On the Primary Process

I never had much interest in the Platner question because I don’t take every race as an existential crisis for me as a Democrat. I think the nationalization of every election is a pretty bad thing, in fact. If the voters of a given Democratic Party want a person, then that’s up to them. Of course if a candidate becomes unelectable, such as Joe Biden or Graham Platner, it is time to replace them. But I find the discourse over primaries to be odd.

A reader of the blog sent me how he summed up the comments to Scott’s post from the other day:

• Primaries are good.
• Stupid consultants picked Platner. Fuck consultants.
• Chuck fucked up because he’s so horrible a guy like Platner could get the nomination.
• Platner is bad because he should have known his skeletons would doom him, so he should have said no to the evil, stupid consultants.
• Primaries are good.

That sums it up better than I could, or more succinctly at the very least. And it does force one to answer a question–why are primaries good? Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with primaries, but I do think that up to a certain unelectable point, we have to respect the outcome.

But I also think people who think about and comment on politics all the time–me, my cobloggers, the readers and commenters here–are all basically out of touch with not only general election voters, but with actual Democrats. I go back to the fact that all of 9% of Democrats had even heard of Ezra Klein’s “prosperity agenda” as just one example of how the things that eat up so much media space are just completely unknown in the general public of people who actually turn out for primary elections–which is a relatively small percentage of pretty engaged voters.

So you can blame “consultants” if you want–though usually that blame goes to the centrist consultants who puke up triangulation talking points thirty years past their sell-by date. And you can blame Schumer if you want. He certainly showed how out of touch he is. And you can blame other Maine Democrats who were too scared to take on Susan Collins in a Democratic-friendly year. Sure.

But you have to engage with this fact–a sizable majority of Maine Democrats preferred a guy they knew had a Nazi tattoo and a skeezy past with women to Janet Mills.

So if primaries are such a great thing and part of our wonderful democracy, well, maybe we need to somehow reconcile this hard-held belief with the actual makeup of even our own allied voters. Maine Democrats had a choice. And they made it already having a lot of knowledge about the man. And you know what, even knowing what they know now, they very well might have made it again if the same primary was re-run.

If primaries are so great, then we are going to have to accept supporting really flawed people. And if we can’t do that, are primaries so great?