So of course after Labor Day, the political ads are out in force. The other day I saw one of the few non-attack ads, where they were promoting Kamala Harris for President. The ad announced, among other things, that Harris is going to be the first president to push for a program of national price controls. (Not quite true.)
And I thought to myself, “But I don’t WANT price controls. I don’t think they work.” Any more than Trump’s wonderful “plan” to shift from income taxes (on the rich) to national tariffs (affecting goods for the middle class and poor) is going to work either.
But how we should run the economy or how government should get revenue are policy matters on which people can agree to disagree. But since 2016, one of these parties, the Democrats, is run by the sort of career politicians that MAGA populists justifiably rail against, but they’re still trying in their own way to keep the system running.
Meanwhile since 2016, the only opposition presidential candidate is a racist, convicted felon, also found guilty in a defamation case involving sexual assault, only three years younger than Biden but still has half as many brain cells, and at this point everything he says is like a turn in Cards Against Humanity. “I have a Plan to save Isreal from Hamas and it involves DAVID BOWIE RIDING A TIGER MADE OF LIGHTNING! Meanwhile, cause of Komrade Kamala, immigrants in Springfiled Ohio are filming TWO MIDGETS SHITTING IN A BUCKET!!!!”
And in his (Republican) party, there may indeed still be some people I like. Such as Joe Lombardo, the current governor of Nevada, who was a fairly good Sheriff in the Las Vegas area. Or Sam Brown, who’s running against incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen for US Senate. Brown literally went through fire in Afghanistan, was permanently scarred but rebuilt his life and became a success. (This would also mean he’s one of those veterans Trump wouldn’t want to be seen with, cause ‘they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.’) But I didn’t vote for Lombardo as Governor and I’m not voting for Brown as Senator, cause they’re both in the Trump Party, and that means that they have to do any fool thing that Trump wants if they wanna stay in the He-Man Woman Haters Club.
And just as Trump’s tariff position means that no longer are Republicans the fiscal conservative party (to the extent that they ever were) there aren’t any good alternatives in “third” parties even if you could somehow wish that your vote was the only one that counted and wouldn’t be cancelled by everyone else in your state. For years, I was a vocal Libertarian, but in the past few years alleged purists took over because they saw how Trumpism had purged all the moderate conservatives and gay-tolerant people in the Republican Party and brought them into the Libertarian fold. These are the same people who in 2022 killed the Libertarian Party position that “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant” because apparently they wanted to attract bigots, not to mention the irrational and repugnant. Some of these people were sincerely trying to purge the “normies” but others were more openly aligning the party towards Putin’s Russia. That’s why the “free thinkers” in party leadership invited Donald Trump to the 2024 LP convention, where he openly demanded that they nominate him. That’s why the Party leadership is not supporting their own nominee, Chase Oliver, because he isn’t on board with the new agenda. Even though Party Chairwoman Angela McArdle tried to rationalize the party’s rejection of her favored candidate by saying the goal is to stop the Democrat (at the time, Biden) and get Trump elected. The irony being that in getting rid of the right-wingers who rejected Trump in order to recruit the “freethinkers” who like Trump, the LP is either not going to get any votes at all (because the fans already have Trump) or they will attract voters who might prefer Trump to Harris and therefore make a Trump victory less likely. Which is why the “freethinkers” got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to drop out.
And then you have Jill Stein’s Green Party, which always WAS a fellow traveler.
So pretty clearly the party politics structure is not working, even for those parties outside the duopoly. In the case of the Democrats, it’s easy to see why. Government is their business. One might say racket. And they’re trying to protect their institution. But in the case of parties more motivated by ideology, namely the Republicans and Libertarians, it becomes a question of what you have to do to be a party member. In the case of the Republicans, if you believed in certain things, like being “pro-life” and pro-capitalism, you were in the club. If you were a constitutionalist, you were in the club. That is of course the point of a political party: To make sure that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal. But if the party gets taken over by some outside force for the sake of one of its political goals, then said force can change the definition of who’s a “real” party loyalist. In this case, being “pro-life” meant that the Republican Party changed into the Trump Party, and went back on pretty much everything else that it meant to be Republican, like being pro-capitalist, pro-Constitution and anti-Russia. Likewise (L)ibertarian suspicion of government COVID mandates (almost all of which were instituted by state governments rather than Washington, ironically) meant there was an opportunity for takeover by people who go for all the alternative-to-being-right positions, like saying that the Federal Reserve “brainwashes our children to not know the difference between boys and girls” (from a Libertarian Party of Nevada post that I got the other day).
