Into the Jungle

"I think that the people are sick and tired of politicians fighting. The system is such that you get punished sometimes when you do something that is good for the people."
- Governor Schwarzenegger

On Friday Governor Schwarzenegger signed the 14 or so bills that make up the California budget. There was a sigh of relief, and little celebration. Even though technically the budget caries us through 2010 everyone knows by May, when the budget is legally scheduled for review, we will be locked in another impasse.

As payment for being the final Republican vote, Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria demanded and received among other things, a ballot measure changing California to a non-partisan, open primary system (or “jungle primary”) for State offices. In a “jungle primary” all the candidates regardless of party appear on the same ballot. Unless one candidate wins an outright majority in the primary, the top two vote getters would face off in the general election – regardless of party affiliation.

Both parties hate this idea as it will break the lock they have on State politics. In the current system, the candidate who is most ideological pure wins the nomination. However, the party with the majority registration tends to win the election because more voters are aligned with the majority party’s overall philosophy even if they are presented with an extreme version of it.

The minority party will also nominate an ideological pure candidate. This alienates both moderate voters in their own party who leave, and repulses non-aligned voters who would otherwise join. The minority party starts to shrink, shifting its philosophical spectrum even further towards the extreme. There they will find their next candidate and repeat the cycle putting their party in a death spiral.

In California we vividly see this in our state politics. Moderate independents, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats all tend to vote for the liberal Democratic candidate, as they turn from the more extreme Republican candidates.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com ran simulations on what the results of a jungle primary would be in California (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/land-of-thousand-liebermans.html). He confirms that to survive in a jungle environment, candidates will have to move towards the center. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Party would win slightly less often and Republican aligned candidates would do better. Those candidates would be conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans. As Silver describes it, we would be electing thousands of Joe Liebermans.

Is this a bad thing? In all the discussion about post partisanship have we missed the larger question of do we really need political parties at all?
The founding elders of this country had a fear of parties. But inevitably conflicts between individuals like those between Jefferson and Hamilton regarding political and governing philosophy developed. Parties became a way to mobilize voters, and disseminate information in a broad country with poor communication and poor literacy.

Parties weren’t written into the governing statutes, so they could grow and die depending on the political tides and seasons. The Federalist and Whigs are two examples. The two party system is not a given. In recent history, there have been credible third party candidates in 1948, 1968 and 1992. But since 1992 the political system has hardened into two dominant party positions.

With the internet, twitter, talk radio and 24 hour cable news is the political party construct an anachronism? If you look at a definition of a party as a structure to communicate with and mobilize a group with a similar philosophy to finance and elect a candidate of their choice, then Moveon.Org defines as a party and so did the Congressional Club. In 2004 Gov. Dean showed how a candidate can use the internet to marshal partisan forces. In 2008 Obama showed how a candidate can use the internet and the new technologies to reach past the party structures and go directly to the voter regardless of their affiliation.

Obama’s campaign is the way of the future, and national candidates will be even less tied to their political party. This lesson will not be lost on future candidates. The successful ones will be those who are fast studies of the Obama way of doing things. Consequently we will be moving to “jungle primaries” regardless of the law.

Sen. Maldonado,said after casting his vote that he knew he had done the right thing for the State even though he knew he had ended his career in the Republican party. It is sad when breaking party lines and doing the right thing for the community as a whole will kill a political career. In a country whose response to the greatest financial crisis in 76 years has been frozen in its tracks by party politics, if a jungle primary makes it safer for politicians to do what is right, then this can only be a good thing.