Charlie notes how the primary system is failing the country:
The idea that undergirds the modern primary system is that rank-and-file voters will be more adept at choosing appealing political candidates than will a handful of party apparatchiks in a faraway smoke-filled room. Primary voters, this theory holds, are closer to other voters than are unrepresentative elites, and, as a result, are better placed to intuit what those other voters want. But is this true? I’m not so sure. Absent a dramatic change, the primary voters within both of America’s major political parties look on course to renominate a pair of figures whom a supermajority of their compatriots disdain.
He’s correct. If you propose abolishing this system, you’re tarred as anti-democratic. But it’s hardly democratic to let a small slice of the electorate, with views that often diverge greatly from the majority, choose the options the general electorate gets to decide between. To do it on an arbitrarily ordered calendar over a period of months, when the general election is held in each state on the same day, only adds to the nonsense.
Plenty of healthy, developed democracies around the world don’t have anything equivalent to our primary system. In other countries, political parties select candidates through internal processes and then put them up for a vote by the general public.
It’s not just in other countries. Every four years, right here in the U.S., each party selects a national candidate through non-public deliberations with no direct input from voters, and their names appear on the ballot in the general election: the vice-presidential nominees.
Neither Kamala Harris nor Mike Pence received a single primary-election vote on their way to becoming vice president. Their respective parties selected them based on a variety of criteria, including their ideology, experience in government, appeal to voters, and complementarity to the presidential nominee. Does anyone believe their ascensions to being one heartbeat away from the presidency were illegitimate or undemocratic?
Abolishing primaries is seen as a radical proposal, but it’s hardly radical to suggest that presidential candidates be selected the same way as vice-presidential candidates.