Arizona does not need California’s ‘top two’ primary

We may soon begin to hear, once again, from the cheerleaders at The Arizona Republic that Arizona needs California’s “top two” primary system. The Republic’s pundits are impervious to facts, but I will try again.

The Washington Post recently reported, California’s top-two primary hasn’t lived up to reformers’ hopes:

California’s top-two primary, instituted for the first time in 2012, has made many hopeful that it would encourage moderate candidates to run and thereby reduce political polarization.  The early analyses of California’s experience have not born out those hopes.  Now, a new round of research conducted after the 2014 election reexamines the primary’s impact — and reaches much the same conclusion.  You can find this research in the new issue of the California Journal of Politics and Policy.

The Post article excerpts comments from  several political scientists.

The Los Angles Times similarly reported Top-two primary system hasn’t worked as proponents promised:

Proposition 14, passed in June 2010 [was] intended to help bring a new breed of more accommodating, less ideological lawmaker to the state capital. (The proposition also covered congressional and U.S. Senate contests, for good measure.)

It was supposed to work like this: Candidates would run in a free-for-all primary with the two top vote-getters advancing to a November runoff, regardless of party affiliation. Absent the need to appease the most puritanical elements of the major parties, the thinking went, candidates would broaden their appeal to the many voters in the middle.

Voila! A more harmonious, pragmatic and productive Legislature.

Has it worked? In short, no, not yet.

New academic research, published Sunday by the California Journal of Politics & Policy, found that voters were just as apt to support candidates representing the same partisan poles as they were before the election rules changed — that is, if they even bothered voting.

Moreover, the studies found, while there is indication of a somewhat more “business-friendly” — another way of saying moderate — approach to lawmaking by Sacramento’s majority Democrats, there is no conclusive evidence the change resulted from California’s new way of choosing its lawmakers.

“To summarize, our articles find very limited support for the moderating effects associated with the top-two primary,” Washington University’s Betsy Sinclair wrote, summarizing half a dozen research papers.

(A link to the journal, published by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, is here.)

It is much too soon, after fewer than a handful of elections, to draw definitive conclusions about the top-two primary, much less declare it a success or failure. Like any change, it will take a period of adjustment, not least for Californians accustomed to approaching their ballot in a more conventional fashion. As Sinclair wrote, “It is possible that voters simply need to adapt.”

But the research, based on thousands of voter interviews and data from the last two elections, does suggest impediments that must be overcome if the system is to have its desired moderating effect.

For starters, voters will have to pay far closer attention to their choices. Some candidates may have hugged the middle in a bid to entice more pragmatic-minded voters, but the research suggests relatively few voters noticed. There was little discernment between, say, a flaming liberal and a more accommodating Democrat; in most voters’ minds they fell under the same party umbrella.

In addition, voters will have to be less partisan themselves, showing a far greater willingness to support a moderate of the other party over a more extreme member of their own. Research into 2012’s state Assembly races found an exceedingly small percentage of so-called cross-over voters: just 5.5% of Democrats and 7.6% of Republicans sided with a candidate from the other party.

“Orphaned voters,” or those who didn’t have a candidate from their party advance to the general election, typically lost interest in the contest; so, for instance, rather than support the more moderate of two Republicans in a November runoff, Democrats simply didn’t vote.

The top-two system also fell short on another of its promises: boosting turnout.

Voters with no party preference — the fastest-growing segment of the state electorate — were forbidden from casting ballots under the old system of partisan primaries. One selling point of Proposition 14 was that independents would be allowed to participate in the nominating process, broadening the pool of potential voters.

But as researchers noted, the June 2014 primary drew barely 1 in 4 registered voters, the lowest turnout in California history.

Proponents of the ballot measure didn’t necessarily mislead people. But they seem to have invested more hope than merited in the virtues of their transformative surgery.

Last week, the Orange County Register reported, Study: State open primary fails to deliver:

Advocates promised that the top-two open primary would increase turnout, give independent voters more reason to vote and result in more moderate victors on Election Day.

But two elections cycles into the new system, the open primary has accomplished none of these goals, according to an analysis published this month by UC San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser.

The previous system allowed voters to cast primary ballots only for candidates with the same party affiliation in partisan races, while the top-two open primary lets voters to pick any candidate regardless of party.

So voters with no party preference – 21 percent of the state’s electorate and growing – were suddenly able to cast primary ballots for governor, state Legislature, Congress and other partisan seats.

Did more voters take advantage of that? Nope.

In last year’s primary, 12 percent of independent voters cast ballots – the same as in 2008 and slightly less than in 2010, according to Kousser.

The top-two open primary also allows voters registered with a party to cast ballots for candidates with a different party affiliation. The increased options – along with the expectation of more independent voters – was supposed to increase turnout overall.

But the 2014 primary saw 25 percent of registered voters cast ballots, the lowest on record.

“The new rules did not seem to change the outcomes of any statewide races,” Kousser writes. He also generally dismisses any moderating effect of the open primary at the state and federal legislative level as “voters have little information about the candidates, making it difficult for them to discern moderates from extremists of the same party.”

Just abandon this fantasy. There are no “magical” fixes to what is wrong with our electoral system. Americans need to: (1) register to vote and (2) actually vote. The problem is with American voters who no longer feel any civic duty to vote. A top two primary isn’t going to fix this problem.