Would people be happy with an undemocratic Democrat Primary process if it was more likely to win elections? (1 Viewer)

I was going to make this in the Bernie Latino/black voter thread, which is why it is used for some examples below, but it really could be any population or a general "primary voter" population.

If your overall goal was for a Democratic Candidate to win the general election in 2020, wouldn't it be a better question on who they would vote for compared to Trump to decide who they nominate? If a population strongly prefers one specific candidate in the primary over other Democratic candidates, does it matter in the general election if they would also vote for any other Democratic candidate?  As a follow up to the primary process, to me it seems like these 2 questions are the most important:

1) Do you live in a competitive state? The black vote in Alabama or the Latino vote in California are functionally worthless when it comes to primary candidate preference. No Democratic candidate will get enough black voters out to win Alabama or any other similar state, and no Democratic candidate will be so bad that they lose California.

2) Would you vote for your non-preferred Democratic primary candidate in the general election over Trump? If a large population favors one front runner, but will also will vote for the other, then their primary vote has significantly less value than a smaller group who will only vote for their candidate.

Hypothetically, lets say 50% of a swing state vote for Biden, and 50% vote for Sanders in the primary. 90% of each 50% will vote for the opposing candidate, but 100% of both groups will vote for someone else (lets say Kamala Harris chosen at random). Wouldn't then she be the best candidate, even though she is no ones first choice? It does not need to be a 3rd candidate coming out of nowhere, it could also be skewed between the two lead primary candidates. Obviously this would need to be done in aggregate with all swing states, since maybe that would backfire in some other swing state. 

I don't live in a swing state so this would not increase the power of my vote, but it feels like tv pundits and people in general spend a lot of effort giving meaning to state level primary results that are completely meaningless for the general election. 

Alternatively, abolishing the electoral college would solve a lot of these problems when you can just do large national polls.

It has always seemed weird that any political party would create a system where the candidate that has the strongest appeal to the base, has the least appeal to the rest of the country.

Seems like both parties would be better off going back to the days when candidates were selected by backroom power brokers.

As far as electoral systems go, the U.S. primaries are pretty much outliers. And since our election system continues to sink in the world rankings, you can draw a pretty reasonable conclusion that primaries aren't necessary for good democracy.

But if we're gonna have them, at least do them better. Logical state batting orders and approval voting would be good start.

roadkill1292 said:

As far as electoral systems go, the U.S. primaries are pretty much outliers. And since our election system continues to sink in the world rankings, you can draw a pretty reasonable conclusion that primaries aren't necessary for good democracy.

But if we're gonna have them, at least do them better. Logical state batting orders and approval voting would be good start.

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Your election talk has really interested me these past few months. What would you suggest instead of primaries?

We need to adopt an American Idol selection style.  I will play Simon Cowell.  

jon_mx said:

We need to adopt an American Idol selection style.  I will play Simon Cowell.  

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I would prefer masked singer.

have them all debate with voices disguised and wearing crazy costumes.

rockaction said:

Your election talk has really interested me these past few months. What would you suggest instead of primaries?

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Thank you for your interest.

Two decades ago a sub-committee of the RNC floated an idea called simply the "Delaware Plan" (the irony of roadkill extolling a Republican idea for primary reform is not lost on him). In their plan, the primaries were held in four groups of states, ranked by population,  with the smallest states going first and then working their way up to the largest states in the final. My version of this would expand the number of tiers to five or even six and then add two twists: (1) approval voting would be used to measure who brought the broadest levels of support and (3) the field would be winnowed at each primary tier survivor-style (or what we called "Running From Zombies" in one of my old fantasy contests). If a candidate can't muster enough votes to finish in the top, say, 80% of the first primary, please stop wasting our time.

I haven't thought completely through how to handle latecomers like Bloomberg or how to allocate delegates from such a process but I have ideas. And I don't know if this system would be worth it with small numbers of candidates like the Republican side this year.

Would I be OK with an undemocratic primary?  Yes.  Do I think that it would be an improvement over the current system?  Not necessarily  Smoke-filled rooms and such may look good in hindsight, but there's something valuable about (a) proving oneself capable of attracting potential voters, and (b) the compettive process itself weeding out weak candidates and strengthening one's messaging and responses to challenges of all sorts -- almost in a Darwinian sense.  So I dunno.