2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Is it really a good idea to get rid of closed primaries? [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,912 posts)Even if an Independent runs for President and gets a third of the popular vote overall it is still very difficult for them to win any electoral votes, certainly not in proportion to their popular vote total. And history has shown that it is very difficult to have a credible Third Party/Independent run for President - they are rare while every election cycle a Republican and a Democrat are both credible candidates for President. And even if an Independent wins the plurality of the popular vote for President AND a plurality in the Electoral College in a 3 way race, then the election gets decided in the House of Representatives, which is completely controlled by the two major parties.
By the time true Independent voters have a real say in who becomes their next President, partisan voters have narrowed the realistic field to two choices. Theoretically that may not be so, but in actual practice it is. You have to go back a century to Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party to find an instance of the two party system being seriously challenged, and even then it was by a previous major party candidate ex president.
When Independent voters were a smaller subset of the general electorate, their relative disenfranchisement in choosing who becomes eligible to have a real shot at becoming president was easier to overlook, but now they outnumber the adherents of either the Democratic or Republican parties. It is inherently undemocratic for them to be excluded from helping to advance a candidate to the finals, so to speak.
Our primaries should be open to actual independents who will become part of the winning coalition to elect any President. I do support safeguards to make it harder for actual partisans to pretend to be Independents in order to create cross over havoc. Therefor I oppose allowing someone already registered with a political party being able to switch their registration over to Independent shortly before a primary in order to participate in it.