And as long as who you are and what you believe matters less than what party you belong to, we’re going to be stuck in this system where Republicans and “third” party candidates have to appeal to the biggest whackjobs to win primaries and Democrats can just mope along cause they have no incentive to compete intellectually. Since parties are now less a means of enforcing party function than a guarantee of party dysfunction, they need to be de-emphasized in the election system, which after all is supposed to supervise the campaigns rather than the other way around.
There have been various attempts to reform things on the state level, some of which got farther than others. This year, on the Nevada ballot, we have Question 3.
The ballot question was already passed in the 2022 election, but in Nevada, any ballot question has to have two successful Yes votes in two successive elections to become law. This is on one level a good security measure, but in practice what it means is that a popular proposal can pass in one election and then the special interests who don’t like it will have time to mobilize and get enough support to get people to vote it down the next time. This is how a previous Question 3, requiring an open energy market and removing the monopoly of NV Energy, could get supported in 2016 and then voted down in 2018, after NV Energy spent twice as much money against it as the supporters had to promote it.
So now we have a fairly similar situation coming up, with far more “No on Question 3” ads slamming the media than there are ads and articles explaining it or promoting it. And with early voting coming up, I need to go over 2024’s current Question 3.
This is the text of the ballot question:
Amendment to the Nevada Constitution:
Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to allow all Nevada voters the right to participate in open primary elections to choose candidates for the general election in which all voters may then rank the remaining candidates by preference for the offices of U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, State Controller, Attorney General, and State Legislators?
According to Ballotopedia, Question 3 greatly amends Article 15, Section 17 of the Nevada Constitution, stating first, “The primary election for partisan offices must be held on the date and time as provided by Nevada law.” Which right there challenges the current default where either of the two big parties can schedule a primary or even a caucus completely independent of what the State dictates. (Strange that no one complains about how confusing THAT is.) The main change is that the primary round would no longer be a party primary; “any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate for partisan office regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter”. Only the names of the five candidates receiving the greatest number of votes will advance to the general election.
It also creates a Section 18 detailing the process of ranked choice voting. It starts by saying that “The general election ballots for partisan office shall (be) designed so that the candidates are selected by ranked-choice voting.” Voters can mark (up to) five candidates in order of preference. It is not mandatory to mark more than one, but voters cannot assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office. If no candidate is highest-ranked on a majority of ballots, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and votes for that candidate will be counted towards each ballot’s next highest continuing candidate and a new elimination round is held until a clear majority is achieved.
Pretty much every organized Democratic interest in Nevada is against Question 3, but not Republicans. Interestingly, the state Libertarian Party is also against it, saying in a September 3 news email, “Question 3 needs to be defeated! The “Top-Five Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative” doesn’t guarantee that Libertarian candidates will be on the ballot. You can kiss checks and balances on the two-party system goodbye. Right now, a Libertarian candidate can run in every race, but if this abomination passes this won’t be the case.”
Which especially in comparison to the status quo is just as illogical as every other objection to Question 3.
One of the objections is that Question 3 would force people to learn about (oh no) up to five candidates in a race. I mean, heavens forfend that people actually make an informed decision while voting. And I say it’s up to five candidates because that assumes there will even be more than the two major party candidates or more than one per party. (One of the reasons I think the Libertarians protest too much about Question 3 is that half of the time when I have a general election ballot, they don’t even have any candidates in most of the down-ballot races.) And if, as is probably going to be the case, there are more than two candidates but they are only in two parties, then yeah, you’re actually going to have to do your research and not just trust someone cause the ballot says R or D.
Another objection is that the system would eliminate the choice you made. This is in fact what the proposal is intended to prevent. If (hypothetically, because Question 3 would not apply until after this election, and the wording specifically excludes presidential races) you’re Libertarian sympathizing and your choices for a hypothetical race are Chase Oliver, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, along with the other “third” party candidates that you don’t care so much about, you can prioritize. If you think Harris is the lesser of two evils, you can set your top three priorities as Oliver, Harris and Trump. If you really think Harris’ agenda is more of a threat to liberty than Trump’s, you’d pick Oliver, Trump and Harris. Assuming of course that you ARE a capital L Libertarian and not just a willing tool of Trump and his boss. If you’re a Von Mises “libertarian” it’s probably going to be Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and I-guess-I-have-to-pick-Oliver. In the current system any choices other than the big two are eliminated automatically, so if you had any sympathies outside the big two, you either eliminate your preferred choice before even voting or the system does it for you.
But the fact that this does involve a more extended decision process is something that is picked on by Democrats in particular, with their campaigns assuming that voters simply can’t sort through them all. Garbage. How do we know Democrats in Nevada can sort through a longer selection process with ranked voting? Because they already have.
