The alternative view is that CA, MA, and NY already get a Democrat candidate 95/270 or 35% of the way to the Presidency with just 20% of the population. Do those states really need a greater impact?
Look at the last few election campaigns, the candidates spend all of their time in tossup states with a large number of college votes. The candidates only go to New York or California to raise more money to spend in Ohio of Florida.
Institutions only perform as well as they have to. For the NY democratic party (or any other party in a similarly lopsided state) the bar is not exactly high due to the makeup of the state.
Parties in states where the elections are routinely more contested tend to spend more effort vetting their candidates and running candidates that aren't trash.
I wonder if someone has gathered the statistics from California elections. Comparing across different electorates isn't hugely meaningful but I would think there would be some evidence about how it impacted third party candidates.
No.
Mississippi will vote Republican and New York will vote Democratic.
They need to run someone that can appeal to the swing states: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio.
I’ve tried but no smart up and coming democrat wants to start their career by poking the party establishment in the eye, so we largely don’t get great challenging candidates. And california republicans have the albatross of what the national Republican Party has become around their neck in the state.
Voting in Washington is really abhorrent. I read the last Republican Governor Nominee's bio and platform in the voting guide and was just surprised that he thought he was qualified to be Governor in a state with 7 million people. I don't really see why solid blue states or solid red states can not be an opportunity to innovate on platform and see what works, instead it seems qualified candidates just don't exist or give up
> only 4% of registered Democrats - four percent! - bothered to show up and vote for someone other than him in the primaries.
New York has low turnout because it has a set of laws that serve to disenfranchise voters in ways that other states could only ever dream of. (Yes, people technically have the right to vote, but because of a set of laws which I've described elsewhere, there's no way for them to use these votes to hold their elected officials accountable, like there is in other states).
Once every decade or so, yes, there's a race that's moderately contested (like the one you describe). But at that point, people aren't in the habit of voting anyway.
By the way, in your example the only reason Teachout ran as a Democrat instead of on the Working Families Party as she'd planned is because of these laws. The Working Families Party was pressured into endorsing Cuomo as their candidate, to ensure that they'd retain their ballot access. Teachout was angry enough that she decided to run as a Democrat, knowing full well that she'd lose, because nobody in New York ever wins a primary without the backing of the major party[0].
Teachout is far and away an exception, not the rule. Even then, her run was purely symbolic, and she herself knew it.
[0] Again, due to a whole bunch of laws that give the party incredible influence in shaping the outcome of primaries.
There were 29 major candidates for Democratic party this year. The Democratic primaries were very competitive, and turnout was high (all things considering). Why do you think you'd have different results nationally?
That presumes candidates would campaign the same way and voters would vote the same way.
Look at the way primaries are run. Candidates put extraordinary effort into small states because that's where the party has decided it wants to have its candidates slug it out. They could instead choose larger states but they don't. Or the candidates could campaign in larger states but it would sink their candidacy --they campaign in order to extract maximum value. It's similar with presidential campaigns.
California has an open primary, first two past the pole approach.
In practice this has driven a big move to the center. Two democrats past the pole first? The more moderate one wins. Two republicans? Again, more moderate one wins in general.
IRV with highly partisan primaries is still a losing game. Go to an open IRV process and you have gold.
Maybe the NY primaries were different, but I don't know that turnout numbers bear out any real material impact from efforts to turn out non-traditional voters.
No. If the system had been different, the candidates would have adopted a different strategy and you can't predict the outcome. The current system doesn't incentivize republicans from California to go vote like it doesn't for democrats from Alabama.
I don't think the California system is great. It ends up benefiting whatever faction fields the least number of candidates. IE, if 40% of voters support the Purple Party and there are only 2 candidates, and 60% of voters support the Yellow Party but there are 10 candidates, there's a decent chance that in the general you'll have two Purple Party candidates even though fewer people support them.
Anyway, in my experience the biggest issue with primary votes is that the vast majority of the population doesn't care, doesn't pay attention, and most don't even bother voting. Check out the turnout for most primaries (and California's "jungle primary" doesn't seem to have helped with turnout[1]), or ask the people around you about the positions between the two candidates in some of the recent local primaries.
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