California primaries

According to Ware, the development of the direct primary as a method for nominating candidates for office was not a revolutionary change, but rather an evolution of a system that relied on patronage to motivate and organize party members to support party candidates. The parties were almost completely decentralized, with the power at the state or even the county level. There was no national party organization through which the local parties were organized and disciplined.

Today there are national party organizations, but they do not operate as institutions that organize and rationalize the local parties. They are not in the position of telling the local parties what the positions of the local candidates should be on national issues. They are rather in the position of supporting whatever positions the local candidates take.

Primary elections took the power of nomination away from the party leaders and gave it to the “people”, supposedly the members of the party, but actually and rather amorphously, to anyone who claimed to be a party member. Ultimately the party was forced into being only an organization that supported whoever was able to get nominated in the primary, irrespective of his/her position relative to the issues of the day.

The ultimate expression of this orientation is the California primary system, where effectively the primary functions as a somewhat redundant preliminary to the general election. Party still are able to nominate candidates for the primary, and how this is done is not specified, but the primary election is a competition among all the candidates from all the parties, with the top two going on to the general election. The primary election is no longer a way of choosing who the nominees of the party are: it is essentially only a preliminary to a runoff election of the two top vote getters. How the parties nominate their candidates for the primary becomes an unspecified process internal to the party. It appears that this has just defeated the purpose of having primary elections.

How this works itself out will be interesting. Meanwhile, there continues to be little national discipline in the parties.