How to Fix the Primary System

I have really nothing to say about last night.  As an elections nerd, I've been asked repeatedly today about what happened in Iowa, and all I can say is that no one has good excuses.  I don't blame the voters or the candidates, but the Iowa Democratic Party screwed up, and while I don't believe any of the conspiracy theories (I do sincerely believe that the winner, whomever they may be, will be known in the next day or two), I can understand the frustration.  People like Lindsey Graham monstrously abusing their position by claiming there was a conspiracy theory afoot are idiots and traitors to the democratic process, but that doesn't mean that this incompetence shouldn't be punished in some fashion.

So I'm not going to speculate too hard on what might be the ramifications of last night (I think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee, though I don't say that with a lot of confidence, in a similar fashion to how I thought Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic nominee before last night, but again with not a great deal of confidence).  I instead want to talk about what is clearly broken here-our presidential primary system.  Last night was the best illustration of not only how this system is broken, but also how to fix it.

For starters, you need to let go of caucuses.  It's absurd to me that these still exist, and thankfully we'll have less of them this year than any previous cycle.  Just three states (Iowa, Nevada, & Wyoming) will hold caucuses in 2020 compared to 14 in 2016.  Caucuses are ridiculous and undemocratic.  Think about last night-the only people who could have possibly voted were people who didn't have to work on a Monday night, who didn't have daycare, and could spare at least three hours randomly being shouted at & confessing to their neighbors whom they are voting for.  Of course voter turnout is down-who possibly would want to take part in such a fiasco.

So remove caucuses-primaries are more democratic, allow for early voting, and make it less likely that you'll have "ties" since the voting pool is larger.  But then there's the question about the order of these states that always comes up.  One of the reason that Iowa did a caucus this year was because it wanted to maintain its perch of importance as a presidential decider, and couldn't switch to a primary without New Hampshire getting angry.  To them both I say-get over yourself, and we need to get over you.

There was a lot of discussion on Twitter this morning about "which state should be the first in the nation?" and my vote is none of them should be.  I've proposed in the past that we have, say, a rotating slate of states for ten Tuesdays in a row that changes each year, but that still gives a few states disproportionate power in a given cycle.  G. Elliot Morris of The Economist recently has been pushing hard the concept of a "ranked choice voting" primary, and I am in.  Finally, this is an actually democratic proposal that can handle the breadth of candidates while not prioritizing any state over another.

You can see some of the description of a poll carrying out this system here, but I'll essentially explain how this would need to be run.  We would all vote (hopefully with early voting over a ten day period), with the election results being counted on a given Tuesday.  If a candidate were to get 50%+1 of the national vote, they would become the nominee.  This may well have happened in a blowout year like 2000 or 2016, where the Democratic nominee was a foregone conclusion.  If, however it's a year like 2008 or 2020 for the Democrats, and no Democrat got a majority of first-place votes, they would go to a second round of voting.  Any candidate who hadn't, say, achieved 5% of the first-round vote, they'd go to the second choices of those ballots, and if there was no person who got a majority, then the lowest total vote-holder would get removed and his or her voters would go to the next person on the ballot.

It's probable that this process would take a week or two to get through, but that's pretty much its only problem (and ultimately that shouldn't be considered a problem, particularly since it takes 4-5 months to vote currently).  No state would receive preferential treatment (something that a party that increasingly wants to eliminate the electoral college should stand behind), and there would be no need for things like delegates being arbitrarily being chosen by a coin toss.  In fact, you wouldn't really need delegates at all.  It'd also mean that you don't have to vote strategically.  Leading into Iowa, there was great talk about how progressives should all band behind either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren so that they wouldn't hurt the other candidate's chances.  That disappears here.  You can vote for, say, Andrew Yang without worrying about throwing out your vote, because if he doesn't achieve a high enough amount of the vote, your second or third place choices would win, rather than a candidate you're truly trying to avoid.

It's hard to understate how much better this system is.  No candidate can win the presidential vote with a plurality (something that was the case for Donald Trump, John McCain, Micheal Dukakis, Barack Obama, and almost certainly the Democratic nominee this year), and so you have someone that truly represents the party getting the nomination.  It makes sure that the party is choosing the nominee that they are most likely to get behind in the general, someone who is a consensus candidate rather than someone who gamed the system, and it doesn't give arbitrary preference to states based on history or demographics.  I'd favor this being a closed primary to registered Democrats (to prevent shenanigans), but otherwise this is a solution to a big problem in America.  We currently are choosing our presidential candidates not based on logic, but on antiquated tradition.  Iowa last night was the inevitable cause of that problem-RCV on a National Primary Day is the solution.