Do Primary Elections in Alaska Work?
According to the Alaska Division of Elections, Alaska taxpayers will pay roughly $2,000,000 to help state political parties choose their nominees this year (note: this does not count the presidential race, which does not use the state primary process). For the price of $2 million in state funding, we should expect an election process that works, and that benefits all Alaskans, right? It seems a fair assumption, but it is also a naïve one. If the past three election cycles are any example, Alaska’s current primary election process has trouble meeting either expectation, which is one of the reasons fewer and fewer candidates are entrusting their bid for office to Alaska’s primary election process.
Of course, in one sense, it is easy to say that the process has worked for the politicians and candidates who emerged victorious from last month’s primary. Winning candidates can often be counted on to defend the process that led to their own election, even when that process utterly fails to deliver for most Alaskans. However, it should be noted that neither Alaska’s governor, lieutenant governor, nor senior US senator won their election through the primary election process. In fact, all three participated in that process and then abandoned it in order to get elected. If bypassing the primary election process worked for three of Alaska’s senior elected officials, why should other candidates not do likewise? And in fact that is what we are seeing today, as candidates openly consider write-in campaigns after primary losses, or bypass the primary entirely by running independent of a party label.
Even as a candidate who was successful in last month’s primary, I would argue that it is fairly easy to see that the current primary election process is not working, and that it needs to be one of the places we look to make cuts in next year’s legislative session. Let us set aside entirely the matter of whether Alaska’s elections are being executed properly. They aren’t, and that will likely be the final nail in the coffin of Alaska’s primary system, but even if they were being executed flawlessly today, I would still have to conclude that Alaska’s current primary election system has failed to deliver.
Voter Participation
According to numbers from the Division of Elections, 12% of Alaskans participated in the 2016 primary election (17% of registered voters). Our senior US senator received support from 5.4% of Alaskans (7.7% of registered voters), which pundits have already hailed as a landslide win. Obviously, her opponents received even less support. But these numbers alone do not tell the whole story.
Primary election participation in Alaska during presidential years has been in free fall since 2008. That year, voter turnout was 40.62%. By 2012, that number had dropped to 25.34%. Now in 2016, that number has dipped to 17.28%, less than one tenth of one percent away from the lowest voter turnout ever recorded and published by the Division of Elections in a federal election cycle.
Public Confidence
While primary election voter turnout is impacted by many factors, of greatest concern to me personally is the impact felt by changes in public trust and confidence in the primary process itself. Simply put, compared to 2008, voters today have less reason to believe that the results of primary elections will be maintained by the candidates and political parties involved. While the results of primary elections used to be a reliable indicator both of which party would be supporting a general election candidate, and of who would be appearing on the general election ballot for that party, today that is no longer the case. Let us review some notable examples, examples that many Alaskan voters will not soon forget:
* In 2010, after pledging to support whichever candidate won the Republican Primary, Senator Murkowski lost her race for the Republican Primary. Instead of supporting the outcome of the primary election, she began negotiations with the Alaska Libertarian Party to appear on the ballot as a Libertarian. When those negotiations failed, she pursued a successful campaign as a write-in candidate, a campaign co-chaired by Democrat Byron Mallott with public support from a number of Republican Party leaders.
* In 2014, after a previous bid for Governor in the Republican Primary was unsuccessful, Gov. Bill Walker returned to the campaign trail as an independent candidate, with running mate Craig Fleener. In the primary election, Byron Mallott won the Democrat Nomination for governor and Hollis French won the Democrat Nomination for Lt. Governor. After the primary election, Mallott replaced Fleener and began campaigning as an independent, and neither Democrat nominee advanced to the general election as a Democrat.
In fact, over the past three primary elections, Alaskan voters have witnessed a number of cases where candidates campaigned under a different party in the general election than they did in the primary, where voters changed party registration to influence the primary election of another party on behalf of their own party, where party leaders supported candidates other than their party’s own nominees, and where the actual results of primary elections seemed to matter very little, as losing candidates either threatened or pursued write-in campaigns, and winning candidates were not assured of support even from their own party. In this type of environment, how do state-financed primary elections continue to make sense?
Party Discipline
This Saturday, the Republican Party will attempt to remove one of its own elected party leaders, Dave Bronson, from office. Ironically, the charge against him is that he has been encouraging voters to support, for US Senate, the candidate who best reflects the Platform of the Republican Party (note: the fracas arose because that candidate is not the candidate who won the Republican primary). Yet, while discipline may exist for party leaders who break ranks in defense of their party’s platform, there does not yet seem to be any corresponding move to pursue discipline for Republican politicians whose official acts undermine the Republican Platform, or who campaign against their party’s own nominees after losing in the primary.
Those trying to make sense of all this should realize that party leadership usually changes biennially, and those currently serving as party officers are likely to be different from those who held those positions two, four or six years ago. However, it does bear mention in the 2010 case, that Sen. Murkowski has had a vote in all official state party business since 2002, and at no point since 2002 has she lost that vote or had her representative removed from party office. In fact, when it comes to official voting leaders of the state party, she has been the one constant.
Conclusion
Perhaps it was once the case that state-funded primary elections served the public by bringing clarity to voters about what candidates of a particular party believed and the positions they would likely hold in office. However, today’s primary election process seems to do more to confuse than to clarify.
When candidates no longer reflect the platform and values of their party, when those who win primary elections do not end up being supported by their party in the general election, when parties ask some of their nominees to drop-out (and others to join competing tickets), when candidates and voters no longer have confidence that the results of the primary election will be honored and maintained by political parties and fellow candidates, then you have all the ingredients for a confusing, dysfunctional system that most voters could simply do without.
Tell me, why should I vote in the primary, if the results of the primary election may not even matter? 83% of registered Alaskan voters chose not to participate this year. They had more important things to do with their time. At some point we need to step back and conclude that the state should not be subsidizing such a dysfunctional process, certainly not to the tune of $2,000,000 every election.
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