Did O’Donnell Just Prove That Primaries Should be Scrapped?

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The reality of our two-stage election process is that it’s become hard enough to get voters to turn out for the general election. Turnout for primaries tends to be far below those levels. Moreover, those who tend to turnout, at least in some primaries, come not surprisingly from the most activist wings of the parties. Primary electorates with low turnout might thus not even be representative of the Republican (or Democratic) voters as a whole. In addition, if independents are legally shut out of the process, through closed-primary laws like in DE, and independents tend to be more moderate, centrist voters, then primaries will diminish the more centrist forces and empower the more extreme ones.

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[I]f one concludes the current structure of primaries is a problem for democracy today, either because turnout is so low and/or because primaries empower the extremes (and that hyperpolarized politics is not good for American democracy), there are at least two institutional design changes to consider. The most obvious is simply to push more states to use open rather than closed primaries. A more dramatic (and far less plausible, therefore, in practice) approach is to adopt systems of voting like instant-runoff voting. One feature of these systems is that they collapse the primary and general election into one day, so that the low turnout problem of primaries is avoided.