex system, comprised of incentives, players, choices, channels, etc. can we begin to understand why piecemeal, kick-around-the-edges-type changes are ultimately doomed to fail and why true systemic change is possible through resolving our primary problem.
In an extensive study of our current election system, Katherine Gehl, former CEO of Gehl Foods, and Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, point out that when originally conceived party primaries were a political innovation that gave citizens the power to directly nominate candidates for office. It represented an improvement over the selection of candidates by party bosses. In that sense, it was more democratic. But the system’s been corrupted. This is no one’s fault. It’s a fundamental law that systems break down. In any closed system, entropy increases, whether that be a mechanical system, a natural ecosystem, or a political system. The way to keep a system running and healthy is to open it up to innovation and change.
There is further cause for hope. A little history lesson goes a long way to dissipating our despondency and dispelling our doubts. Our modern nomination system – what we think of as primary elections – is actually the result of several hundred years of experimentation. These are rules we have tested and effected at various points in our history in order to improve the system and to make it work better for as many citizens as possible. That same spirit of experimentation can be what carries us forward today.
Where it all began
While the Constitution mandates we must elect someone for office, it doesn’t dictate how to do so. In the 21st century, the thought of not electing someone and leaving a seat vacant doesn’t compute, but then again we think of the United States, generally, as a singular noun. In 1790 ‘the united states’ was still very much a plural noun. Part of the reason for this is reflected in Hamilton’s writing in Federalist 59-61.
There was a real concern in the 1780s that some states would choose not to send elected representatives to federal office in order to hamstring the federal government. In the chaos of the failed Articles of Confederation, many of the thirteen States still saw themselves as individual entities, not a Union, and were narrowly focused on preserving their own authority. So, with the Framers’ focus on the preservation of a nascent federal government, they mandated that elections must take place but granted states the maximum amount of autonomy in determining the method and the result. The compromise is detailed in Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
You’ll notice the Constitution makes no mention of how candidates should be nominated for elections. As a result, the methods for nominating candidates for office have varied drastically over the past 200 years.
For the country’s first 30 years, nominations were made by friends and allies of candidates. There were only a handful of personalities in American politics that really mattered in those early days. Essentially, conversation among these closed groups amounted to a nominating process while agreement among those closed groups was tantamount to a nomination. They would circulate their preferred candidates in the local newspapers, and on Election Day people would vote for the person of their choice. As formalized parties developed – the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists – ballots were then provided by the parties with the “nominated” candidates listed on the paper. All a white, male voter over the age of 21 had to do was drop it in the ballot box.
By 1828, this system was changing. The first big catalyst was the collapse of the Federalist Party. This meant that a nomination by the Democratic-Republican Party was a de facto electoral victory. A similar frustration to that in which most Massachusetts Republicans find themselves today. More and more men became frustrated with this informal nominating system that robbed Americans of a real election. As a result, the caucus and convention system developed.
Caucus and Convention System
In 1828, local, i.e. county, party leaders would hold a caucus to nominate delegates. These delegates were trustees, charged with communicating the will of that local group to the state nominating convention. These delegates represented their small party factions at the statewide convention with specific voting instructions. The local leaders and local party members were trusting that delegates would uphold their wishes.
Given the communication and transportation technology available, this system made sense. It could be a big journey to travel to these conventions, and a convention was necessary for the party to find consensus on candidates.
There was no Google Form option or Zoom Caucus that could have brought everyone together cheaply and effectively. At the time, caucuses and conventions were a common sense innovation that gave individual voters more say in who was ultimately nominated for office. But, by the late 1800s these nominating systems were failing once again to serve the people. Parties and party bosses co-opted these tools to serve narrow personal and party needs, and our elections once again grew increasingly uncompetitive.
The Great Upheaval
By 1890, things were looking grim.
At 100 years old, our country had exploded in population. An influx of immigrants provided the workers we needed for our growing industrial complex, but massive amounts of immigrants also proved to be pliable populations for coercion and manipulation through urban patronage. Party machines in the city purchased votes through a bribery system that awarded immigrant populations with the equivalent of social welfare services and others with jobs, money, and positions of power.
On the enfranchisement front, things also looked bad. Reconstruction had been abandoned in the corrupt bargain between the Republicans and Democrats 1876, leading to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. “Between 1876 and 1898,” write Gehl and Porter, “the number of African Americans registered to vote plummeted by 97 percent in South Carolina and 93 percent in Mississippi.” Louisiana was similar, they point out. In 1896, there were 130,334 blacks registered to vote, but by 1900, the first year after the adoption of a new state constitution meant to uphold ‘the supremacy of the white race’, there were only just over 5,000.
