Michael writes:
There is a lot of talk after 2022 about how Republicans chose candidates that could not win over independent voters and many softly Republican-leaning voters.
But structuring the debate this way is strange, as if Republican primary voters ought to set aside their real preferences and make more responsible choices. I think you’re getting democracy backwards when you demand that voters solve problems for politicians, and not the other way around.
Whether a candidate can win a general election against a Democrat can’t be the only criterion for determining an “electable Republican.” Whether he or she can win a Republican primary matters just as much.
I’m struggling to think how I could disagree more with this. I’m not even entirely sure what Michael means. The purpose of a Republican primary is to choose the best candidate to represent the Republican Party in a general election. Michael is correct to say that “whether a candidate can win a general election against a Democrat can’t be the only criterion” (my emphasis), but it obviously has to be a pretty big one, and, obviously, it does not matter “just as much” whether a candidate can win a Republican primary as whether that candidate can win the general election that follows. The aim in a primary should be to select a candidate who is acceptable to the primary electorate and who can also win. Pointing out that primary voters have not been very good at this recently is not “getting democracy backwards” or demanding “that voters solve problems for politicians”; it’s demanding that, within the democratic process that is the primary, voters get better at solving problems for themselves. Unless we assume that those primary voters wanted to lose — or that they would rather lose with a candidate who has cable-tied himself to Donald Trump’s leg than with one who has not — they’re clearly not doing a good job on their own terms. There’s nothing “undemocratic” about pointing that out.
And besides, primaries are usually far less democratic than general elections. Most primary elections are internal polls of one faction within one jurisdiction. General elections, by contrast, are polls of everyone who is eligible to vote. It is entirely reasonable to point out that, sometimes, the people who vote in those primaries are badly out of touch with the larger democratic sentiment, and that, when this mismatch is confirmed it costs those voters the chance to advance their agenda where it actually matters. I see nothing “strange” at all in pointing out that, in 2022, Republican primary voters “chose candidates that could not win over independent voters and many softly Republican-leaning voters.” They did — and now they’re paying the price. If anyone should want to internalize that mistake, it should be those primary voters themselves. Clearly, the rest of the country isn’t going to do it, as they’re the ones who rejected the bad candidates in the first place.