This article was written by a young college Republican in South Carolina.
In South Carolina there is a heated debate about our primaries and whether they should be “open” or “closed”. Republicans who believe in closed primaries see them as an important aspect of our future political success, as primary elections in right-leaning and deep red districts—which is most of South Carolina—are the real election in practice. So, would closed primaries really result in additional electoral success for Republicans?
Proponents of closed primaries contend that our current open primary system combined with our Republican hegemony creates an environment where Democrats vote in Republican primaries, and that the Democrat share of the vote is sometimes enough to alter who wins, thus resulting in a RINO or Democrat becoming a red district’s representative.
This is an understandable argument on its face. However, there are four complicating factors that indicate our status quo is as good as a hypothetical closed primary system.
First, the extent to which Democrats vote in Republican primaries is largely unknown because that data is not collected with the broader voting data—but we can make some rational assumptions. We know that number isn’t zero percent, and we know that number isn’t one-in-four. It’s probably somewhere in between. A subquestion we have to ask ourselves is that of composition. Are Democrats voting in lockstep for one Republican candidate? No, they are not. There are two schools of thought on primary sabotage among Democrat operatives: vote for the more radical candidate, and vote for the least radical candidate. In politics, egos get in the way, and this is just as prevalent with Democrats as it is with Republicans. Democrat operatives frequently present mutually exclusive battleplans for primary sabotage that almost always cancel themselves out in practice. We should also note that Democrats voting for a candidate in our primaries means they forego voting for a Democrat candidate in their primaries, which is a dangerous gambit.
Second, open primaries are open to Republicans and Democrats. We have the ability to do some sabotage of our own. And Republicans losing a red seat to primary sabotage is less of a loss than if Democrats lose a blue seat due to sabotage: there are many more of our seats than there are of theirs. Now, our successful operations are just as rare as theirs but the potential is there, and both sides know it. We should think of this as an even tradeoff, not as a lopsided Democrat party cheat code that mints new Democrat or RINO congresspeople every election.
Third, we should examine how our state adopted open primaries, and what wisdom its enactors may have seen in it. In 1896, the statutes we recognize as our open primary system were enacted by a unified Democrat government. Their exact rationale for passing it is not clear from the historical record, but there was certainly a perceived electoral advantage to doing so. For some additional context, primary laws were just a small part of a larger Democrat legal framework that was meant to enshrine their hegemony. It worked for a century, and now it’s working for us because we have control.
Fourth, the counterfactual. In order to get the full picture of this debate, we should peer briefly into a future where one’s primary participation must match their party affiliation.
Instead of Democrat operatives and their colleagues voting as Democrats in our primaries, they now vote in Republican primaries as registered Republicans. How can we be certain this would be the result of implementing closed primaries? Because registering one’s affiliation with a political party is free, simple to do, and reversible. Requiring people to pay in order to change their party affiliation is effectively a poll tax, which was deemed unconstitutional per the Supreme Court’s 1966 ruling in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, meaning there is no way to avoid some amount of partisan sabotage in primary elections.
Open primaries have their advantages, and closed primaries don’t effectively solve the problems they claim to solve. Republicans, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
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