Opdycke: All voters should be eligible to vote in all elections, including primaries
Can the Democratic Party become a voice for democracy?
John Opdycke
The Hill
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is playing a vocal role in the DNC Chair election, spent the last months of the presidential primary describing in detail how the system is rigged. He lambasted closed primaries that excluded independents, the super delegate system, and the tilted playing field. But since endorsing Hillary Clinton, he has put less emphasis on the need for a structural overhaul.
Virginia Delegate Sam Rasoul recently made statewide news after resigning as Treasurer of the Democratic caucus and declaring that the Democratic Party wasn’t going far enough to build trust with the American people. He recently told me, “I love our platform. That’s not the problem. When we say we are the ‘party of the people’ but then we defend a political system that excludes millions of people from voting in primaries, why should people trust us? I think people have lost trust with both parties but that lack of trust is a bigger issue for Democrats because the gap between our rhetoric and our actions is wider. Nobody will believe us on the issues if we don’t start telling the truth about our broken political process.”
The American people are distressed by the decline in our world standing, by the growing gap between rich and poor, and by the lack of a level playing field in politics. A recent poll by pollster Pat Caddell showed that 67 percent of Americans believe that the real struggle in our country is not between left and right but between the ruling political elites and the rest of the country. American democracy needs to be overhauled to address the gap between insiders and outsiders. All voters should be eligible to vote in all elections, including primaries. Districts should be drawn fairly, not to serve party interests. State legislatures, Congress, and the Federal Election Commission should not be controlled by party caucuses and special interests.
The Democratic Party has an opportunity to become a voice for democracy. That means building a more inclusive political process. It may also mean giving up some short term privileges. But by dedicating itself to rebuilding our democracy, the Democratic Party has a real chance to reverse its fortune and help our country move forward in the process.
I know this won't be popular to say here, but Opdycke is correct. We like to think of party primaries as playing a role akin to a first-pass vote and the general as quasi run-off where the strongest candidates run.
As we saw in 2016, the primary process on the Democratic side didn't produce the strongest candidate with the widest support, and on the Republican side produced a disaster. When you consider not the percentage of actual voters, but the percentage of Trump voters out of all possible voters, Trump was elected by 27% of the eligible voting population. Clinton got 28.5%. That's not exactly a representative democracy.
When you take a look at the primaries, again assuming percentage of voters out of all citizens able to vote in 2016, Trump was selected by 6% of the voting population and Clinton was selected by 7%. Given this, it's not hard to see why somewhere around
90 million people didn't even bother to vote.
I understand the position of only allowing Democrats to vote in Democratic primaries, but if the assumption is that the Party is so fragile that allowing too many people to vote in a primary would destroy the Party, then the Party is in serious trouble.
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