The topic of this episode is, “What is the primary problem?”
Every two years, we have congressional elections, which feature both primary elections and general elections. For nearly everyone who listens to this podcast, this seems like an eternal feature of governance system: primary elections are used to winnow the candidate field, and then general elections give voters the choice between two or maybe three finalists.
But in truth, congressional primaries are a more recent development in our political history. They became the norm only about five or six decades ago.
And like any other system of rules—be it the laws restricting investments or the rules of baseball—primaries are imperfect and susceptible to gaming by the players. Worse, according to some critics, primaries are fueling toxic partisanship within Congress and curbing its capacity to serve the public.
Is there a primary problem? And what is this problem? To help us think through this subject I have with me Nick Troiano. He is the author of The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Nick is the executive director of Unite America, an organization that advocates for nonpartisan election reform and alternatives to partisan primary elections.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Nick Troiano:
Good to be with you, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
You and many others have been critical of primary elections as a vehicle for picking candidates. Let’s first talk about their results. Do primaries produce suboptimal candidates?
Nick Troiano:
We know that the approval rating of Congress is in the toilet right now. And if we were examining Congress as any business owner would be examining their factory, you don’t just look at the final product. You look at the assembly system, and when you look at the assembly system for who gets to Congress and how they behave, you have to look at our election system because that’s the mechanism by which they get there. And so something’s wrong along the way, and I would submit to you it’s not.
There’s a lot baked into the incentives of who runs for Congress, how they campaign, and ultimately how they choose to govern—all around the core incentives, which is what I learned in Political Science 101. Members of Congress are single-minded seekers of reelection, so they will do what is necessary to get reelected. And the challenges right now to get reelected do not necessarily mean winning a competitive general election. It means winning a low turnout party primary because most seats are overwhelmingly lopsided for one party or another.
So that essentially advantages those candidates who want to pander to the base of their party because it’s the base of their party that determines if they get renominated and therefore reelected. And that’s the essential problem of primaries. They are not representative mechanisms to choose leaders who are aligned with the majority of voters, nor are they great mechanisms for accountability—for holding those leaders accountable to the majority of voters.
So we ultimately have a Congress that is populated with members who are beholden to the fringes and not to the majority, which is why when people are frustrated that Congress does not things that are popular, that super majorities of Americans want—whether that’s on immigration, on the national debt, or on climate—it’s really because Congress is not representing a true majority because of our primary system.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the classic books that political science students are freqeuntly introduced to at the college level is Congress: The Electoral Connection, which posits that you should look at Congress as being comprised of a bunch of people who are single-minded seekers of reelection. And when you do that, you can see why they behave in the way that they behave. Perhaps you may not be surprised, but nonetheless you can be dismayed.
Is your criticism of primaries—this version of a preliminary election—that all preliminary elections are problematic and that we shouldn’t have them? Or is it the way we do them—these partisan primaries—are the real problem?
Nick Troiano:
The problem is that we’ve conflated really two things. One thing is that political parties, as private organizations, ought to have some way of choosing their standard-bearer to run for election, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The second thing is when we hold elections and multiple candidates run for office, how do we identify the candidate that truly is the preference of a majority of the citizenry? One way of doing that is to have a preliminary election that winnows a large candidate field down to just a few options, or maybe just even to two options by the November election.
The problem with our primary system is that it has conflated and is doing both of these things. The parties, as private organizations, are using it as a nominating contest, but they’re also using taxpayer dollars in a government-run system to do this winnowing process. And our core point is that we should separate these things. Let the parties decide how they want to recruit, support, and endorse candidates, and let the public use our publicly funded election system to organize elections in the best interest of voters, which is not a bifurcated system where you can only vote in a party’s primary if you’re registered with that party.
Every voter should have the freedom to vote for whomever they want if their tax dollars are paying for the ballots. So I think at the end of the day, we have to disentangle both of these core functions of first round elections and distinguish between what is in the interest of the political parties and then also what is in the interest of our democracy.
