Pushing Political Parties out of the Nest

Fly, Little Birdy, Fly!

Last week I shared my amazement at how the All-Party Primary ballot initiative in Massachusetts has brought Trump-establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats together at last. It seems that the one thing our parties can agree on is that they want to keep our dysfunctional political system as it is.

As several of you pointed out, I neglected to comment on one of the complaints from party leadership that merits attention.

The MassGOP said in its statement that All-Party Primaries “would undermine core democratic principles by eroding the ability of political parties to select their own nominees.”

This is misleading. Seeing why requires paying a bit more attention to how parties operate than most people can usually stomach. Bear with me for a moment, because it’s important.

Right now, with conventional primaries, parties rely on public welfare to determine the person who will be their official standard bearer. Taxpayers pay for the state-run party primaries that have for decades now generated a “party nominee.” Even taxpayers who are not enrolled in a party pay for this process. In Massachusetts, 65 percent of voters are not in a party, but they too are forking over hard-earned money to pay for parties to select a “nominee.” In Massachusetts, they can participate in that primary, yes, by choosing a party ballot in a primary election, but often they are independent for a reason!

This arrangement dates to the turn of the 20th century, when state governments took over the party primary process. The effect was to make our two major parties something strange: private clubs running on a public subsidy. Their membership shrinks — as it has, consistently, over the past two decades — but the taxpayer funding for their primaries flows on. They are like businesses with a dwindling customer base and a guaranteed public revenue stream for a core part of their operations.

Those public funds also flow even though the parties hold conventions, paid for by party members, at which members vote on which candidate the party should endorse. In deciding whom to endorse at their member-funded conventions, parties behave like the private associations they are. They can and do use their conventions to choose standard bearers via their endorsement process.

Here’s the truth: All-Party Primaries in no way hinder parties from exercising their First Amendment freedoms of association to identify their favored candidates.

This is settled law. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party (2008), the US Supreme Court upheld the kind of all-candidate, top-two primary that is proposed for Massachusetts precisely because it does not determine the parties’ nominees. A so-called “blanket primary” — where all candidates appear on the same first ballot and then the top Democrat and the top Republican advance — is unconstitutional, as the court held in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000). The court ruled that that “blanket primary” method did amount to letting outsiders pick a party’s official representative. But an all-party primary that advances the top two vote-getters regardless of party takes nothing away from the party’s right to endorse its own standard-bearer. The party’s nominating function is left entirely intact; it simply moves where it belongs — the party’s convention, carried out through its endorsement process.

In our Massachusetts ballot initiative, which improves on the Washington and California versions of the all party primary, those party endorsements can appear on the ballot, if a candidate accepts them. The parties are not only able to choose their standard bearers; they will continue to be able to communicate those choices to the broader electorate. Nor will outsiders be weighing in on their choices. Voters will see all the candidates, as well as the information about which candidates are standard bearers for which parties. They will even be able to tell if a voter is a standard bearer for more than one party, as candidates can carry more than one endorsement on the ballot.

The MassGOP is right that the taxpayer-funded nomination process would disappear. What it cannot honestly say is that parties would lose the ability to select their own standard-bearers. That ability survives in full. What changes is who pays for that process. The other thing that changes is the contest on the public ballot: all candidates who meet the public’s requirements for candidacy, as expressed in state law, will appear.

That is the heart of the matter. The All-Party Primary insists that state-run elections belong to the voters and taxpayers, not the parties. The voters who pay for the election should get to see all the candidates. And candidates, running in elections funded by voters, should face all the people who fund them, all the time.

All-Party Primaries restore parties to being what they should be — private networks of people coordinating around shared ideas and policies. Parties can continue to choose their nominees, as the Supreme Court has recognized. But they can’t block other people from running and claiming ideological affiliation with their agenda, and their endorsed nominees will have to fend off challengers all the way through.

Our major parties will have to re-learn the muscle of being private associations. Currently, in Massachusetts, they carry out the endorsement process only for statewide elections. They would have to re-learn how to do endorsements in legislative districts.

But this is as it should be. A party that must persuade the whole electorate, rather than bank on a closed primary, has every incentive to organize through the grassroots, sharpen its agenda, and tie voters to it. We can already see what that kind of organizing looks like: the gains that the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party are making come precisely from doing this work — building membership, contesting races and earning support voter by voter. They are functioning like private associations rather than relying on a public subsidy to manufacture a nominee. All-Party Primaries would extend that same discipline to everyone. They also require everyone to earn votes from the whole electorate at every stage. They push parties out of their feather-bedded nest.

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