Thread: Hall: The Presidential Primary System And What To Do About It

Jon - I generally agree with you. Among the problems associated with primary campaigns is the sheer cost of them. There are many good people who could be nominated, but they simply don't have the funds. Fundraising should not be one of the main criteria for nominating and electing people. I want my candidates to focus on the needs of the electorate and building plans and programs for meeting those needs. With the current system, each...

I don't much care for taking the power of selecting the party's candidates out of the hands of the voters. If that is the case, then you have the party bigshots and establishment dictating them to the party and the voters, which they pretty much try to do now and are already successful at it. But if there are no primaries, then the party's voters have no say at all, and with all the RINO's, moderates, centrists, and...

By Jon N. Hall October 19, 2009 America's primary election system allows anyone to run in any party's primaries. For instance, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent. If a radical leftist runs in a Democratic primary, it's just possible that the Democrats would end up with a radical leftist nominee. The same could happen to the GOP. The primary system elongates campaigns,...

While I do not completely agree with Jon Hall, I do agree that we need to dump the current binding primary system for the nomination of President in the major political parties. (Or at least in the GOP, because that is the party I care about.) I would also like to add another dirty little secret of the current system, the attempts made to remove people from state primary ballots. (Consider the 2000 Primary in New York and the campaign to keep...

Quote: One of the more sobering problems with the primary system is that voters can vote for candidates they have no intention of voting for in the general election. That is, they can switch parties and vote for the weaker candidates of the opposition party. This tactic was famously deployed in the last campaign: Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos". "Party switching" is an especially tempting tactic when...