Economically there were also major causes for concern. Consolidation and corruption in business led to the rise of the robber barons who mixed business and politics to their own gain. “These titans of industry,” write Gehl and Porter, “came to dominate not only markets but also politics, using their vast resources to gain undue government influence, distort policy, and extract special favors.” The 4,000 richest families, they write, had as much wealth as the rest of the country combined. Then, in 1893, a depression struck in what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls ‘the most serious depression the nation had yet experienced.’ At its height, one in every four workers was unemployed. Massive inequality between the rich and the poor, inhumane working conditions, lack of governmental regulation, massive worker unrest – the list goes on.
As if this wasn’t enough, on September 14, 1901, Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, a gruesome end to decades of social unrest and economic upheaval. And yet, in the midst of all of this chaos, a second wave of political reform swept the country, a force that we now refer to as the Progressive Movement.
Progressive Reforms
Let’s now imagine you’re casting a ballot in the 1890s. The caucus and convention system which began in the 1820s has been dominated by party bosses. Your voice as an individual voter in your party’s nomination process has withered away. While there might be more polling stations, those stations are watched by party informers. If you cast a ballot – which was still mostly white males over the age of 21 – you cast your vote by dropping a party-supplied, colored piece of paper into the box. This allowed the poll informants to guarantee you voted ‘correctly’. To vote against your party was often to put your livelihood and your family at risk.
Because ballots were supplied by the parties, even if you wanted to run a third party candidate, where would you find the money and resources to print thousands upon thousands of ballots?
The Progressive movement was not a nationally coordinated campaign. It was a grassroots movement of political reformers across the nation. Some were in government positions, like Robert La Follette, the governor of Wisconsin, or Teddy Roosevelt, who ascended to the presidency after the assassination of McKinley. Others were journalists, the ‘muckrakers’ like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, who wrote about the corruption rampant across the country. Still others were average American citizens fed up with the way things were going.
These groups of reformers together ushered in a series of innovations that changed our election machinery for the next century. It was only toward the end of the 20th century that the systems they put in place began to waver, rust, and grind to an inefficient halt. Here are just a few of those reforms.
First, the introduction of the ‘Australian ballot’. This was a reform pioneered in Australia that migrated to Europe and eventually to the United States. “Government, not the parties,” explain Gehl and Porter, “provided a single ballot that listed all candidates regardless of party.” Now voters could vote however they chose, or split their tickets, without fear of reprisal. Secret ballots are so much a part of our voting experience today that we don’t even realize they’re a relatively recent invention. Massachusetts adopted the Australian ballot in 1888, and within five years, every state had followed suit.
Second, Several innovations in direct democracy spread during this time as well. Initiatives and referendums were two foremost innovations introduced during the Progressive era. An initiative allows citizens to collect signatures to put a new measure on a ballot. A referendum is a process by which citizens can repeal, or uphold, a law passed by a state legislature. These reforms were another way of the citizenry providing a check on their legislatures. As of this writing, 26 states in the U.S. still have initiative and referendum processes.
Third, Robert M. La Follette, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a staunch Progressive reformer, championed direct primaries in his own state. In 1904, Wisconsin became the first state to adopt a primary system where party nominations were determined by popular vote instead of by the convention system where party bosses and insiders had back-channels and undue influence to produce a nominee of their own. Within a decade, most states adopted the direct primary system – with which we should all be familiar today.
No system is perfect, however, and the direct primary had its drawbacks. By 1928, most states had ‘closed’ their primaries in order to prevent abuse and to prevent ‘the Ames effect’, named after Minneapolis mayor Albert Alonzo “Doc” Ames. Ames was a three-term Democratic mayor who won a fourth term in 1900 by switching parties and dragging all of his supporters into the Republican party primary. Even our system of closed primaries, as detrimental as it is to us today, had a purpose at one time.
Now that you know why it’s there…
I opened with a G.K. Chesterton quote, and it only seems fitting to close with one as well. In his essay “The Drift from Domesticity” he presents an analogy popularly referred to as ‘Chesterton’s fence’ or ‘Chesterton’s gate’.
If there exists a statute or law, he argues, like a fence erected across the road, it’s only common sense to ask why it was put there in the first place. The existence of the fence, he writes, ‘rests on the most elementary common sense’:
The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.
Thoughtless people, he argues, are only too willing to tear things down because they don’t understand their original purpose. But the thoughtful reformer understands why it might have been put there, and because they understand its original intent they’re better suited to call for its destruction, alteration, or transportation. ‘In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle,’ he writes: we must understand the history of something. Then we know how best to make use, or dispose, of it.
This essay is my attempt to do just that. The way we conduct our primary elections today didn’t materialize out of thin air. If we understand why the fence, our primary system, was put there in the first place, we can look calmly and judiciously at what needs to be done to fix it.
Next week we’ll explore how the direct primary system developed in the Progressive era has outlasted its usefulness. I’ll explain why changing Congress, decreasing our polarization, stripping power from the ideologues and fringe elements of the parties, and enfranchising millions more Americans is easier than you might think.
I have an overwhelming amount of optimism about the path toward reform. It’s time to tear the fence down.
See you next week.
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