In the wake of Democrat Doug Jones’s surprise win over Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate, pundits and prognosticators were scrambling to make sense of the new political landscape. The verdict was almost all bad for the Republican party.
The silver lining is that Mitch McConnell and his GOP Senate caucus do not have to deal with Moore in the upper chamber and are spared the difficult process of an Ethics Committee investigation into Moore’s past behavior. That benefit is dwarfed by the fact that Democrats now have a real shot at reclaiming a Senate majority next year. Prior to the Alabama election, this was seen as a virtual impossibility.
Yet results in Alabama tell us about more than the relative strength of the two parties. They also serve as yet another warning that our two major parties are badly misfiring and undermining our democracy as a result.
Parties serve a lot of purposes, many of which we are familiar with. For instance, they organize both chambers of Congress, corralling House members and senators to vote for a legislative agenda. They also present voters with positions on a basket of issues that basically follow one of the two major ideologies. In both cases, it is the conflict between the two parties that structures and gives meaning to our politics.
But there are other functions parties serve in which they work together. Importantly, they act as a cartel with regard to the voting booth—controlling access to who is allowed to appear on the ballot, and who is and who is not considered a serious candidate.
This can be a good thing. Imagine a world with no political parties, in which each ballot is a very long list of independent candidates to choose from. It would be difficult for voters to figure out which candidate best fits their views. And the winner would likely receive far less than 50 percent of the vote, leaving the majority of voters frustrated that their elected officials do not represent them.
When the parties are functioning properly, they limit ballot access to fit candidates who are of good character and generally reflect the views of a significant chunk of the electorate. This is what makes parties essential to a well-functioning democracy, for it is only when voters have good candidates to choose from that the ballot box actually serves as a useful check on our governing institutions.
But what happens when the parties fail to do this? What happens when they nominate morally dubious candidates or candidates from outside the mainstream? That undermines democratic accountability, as voters face a choice that does not reflect their values or interests. If good parties enhance democracy, bad parties weaken it.
It is increasingly clear that today’s parties are screwing up the nomination process. This was on full display during last year’s presidential campaign, when the Democrats and Republicans nominated the two most unpopular candidates in the history of public-opinion polling. They gave voters a choice between a boorish, unprepared Donald Trump and an out-of-touch, corrupt Hillary Clinton. It is no surprise that despite the fact that we have only two major parties, neither earned half the vote, as millions of voters cast protest ballots.
Party dysfunction was also on display in Alabama this year. The voters in this deeply conservative state were faced with a choice between Moore, a candidate credibly accused of sexual assault, and Jones, a pro-abortion Democrat who received the overwhelming majority of his financing from out-of-state liberals. Did either candidate really reflect the values and interests of the state? Of course not, which is probably why neither candidate managed to win a majority, and about 23,000 voters wrote in another person’s name.
These are big elections in which the voters feel unrepresented. What is going on? One problem is our system of primary elections. Conceived in the early 20th century as a tonic for corrupt political machines, primary elections have become the main form of nominating candidates. Unfortunately, they come with problems of their own. The biggest one is relatively low turnout, which favors candidates who appeal to an intensely loyal minority of voters.
Indeed, the GOP’s problems with Moore began when he finished in first place in the first round of the primary—winning just 165,000 votes (Trump won the backing of 1.3 million Alabamians in 2016). Moore was the first choice of a tiny segment of all Republican voters. The same is true of Trump in 2016, who was able to win the party’s nomination despite the fact that a majority of GOP voters supported somebody else. Yet Trump had a diehard following that helped him win contest after contest.
Another problem with primaries is they favor well-heeled candidates, who may seem moderate in their views but whose financing tilts them to the interests of their donors. The choice of Republican elites in Alabama was Senator Luther Strange, whose elevation to the seat was ethically questionable. Strange had been the state’s attorney general and was appointed to fill Sessions’s Senate vacancy by Governor Robert Bentley, who was under investigation by Strange’s office at the time and eventually resigned. It looked like a quid pro quo, which turned voters off. Yet in the first round of the primary, the national party went all-in for Strange, at the expense of Rep. Mo Brooks, who finished third.
Similarly, the preference of the high-dollar donors helps explain the Democrats’ nomination of Clinton last year, a candidate just as disagreeable to voters as Trump. Despite decades of ethically dubious practices, Clinton more or less had the market cornered on big donors, which scared away arguably stronger candidates and left as her only serious challenger Bernie Sanders, a radical candidate whose appeal was too narrow.
Money also influenced the Democratic side of the Alabama ballot this year, as Democrats spent more than $10 million on behalf of Jones. That cash came largely from outside the state, from liberal donors who no doubt will expect Jones to represent their interests, as opposed to the conservative views of Alabama.
Perhaps the biggest problem with our nomination system is that public intellectuals and voters at large have invested little effort in examining it critically, identifying weaknesses, and recommending changes. Liberals spend lots of time thinking about health-care policy, conservatives do likewise with tax policy, but hardly anybody scrutinizes our nomination system. There is instead a collective shrug of the shoulders, as people respond to these dissatisfactory results, “Well, the voters have spoken. What are we to do?”
The truth is, we could alter the primary process if we wanted to. Today, a shocking number of Americans feel alienated from our political process. Is it any wonder why? Increasingly, they see candidates who do not reflect their values or interests—but instead represent wealthy donors or ideologically extreme groups. Our shoddy nomination process is one reason why.
Jay Cost is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
