Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight recently wrote an article challenging the premise that primary elections reform will make politics less divisive. Skelley draws heavily on a new report from New America’s Lee Drutman.

To be sure, Skelley gets a number of points right. Our politics is suffering from highly partisan electorates as a result of partisan sorting. This means there is often no meaningful ideological gap between primary and general election voters. Primary reforms such as open primaries and top-two primaries fail to address many of the key problems with hyperpartisan politics.