Member-only story
Open primaries are general elections with run-offs called “general elections.”
The difference between closed and open primaries is simple. In a closed primary, the party’s members choose their candidate. In an open primary, the candidates choose their party, rendering the party machinery inoperative. That doesn’t seem too bad when the parties have already lost their institutional power to affect the outcome of the primary system. But it’s still a bad idea.
In 2016, the DNC took a lot of heat for “rigging” the primary process. But “rigging” the primary process is precisely what parties exist to do. The party bigwigs are supposed to know and enforce the party’s ideological principles and values. That’s not possible anymore. Modern communications methods enable would-be candidates to disintermediate the process, to appeal directly to voters, making the “party” irrelevant. And so we get Bernies and Donalds, populists who are more alike than different in their appeal to the disaffected.
The so-called “open primary” is offered as a solution to this problem. It’s not. The only form of open primary that even appears to make sense is the “top-two” primary, in which any voter can vote for any candidate, with the two highest vote-getters, regardless of party, moving on…