Kevin Kosar:
Earlier, you mentioned that primaries were low-turnout elections. I think the last time I looked for a general figure, it was somewhere between 20 and 25% of eligible voters participated in primaries, and the key word is eligible because not all voters are eligible to participate.
Nick Troiano:
Right. This is stunning. For federal office, there are 16 states right now where, if you are an unaffiliated or independent voter, you are legally prohibited from voting in either party’s political primary, unless that party in a few states happens to decide to let you in. But by law, you’re not guaranteed.
And that’s a big problem because again, you have a right to vote. You are paying for these elections. How is it that these private organizations can determine who gets to vote in publicly funded and government-run elections? There are 17 million Americans right now who can’t vote in closed primaries for Congress. This includes veterans who fought for our country. It includes young people who are the future of our country. It is un-American and anti-democratic that we allow elections to exclude these voters, and unfortunately, there are some states that are actually trying to close their primaries that are currently open. So, not only do we have this current challenge in our hands if we don’t do something about it, it’s set to get worse over the coming years.
Kevin Kosar:
And it feels important to mention, since you brought up independent voters, last I checked, the percentage of Americans who identify as independent voters is higher than the number of people who identify with either the Democrats or the Republicans. One data point I saw that was particularly striking is in my home state of Ohio. When you register to become a voter, you don’t have to register with either party. You have the choice, but you don’t have to do it. And it turns out something like 74% of people who fill out that form choose not to register with either party because they don’t want to associate themselves with either brand.
That’s stunning. That’s a huge thing. That’s a massive change from 80 years ago, when high percentages of Americans were clearly affiliated with one party or the other. Times have changed.
Nick Troiano:
Political independents are the largest and fastest-growing segment of the electorate, and therein lies the opportunity for both major parties to support opening their primaries because they’re losing the market share of voters by not opening their primaries and allowing independents to vote. They can actually make inroads with a constituency that they need to, you know, win elections.
Unfortunately, right now, both parties seem content to be the 50% plus one of that declining market share of party-registered voters, but it’s not sustainable for them, which is why I think ultimately reform will come around when not only is there sufficient pressure from the outside, but the parties will wake up and realize this is in their interest as well.
Kevin Kosar:
And to clarify for listeners, what constitutes open? Does it mean, for example, the Ohio Democratic Party opens its primary races for the House of Representatives to independents, or does it also mean allowing Republicans to vote?
Nick Troiano:
There are different sorts of gradations of an open primary. On one end of the spectrum, you have closed primaries where only party-registered members can vote in the respective primary. Then you have some states with semi-open primaries where independents can choose a ballot, but if you’re registered to a party, you can only vote in your party primary. And then you have states—there are three of them for federal office, given some changes in Louisiana—where there’s an all-candidate primary, where there’s one ballot, all the candidates are listed on it, and everyone can vote in that primary for whomever they want. And the top finishers move on to the general election. So there are a few different types from closed to open to all candidate. And the more open you get, the more responsive the candidates and the elected officials will be to a true majority of the electorate.
Kevin Kosar:
And the idea being to get a larger sample.
One point you make in your book is the interplay between primaries and who gets to Congress. In many House districts and—to a lesser degree—in the Senate, whoever wins a particular party’s primary has pretty astonishing odds to win the general election. It’s like the winnowing process, which was supposed to precede the deciding process, has become the voting process—the deciding process—and the general election has become largely a ceremonial exercise.
Nick Troiano:
That’s right, and people don’t realize that. If I told you about a democracy where 90% of the elections for the Congress were effectively known a year out from any votes being counted, you wouldn’t say that’s a democracy at all. But that is the context in which we live right now.
In the United States of America, because 90% of US House seats are so overwhelmingly lopsided for Team Red or Team Blue, the only election of consequence is the primary in which the parties decide who their candidate is. So by the time most people show up in November, that decision is already made.
And when you look at the last election in 2024, 87% of seats were decided in primaries by just 7% of voters nationally. So you have 7% of eligible voters determining 87% of the outcomes. It is no wonder that we have such a divided and dysfunctional Congress that is not responsive to a majority of Americans, and that will not change, regardless of who we put in Congress, unless we change the way that they get there, which is why opening primaries and election reform is so critically important to fixing a broken political system.
