Re: Landslide for 'None of These Candidates' exposes our broken presidential elections

On 26 May 2022, Molly Bolt <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> Eliminate all cheating Democrats.

Since state primaries became the main path for selecting U.S. presidential 
candidates over the second half of the 20th century, these hard-fought 
contests have provided some of the most memorable moments in modern 
American history. These range from the tragedy of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 
assassination in California to the pathos of Howard Dean’s 2004 losing 
scream in Iowa to the importance of Barack Obama’s 2008 speech about race 
here in Philadelphia.

In 2024, the worst primary season ever, the only thing we’re likely to 
remember is a landslide victory in Nevada by ... nobody. Literally, 
nobody. Indeed, nobody gave a rousing victory speech after Tuesday’s 
anemic primary there, in which nobody won by a better-than-2-1 margin.

Some 63.3% of Silver State Republicans who even bothered to turn out 
pulled the lever for “None of These Candidates” — an option more states 
ought to be considering amid the fiasco that is the 2024 White House race 
— while a meager 30.4% preferred the one sentient human being who is still 
a candidate and was on the ballot, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

In another sign of the nothingburger-ness of the 2024 primary season, I 
couldn’t find any journalist interviews with rank-and-file Nevada voters 
who cast “None of These Candidates” ballots, so we don’t fully know what 
they were thinking. No doubt a chunk of them are supporting the man who 
wasn’t there, GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who worked with his allies 
who’ve taken over the state party in Nevada to create a confusing, two-
stage process that meant the primary results were essentially meaningless. 
Presumably, some voters were just mad that delegate selection in Nevada 
has been — to use a word that’s thrown around too much but actually fits 
here — rigged.

“They basically told us they don’t care about us,” Bruce Parks, the GOP 
leader of Washoe County, told the Associated Press. He seemed mainly to 
mean Haley, who — knowing the state was hardwired for Trump — didn’t 
campaign there. “By marking ‘none of these candidates,’ we respond in kind 
— we don’t care about you either.”

Whatever the reason, the overwhelming win for “None of These Candidates” 
is a great-white-whale-sized metaphor for the state of a presidential 
election in which most observers rightly believe that nothing less than 
the fate of democracy is on the line, and yet, the broader electorate is 
wildly unhappy with a repeat showdown between two candidates whose 
nomination seemed ordained from the very beginning, no matter what anyone 
thinks.

Late last month, a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll found a whopping 67% of 
the electorate agreed that they were “tired of seeing the same candidates 
in presidential elections and want someone new.” And yet, voters feel they 
have no path for stopping the inevitability of Trump or President Joe 
Biden.

And that’s not surprising, because the primary process — which 50 years 
ago was amped up and hyped as the way to let the people and not party 
bosses pick the candidate — is badly broken. Consider:

For all the talk about the importance of democracy, there have been no 
meaningful debates in either party. Trump — invoking the realpolitik 
reality that his huge lead means he has everything to lose and nothing to 
gain by debating his opponents — has refused to take part in the GOP 
events. But Biden is being challenged by a sitting U.S. congressman in 
Minnesota’s Dean Phillips and, until Wednesday, by 2020 candidate Marianne 
Williamson — and the Democratic National Committee didn’t even bother to 
schedule debates.

Despite a modest effort on the Democratic side to reform this aspect of 
the system, it’s still the case that four smaller states — Iowa (31st 
biggest state), New Hampshire (41st), South Carolina (23rd), and Nevada 
(32nd) — are handed the ability to winnow out most of the candidates so 
that there’s no real competition by the time bigger states like 
California, Texas, New York, or Pennsylvania go to the polls. Those key 
first two states — Iowa (89.8%) and New Hampshire (92.6%) — are also 
overwhelmingly white.

Not only are the early states small and unrepresentative, but a 
conflicting morass of rules and conditions conspire to make it harder, not 
easier, for everyday citizens to vote. The Iowa caucus, which requires 
participants to sit through a lengthy meeting before finally casting their 
ballot, was held on a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when 
the state was ravaged by sub-zero weather and swirling snow. In New 
Hampshire, a Democratic fight over changes in the order of states meant 
that Biden only appeared as a write-in and did not campaign there.

Even worse, the mess in Nevada was just one of the ways Trump is trying to 
tilt the process on the GOP side in his direction and make it less 
democratic. In Nevada, where state law mandates a primary, Trump-backed 
state party officials created a system in which those votes are 
meaningless and all the delegates are selected in a separate Thursday 
night caucus in which candidates who entered the primary — such as Haley — 
are barred.

But other states like California were changed to a winner-takes-all 
format, also with the goal of helping Trump. The idea was even floated in 
a draft resolution to the Republican National Committee to make Trump the 
presumptive nominee before 48 of the states had weighed in — before 
someone realized that was taking it a little too far.

The bottom line is this: Only 764,697 people have cast ballots so far, in 
a nation of nearly 332 million people with more than 160 million 
registered voters. And yet, there’s little doubt that the die is cast, and 
Trump and Biden will be the general election candidates.

There’s got to be a better way.

The breakdown of the primary system is especially sad for those of us old 
enough to remember the 1970s, when — in the wake of the Democrats’ chaotic 
and violent 1968 convention in Chicago that nominated Hubert Humphrey, who 
hadn’t even run in that year’s primaries — the system was radically 
reformed to take most of the nominating power from the party bosses and 
give it to the people. Much like that era’s noble but ultimately failed 
effort to get big money out of politics, that brief flowering of democracy 
is wilting in the 21st century.

The laws and traditions that not only give control of a national election 
to the states — and, in the case of the primaries, political party leaders 
in those states — have created this hodgepodge of confusing rules and 
inconsistent methods of open or closed primaries or even less 
participatory caucuses. A prime example is New Hampshire, which has a 
state law that mandates it must be the first primary in the nation, even 
when Biden and other national Democratic Party officials want to dislodge 
it.

In a recent New Republic piece, Matt Ford notes that the hundreds of power 
centers — national and state parties and state lawmakers and secretaries 
of state — managing the primary process guarantee the chaos we are now 
seeing. He writes that “the best solution to the problem might be one that 
doesn’t solve it directly but at least makes it more solvable: a 
constitutional amendment that gives Congress the power to control certain 
aspects of the presidential primary process.”

But he also notes that there’s no universal agreement on what those 
reforms should look like. A single-day, national primary — an idea that 
resonates with many voters — might give an unfair advantage to the 
candidate who starts the race with the most money and name recognition. 
But the bigger issue is that you could never get 34 states to ratify an 
amendment that would surrender their powers to set primary dates or rules 
to Congress.

The parties and their allies in state government need to fix the problems 
that make it more attractive to vote for “None of These Candidates” than 
for an actual person. It seems like that could never happen, but it did 
happen after 1968 — a year in which one primary candidate was assassinated 
and a party’s convention was overwhelmed by violence in the streets. God 
only knows the level of 2024 mayhem that will be needed to fix the current 
broken way of electing our president.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/none-of-these-candidates-nevada-primary-
20240208.html