Election Reforms Could Curb Extremism

Sept. 15, 2024

For those who believe the division and dysfunction within Congress is structural in nature, some amount of help might be on the way this fall.

The faces of the problem are hard-liners such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and their polar opposites Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, but they are not necessarily the problem itself.

The real culprits are features of our election system, specifically gerrymandering and closed primaries, that make it easy for extremists to land in Washington and then face no accountability back home.

It’s one of the great paradoxes of modern politics that independent voters are becoming ever more prevalent, yet because of closed or even semi-closed primaries in many states they have little or no say in choosing the candidates they will vote on in November.

Take the case of Arizona. It gets well-deserved recognition these days as a swing state, with the voter rolls showing as many unaffiliated voters as there are Republicans and far more than Democrats. The state went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.

By contrast, the state’s representation in the U.S. House of Representatives won’t be mistaken for middle-of-the-road. In fact, its nine-member delegation is among the most extreme in the country.

Four of the six Republicans in the delegation belong to the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, which is saying something when one considers that the group only has 39 members. Arizona matches the four from Florida and Tennessee, and exceeds the three from much bigger Texas.

With the caucus’s most ardent obstructionists, including some of the Arizonans, once again jamming up discussions on the federal budget, it’s fair to say that these individuals don’t make it their first priority to work together across the House.

But what is one to expect when two of the four ran unopposed in the last general election? Their districts provide them unassailable registration advantages, with roughly twice as many Republicans as Democrats.

This is not entirely a one-way street. The pattern is repeated on the other side of the aisle. Two of the three Democrats in the delegation belong to the most liberal group in the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They’re able to do so with impunity because they also enjoy huge registration margins back home. One of the two represents a district with three times as many Democrats as Republicans.

That’s Arizona. High percentages of Republicans live in rural counties and certain portions of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Then the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission comes along, and in the course of “fulfilling” its cautious interpretation of certain requirements, tilts the table even more.

Even with all this, however, the extremism would take a hard hit if the state’s plentiful independent voters had an easier time of participating in primary elections. The good news is that this could change in a major way this fall. Arizona is one of seven states that will vote on reforming how elections are conducted.

Initiatives in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon are going after the whole enchilada. They seek both open primaries, in which all candidates and all voters are treated equally without regard to their political party affiliation, and converting to ranked choice voting in the general election. Oregon would take it a half-step further by applying ranked choice voting to its primary elections as well.

Activists in the remaining three states – Arizona along with Montana and South Dakota – are content just to seek open primaries.

Arizona is going at it in roundabout fashion. For starters, it has two conflicting initiatives on the ballot. The one enacts open primaries. The other keeps primaries pretty much the exclusive domain of Republicans and Democrats. If both initiatives somehow pass, the measure with the higher vote total will prevail.

If that confusion isn’t enough, the open primaries measure doesn’t specify whether, like Montana, the top four candidates make it to the general election or, like South Dakota, just the top two candidates move on. Arizona will leave it to the Legislature to decide. What a mess that will be. To top if off, depending on what the Legislature decides, the state could back into instituting ranked choice voting in the general election.

Even with these zig-zags, it still is worth the trouble. Bringing to bear the moderating voice of all those independents will have considerable impact on congressional primaries across the board.  Their influence surely will be felt in the two or three districts that could flip to either party.

And even in the six districts with lopsided registration advantages, the single primary ballot and the size of the independent bloc will encourage moderate candidates to throw their hats in the ring. We have to hope that just the prospect of such will cause the incumbents to think twice before going to the extreme.

— Richard Gilman