Open vs Closed Primaries
One of the beauties of blogs is that one can spout off on anything, with or without the facts necessary to substantiate their opinions. Doing so without the facts is exactly what I did when I made N.H. out to be an oddball state with its semi-open primary.
Listening to POTUS-08 on my XM-Radio (C-SPAN radio has totally ruined my drive-time music listening), I heard someone talking about South Carolina's OPEN primary. That got me thinking about the issue again. Checking Wikipedia, I discovered that fifteen states have open primaries, where a registered voter can pick the ballot of either party at voting time. Two states are semi-closed, N.H. being one of them, and twenty-three have some form of closed primary. The difference is made up by caucuses of various types.
Having plugged that gap in my knowledge, I looked to see what I could find about South Carolina's open primary. What I found is that some there want to keep it open, and others are lobbying to change it to a closed primary, for reasons similar to those I've posted against the way we do things here in N.H. The interesting thing is that in 1980 Republican-controlled South Carolina adopted its open primary as a way for Republicans to build party membership. For more information, follow this link: http://screpublican.blogspot.com/2006/09/gop-debates-closing-primary.html.
A bit more research uncovered a paper written by two professors from Dartmouth and one from UCLA, titled “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing: Undeclared Voters in New Hampshire’s Open Primary.” It posits that undeclared voters, i.e. Independents, behave and vote pretty much like registered partisan voters, and don’t have as much influence on results as popularly imagined. Said another way, they are not a problem as far as election results are concerned.
That takes a bit of wind out of my sails on my arguments against the way we do things here in N.H. But, just as there are now those in South Carolina who want to shift back to closed primaries there, I continue to believe that the trend in N.H. of increased numbers of undeclared voters is not good for the two-party system.
It is evident to me that our entire presidential election process is under assault by a confluence of forces. Over the longer term, how we conduct our elections will be even more important that who we elect in this election cycle. Open versus closed primaries is just one issue that deserves more thought and discussion.
