How to Bring Parties Back to the Center

Primary voting and campaign financing allow small groups to capture parties and disenfranchise the middle. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Primary politics and campaign finance allow small groups of highly committed voters to capture political parties and disenfranchise the middle. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Click here for part 1 and part 2 of this series.

By building voting systems and party finance systems that enable relatively small groups of highly committed people to capture and use a party, what we have done in effect is to disenfranchise the great national middle of American life. The game is over before the typical person ever notices that the game has begun.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

If for example all primaries had open voting - so that any citizen could take part in a primary election - a Sharron Angle would find it much tougher to win a Republican nomination.

Maybe more relevantly, we need to look again at how attempts to "reform" campaign finance have perversely empowered shadowy interest and ideological groups. Political money now comes in two basic envelopes, one transparent, one opaque. The transparent money is money whose source is disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission. The non-transparent money is raised and spent by political entities that need disclose nothing. You'd think we'd favor the transparent envelope. But no. The transparent money is hedged with difficulties: you have to raise it in increments of $2400, each donor is subject to a cap of his total giving for the cycle, etc. The non-transparent money is not only secret, but also limitless. The next step to real reform would be to make it easier for donors to give to parties - and for parties to support candidates. If we had a system whereby a wealthy person could give $1 million to the RNC or DNC, which then distributed the money among the most electable candidates, we'd accomplish two things: we'd liberate candidates from spending so much of their time fundraising, and we'd also allow parties to impose some discipline on their weirdos and outliers. If more of the money flowed from the DNC or RNC to the local candidate, you'd see fewer loudmouths like Alan Grayson behaving like yobs in hopes of capturing the attention of the cable networks - and the cable donors.

More to come...