Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Top Two

I haven't had a chance to dig in, but buzz seems to be that Democrats have avoided losing a bunch of Congressional races in California, which was a worry because too many ran and split the D vote.

I know even plenty of basically partisan people have a weird dislike of partisan primaries and seem to happily embrace any "solution" to that "problem," but those solutions are all bad. The top two system is dumb. Open primaries are dumb. There's no perfectly right way to do these things, and all will have consequences, but I think there's something obviously off about a primary system where two Republicans (or Democrats) can be on the general election ballot by getting, say, 20% of the vote, while 80% goes to candidates from the other party.