In the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus, the party experimented with a ranked-choice system for selecting the Democratic nominee for President in the early voting period. I have already gone over how it worked. Interestingly, that contest ended up with independent Bernie Sanders winning over Joe Biden, 40.5 percent to 18.9. Now that was a closed Democratic caucus, but again it included Sanders who is technically not a Democrat and businessman Tom Steyer who had previously never run for office.
To sum up, if Question 3 passes, Nevada’s election system would change in two major respects: elections for partisan state office (including US Senator and Representative but not including President and Vice President of the United States) would be effectively open primaries in which all voters can participate, as opposed to being restricted to members of one party. This would produce up to five candidates in a general election, who would be ranked by voters so that if no one candidate has an absolute majority in the first round of votes, the ranking order creates elimination rounds until that majority vote is achieved.
This is important for at least two reasons. The first, again, is that the process would be under the control of the state government as a whole as opposed to being an internally controlled party affair. Whereas when Hillary Clinton’s people were in charge of the Democratic caucus in 2016, they basically threw out votes for Sanders and when Nevada law was changed after 2020 to eliminate party caucuses and set a date for the 2024 Republican primary, the Trump Party held a caucus anyway, basically so that they could guarantee the result.
Second, ranked choice voting in the general round addresses the point that while the practical default in this country is two-party voting, Americans are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with both Democratic and Republican institutions. It certainly does not guarantee that a “third” party politician would win state office, but it greatly increases their chances of advance (that is, above zero). The fact that up to five candidates can participate addresses one issue with our region’s other alternate model, California’s ‘top two’ runoff system, where you could have two Republicans against three or more Democrats splitting the notRepublican vote and end up with a general election where the two choices are Republicans.
So, Question 3 addresses the problems with independent voters being shut out of the primary process and the general election, and makes the process less dependent on the control of partisan organizations.
No wonder some people want to kill it.
Again, an issue with ballot initiatives in Nevada is that the need for them to pass twice in two elections means that people against the change can simply hoard their assets and create an opposition in the second election that wasn’t there when the question passed the first time.
It is true that the “Yes” campaign is being funded by both millionaires of both parties in Nevada as well as both Democratic and Republican donors from out of state, but their efforts haven’t been nearly as visible as the “No” campaign. Pretty much every TV ad on the subject in Las Vegas has been a No ad, and that would be one thing, but most of them are written on the lines of a few specious and just plain wrong arguments. Such as, you have to vote for more than one candidate (you don’t, but if you do, you have to assign each a different rank), your vote will be thrown out (when again, if you’re a ‘third’ party voter, your vote will almost certainly not count at all in the current system) or it’s just too hard to go over five picks (when again, Democrats in Nevada have already done so at least once).
What it is is that certain people, including in the “third” parties, are interested in brand protection. The Democrats, at least in Nevada, like things the way they are. And the one grain of truth in the No arguments is that since “third” parties effectively do not even have a primary process, since there aren’t enough people involved, the open primary system where only five advance might eliminate a third-party candidacy. But I’ve already given my personal response to that: In most general election ballots I’ve seen, “third” parties are only running for President (which isn’t affected by Question 3), or maybe Senator. By and large they haven’t been fielding candidates under the status quo, and only when they do would such objection be relevant.
And to review, this whole process, explicit or otherwise, is going to make party affiliation less relevant. Because when the election system is run by the parties, it is gamed to their benefit, which is a large part of why we have sought out “third” parties as an alternative to the duopoly. And frankly, that hasn’t worked, both because our first-past-the-post standard has made a “third” party candidate irrelevant at best and a “spoiler” at worst, and because what happened to the Libertarians and Greens demonstrates that Republicans are not the only ones vulnerable to a hostile takeover that obliges party voters to choose between what they thought their party was and what it is now.
And that gets to the big point which is relevant to America in general and Nevada in particular:
In Nevada as of July 1, there are 685,459 non-partisans compared to 608,048 registered Democrats and 578,365 registered Republicans. Being “politically homeless” is more and more of a thing, because the Republican Party has made itself more and more repellent, and that has not in itself made the Democratic Party better at government nor made other parties more attractive. And none of this changes the fact that in any given election, one candidate is going to win. Anything that creates more participation in the process can only help, given that the dysfunction in the current duopoly is based on their closed participation systems, which are becoming more and more unrepresentative of a country where fewer people can identify fully with either big party.
The current system is a trap, it’s only going to lead to increasingly negative returns, and the best way out is to de-emphasize party loyalty and have people vote for whoever the best candidate is.
You know, like in a democracy.