WHAT IS A PRIMARY

I had a talk with a guy the other day; he was bemoaning how unfair it was that come the Illinois Primary he would be unable to vote for his two favorite candidates because one was a Democrat and one was a Republican.

Why is it that no one seems to know what a Primary is anymore?

People seems to want to look at the political process like it’s a giant tournament bracket. “I hope Hillary and Duke make the Final Four.” They want to pick their team and root them all they way through. Maybe it is because Presidential elections come with the same regularity that the Olympics do. Hell, I’m waiting for the day where the Presidential debates have expert commentators and then we can have judges score the candidates afterward. “Huckabee made a bad landing on that question, Bob, but he recovered nicely with his base by attacking Thompson on the Stem Cell issue. Let’s see what the judges say. Oh, that 4.5 from the East German judge will really hurt him.”

That is not what a Primary is or should be.

Our republic is primarily governed by one of two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans (neither of which was around when the country was founded, I might add). A political party is a bunch of folks who decide that they more or less agree with each other and that they would be stronger mutually supporting each other. So they band together and put forward the party’s candidates for each office and, in theory, the members of the party vote for their party’s candidates. If you don’t agree with a party, you can try to run on your own, but you are usually really hurting without the numerical support of a party. Eventually, you have multiple people wanting a job, even within the same party. If the party were to run two people for the same job, it would split the party’s votes and the party would lose the numerical strength of its numbers, so all the parties use systems to pick which of their possible candidates they want to run as the party candidate. In many places these are called Primaries. Other places are called Iowa.

Did you catch that? The purpose of the Primary is to allow the PARTY to select which candidate the PARTY wants to represent the PARTY in the upcoming election. A Primary is basically an internal decision maker for political Parties. This leads to several logical conclusions.

1. People who are not members of the party really have no business selecting on behalf of a party which candidate will represent the Party. That function belongs to the members of the Party.

2. Political “independents” have no business voting in any Party’s Primary.

3. Whining that it is not fair that you can’t vote for your favorite candidates because they are in two different Primaries makes you a complete moron. If we had a sort of pre-election where we could winnow down the field of possible candidates to just the two or three who gathered the most pre-votes we would not even need parties. Hell, then we could just take the winner and Bob’s your uncle.

It’s a good thing we Americans are so well politically educated.