Moulitsas: It’s time to trash ‘top-two’

Proponents of the “top-two” primary system are aggressively promoting their cause across the country, hoping to convince states to abandon traditional party primaries in favor of “jungle primaries,” in which all candidates run together regardless of party affiliation. As the name suggests, the top two vote-getters in these elections — irrespective of party — advance to a general election showdown. 

Top-two proponents claim their scheme will produce more moderate candidates and boost voter turnout. But as I wrote last week, the reality is very different.

{mosads}When California adopted the system, electoral turnout notched a record low. The Golden State’s congressional delegation is no less polarized than that of the rest of the country. And the system squelches ideological diversity by forcing the parties — which don’t want to see their members split votes among multiple candidates — to strong-arm nonestablishment candidates out of races. The alternative is a scenario like the 2012 election in California’s 31st Congressional District, where two Republicans advanced over a fragmented Democratic field in a solidly Democratic district. 

But it’s not just partisans arguing against top-two. The academic California Journal of Politics and Policy dedicated its first issue of 2015 to the topic, producing a wealth of analysis on the performance and effects of the top-two system in the state. The results weren’t pretty. 

Did the new primary system better engage more “centrist, independent voters”? “We see little evidence of this in the empirical data,” the journal editors concluded. Did the new primary system improve the chances of minority party candidates? “We see limited evidence that minority party registrants capitalize on this opportunity.” 

In one study, voters were given two ballots: one with the top-two lineup, the other one a mock traditional ballot. The results were “indistinguishable between ballot types.” The voters voted on party labels, not on candidates’ specific ideological positions.

Another study explored the rate of party crossover votes and that of “strategic” voting, in which a voter’s candidate is not the most preferred (like a libertarian voting GOP in the general). The results were conclusive: the top-two system had zero effect on crossover and strategic voting. 

But what did grow was the numbers of “orphaned” voters — that is, voters who didn’t have a choice in the general election because their party had been shut out. In fact, a whopping 47.9 percent of these orphaned voters abstained from voting. 

In other words, the preferred mode of voter decision remains party ID, yet the top-two system actually deprived many voters of that choice in the general election. Thus, the study’s author concludes, “If the voters who were expected to provide moderating influence instead choose to abstain, then the top two will fail to provide the expected result.”

Even a case study that purported to show how top-two could energize moderate voters — a look at the California 5th Assembly District race, where supposedly moderate Republican Frank Bigelow emerged victorious after having lost the first round to a supposedly more conservative challenger — failed to provide real support for the cause. While in office, Bigelow built up a 90 percent rating from the California Pro-Life Council, a 100 percent rating from the Chamber of Commerce, a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union and a 92 percent rating from the National Rifle Association. That’s hardly the record of a moderate.

The academic research confirms what common-sense observation makes clear: The top-two system is a failure and should be squashed dead.

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.