Kevin Kosar:
In my introduction, I point out that primary elections are a fairly recent innovation. How did we get here?
Nick Troiano:
When you read the Constitution, you won’t see any mention of party primaries because you won’t see any mention of political parties to begin with. Our founders feared them, but when parties started to form in the early days of the Republic, they needed to figure out a way to choose a candidate to put forward.
And so the early system and way of doing that was what was called the caucus and convention system, which is essentially when the party bosses were getting together in those proverbial smoke-filled rooms to handpick the candidates. By the late 1800s, you had machine-style politics take over. Tammany Hall was known as one of those machines in New York. The person in charge, Boss Tweed, famously said, “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”
And so it was very clear that the party bosses knew, even back then, that to control the primary was to control the election. And so democracy reformers in that era essentially said, “That’s not an acceptable outcome, and we want to get rid of the corruption that was embedded in that process.”
And they replaced caucuses with the direct primary to give all citizens the ability to vote in these elections. And in 1906, Wisconsin became the first state to adopt that. Within a decade, a majority of states did. Now all states do. And for the last century or so, that system worked decently well, better than the old system. It is just a challenge that in the last 20 or 30 years or so, as the parties have become so ideologically sorted, and as turnout has stayed so low, you wound up replacing the party bosses with the party bases. And so we’re left with the same problem that we saw a century ago, which is that. A handful of activists and special interests are actually the ones picking the candidates.
So when we talk about how we got here, it’s been a journey of trying to make and democratize our elections and make our elections better. That’s the tradition that we need to continue to improve and continue to build upon. And that is, as I’m sure we’ll discuss ways to reform primaries that shift competition from the primary to the general election when most people actually do vote.
Kevin Kosar:
I’m glad you mentioned interest groups. I remember reading some years ago that a representative of—I believe it was—the National Rifle Association, when asked about congressional primaries, responded that their organization views primaries as a place to litmus test. Essentially, they go around and they talk to those who would like to run, and find out who has the answer they like, and that’s where we put our money.
That was an eye-opening thing for me to read back then, but when you step back and think about it, it’s utterly rational. If you are an organization that wants to affect the voting behavior of a legislator, a smart way to do that is not to just approach members in Congress and hope that you can offer them campaign cash, and maybe they’ll come around, but rather to back the people who agree with you early on. And primaries, by virtue of the fact that they have such low turnout and often have a whole lot of candidates, are a place where any deep-pocketed interest can have a lot of sway because if they could throw a ton of money behind one person or another, they get their person, because once they’re through the general election’s a breeze.
Nick Troiano:
Agree, and you don’t even have to have that deep of a pocket because the turnout is so low, the amount of money it takes to reach and influence those voters, and especially a segment of voters that happen to be more partisan and ideological, based on what motivates them to turn out, it’s a great bargain for any interest group on the left or the right. When you look at these single-issue groups, it could be gun groups on the right or teachers’ unions on the left—for those that are concerned about the issue of money and politics and the role that it plays—that issue is orders of magnitude larger in the primary system when so few voters are actually participating and take cues from these interest groups as to who the most pure conservative or progressive might be.
And so we’ve done a bunch of research here at United America that showed ideological PACs have significantly greater influence in getting their preferred candidates elected in states with closed primaries than they do in states with open primaries, because in open primaries, you have a larger and more representative electorate that dilutes the influence of narrow interest groups.
Kevin Kosar:
So the old political boss system of candidate selection was obviously unsavory in many ways and ultimately offended our democratic sensibilities to some degree. And the idea of power brokers behind closed doors doing the picking was rejected. We moved to a primary system, and whatever its merits were, it’s obviously got its own problems and is being gamed by various players.
So what should we do? What are the options we have for something better? You’ve mentioned opening primaries, but are there other things we should be thinking about?
