The Primary System Is Failing Americans

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, June 13, 2023

 

Divided though they may be, Americans at present seem to be united on at least one thing: When they step into the voting booth during next year’s presidential election, they wish to see neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump featured on the ballot. Per a series of polls, up to 70 percent of Americans want Biden to decline to run for reelection in 2024, while 60+ percent hope Trump will retire. On this, voters are consistent and bipartisan. This week, Biden’s approval rating was measured at 31 percent, which brings him perfectly into line with Trump, whose number is the same. Loudly, and repeatedly, the customers are speaking. Their request? Less cowbell, please.

 

In response, America’s primary voters have decided to flip them the bird. Currently, Joe Biden is winning the Democrats’ primary by 50 points, while Donald Trump is winning the Republicans’ by between 30 and 40. Nothing — nothing — seems able to change this. Not the recapitulated pleading of the battle-weary public; not the news of widespread contempt and disapprobation; not the advent of devastating federal indictments or nascent crisis-inspiring scandals; not rampant inflation or disastrous right track/wrong track numbers or concerns about age, honesty, and criminal conduct. Nothing. The data come in, and they’re bounced away as swiftly as they arrived. “No” is taken to mean “Yes.” Antipathy is recast as enthusiasm. Contempt is worn as a badge of honor. In theory, the role of a political party is to discover and then to promote a candidate that can secure a winning coalition. In practice, all that seems rather quaint. This time around, both parties seem determined to interpret popularity as weakness, competence as vapidity, and comity as perfidy. Today, to win is to betray. To persuade is to surrender. Irritation, not advancement, is the aim of the day. In private enterprise, the news that one’s business competition is making a series of suicidal decisions is considered an opportunity. In politics, it is an excuse to continue one’s own bad behavior. “If their guy is hated,” the contemporary thinking seems to go, “then our hated guy will have a better chance.”

 

The idea that undergirds the modern primary system is that rank-and-file voters will be more adept at choosing appealing political candidates than will a handful of party apparatchiks in a faraway smoke-filled room. Primary voters, this theory holds, are closer to other voters than are unrepresentative elites, and, as a result, are better placed to intuit what those other voters want. But is this true? I’m not so sure. Absent a dramatic change, the primary voters within both of America’s major political parties look on course to renominate a pair of figures whom a supermajority of their compatriots disdain. If, as the premise implies, the advantage of party primaries is that everyday voters are able to respond nimbly to a cacophony of information, those voters certainly have a funny way of showing it. What, I wonder, would be unfurling differently if, à la The Producers, both Democrats and Republicans were scouring the horizon in search of the worst political strategies they could possibly find?

 

Structurally, this development is of a piece with the trends that we have begun to see within many of America’s major corporations, where staff, corporate executives, and advertising firms have elected to eschew conventional aims such as profitability, market share, and the broad goodwill of the public, and to focus instead on the advancement of fringe ideologies that everybody hates. Examine companies such as Bud Light, the Walt Disney Company, and Target in the year 2023, and you will come to the reluctant conclusion that a good number of their employees, executives, and consultants have come to disdain the products they sell and to loathe the people whom they have traditionally existed to serve. Anheuser-Busch did not put Dylan Mulvaney on its cans because it believed that doing so would help it sell more beer. Anheuser-Busch put Dylan Mulvaney on its cans because it believed that its customer base was reprehensible and needed to be enlightened — even if that enlightenment came at a colossal cost. Alas, one senses a similar attitude within the Republican Party, which, in 2022, was determined to waste the friendly political winds that were at its back, and to foist an ensemble cast of strange and unlikable candidates upon a baffled general public. Just as Anheuser-Busch believed that Bud Light’s consumers needed to be treated to a minstrel show in which they had no interest, so Republican-primary voters insisted that voters were going to see Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, Dr. Oz, and Doug Mastriano on the ballot whether they liked it or not. From the perspective of those who wanted to win, these decisions seemed absurd and counterproductive. But winning was not the aim. Damn the torpedoes, this is show business now.