Nick Troiano:
Well, the unlock for this solution, and why I think the primary problem is the biggest solvable problem in our politics today, is that it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment or an act of Congress to address. The Constitution gives every state the right to set the time, place, and manner of its elections. And so we can change the rules of our primaries to ensure that they’re more representative and produce more responsive outcomes. Those laws can be changed at the state level, and that could be done through state legislatures, or in the states that have a direct citizen initiative process, directly by the voters themselves, which is actually traditionally how this has happened in states like California, Washington, and Alaska that have passed these reforms in the last couple of decades.
So the solution set depends on what might be most viable in a particular state. New Mexico, for example, this year was one of those states that had closed party primaries. It was their legislature, after a multi-year campaign, that passed a bipartisan bill that will allow independent voters to participate in party primaries starting next year. Alaska is another example where, you know, in 2020, it was the citizenry through a direct initiative that scrapped the party primaries altogether and replaced them with a Top Four all-candidate primary. So now everybody gets to vote, and the top four candidates, regardless of party affiliation, move on to the general election, and through an instant runoff, whoever earns majority support, you know, gets elected. And the states that have changed their rules to open their systems up to more competition and more participation have shown that they have less polarized legislatures, which are able to pass policies that are more in line with the interests of a majority of voters.
You can look at Louisiana, for example, where they have a natural experiment over the last 50 years of not having party primaries. And it’s a state that has done things like become one of the first states to really advance charter schools and school choice, that has improved education outcomes in that state, much to the chagrin of teachers’ unions on the far left in that state. It’s also been a state that has advanced Medicaid expansion—the only deep south state that has taken federal dollars to expand access to Medicaid, much to the chagrin of the far right that didn’t want to see that happen. But the reason why these things were able to happen in Louisiana is because its legislature is responsive to a majority of voters, as was the governor who championed these policies.
That just doesn’t happen in states that are ideologically rigid, that are beholden to one faction of one party and their aligned interest groups. And so this is not just a theoretical mechanical fix to democracy. This has major implications for issues that matter to people.
What’s more fundamental than access to a good education or healthcare? That’s what these reforms can deliver on in the states where they’re adopted.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the things that you mentioned was instant runoff voting. To clarify for listeners, does instant runoff voting mean rank choice voting, approval voting, or some sort of preferential voting system?
Is that what you’re speaking of?
Nick Troiano:
Yes. So in Alaska, if step one is the top four candidates from the primary go to the general election, you want to make sure that one of those candidates prevails with true majority support, not just plurality support (e.g., 30% of voters that might support them). So voters have the option of ranking those candidates, and if no one gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, then the person with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then their second choices are reallocated until someone emerges with majority support. The only difference between an instant runoff system and a runoff system is how many times we ask voters to go back to the polls to register their preference and how much money we wanna spend on it. So the Alaska system offers a better, faster, cheaper way of getting to a majority outcome.
Kevin Kosar:
And listeners might be wondering about some sort of reform that tries to just get more people to vote in the primaries? Is that something that’s feasible, or is getting Americans to vote in two elections for the same office each year just too big an ask?
Nick Troiano:
I think we could do some things like in the early days of the Republic, there was no single national day for general elections until we realized that was silly. Why don’t we have people all vote on the same day? We could do that for primaries, too. Congress could do that, and that may draw more attention, more media coverage, and more turnout to those elections. So that’s one idea.
On the other side of the spectrum is, why do we even have to have primaries in the first place? I describe the Louisiana system, which is essentially a single round general election that everyone runs in, and if no one gets majority support, then there’s a second round election after that. And sometimes turnout actually goes up in gubernatorial races, for example, that are high salience in the state.
So there’s a variety of ways we can think about this. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to ensure that elections are decided when most people vote. So even if you still have a primary and advance enough candidates, people will still have a meaningful choice in the general election and those candidates have to compete for everybody’s votes, not just rely on their party affiliation to win the day.
Kevin Kosar:
I think that takeaway message is something that a lot of Americans could agree with. How many of them bemoan the fact that they show up to a general election and then have to hold their nose and pick the lesser of two evils? It seems like we could do better.
Alright, we are out of time for this episode, so let me thank Nick Troiano, author of the book The Primary Solution, for helping us better understand the primary problem.
Nick Troiano:
Thanks so much, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on X.com and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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