In less than two weeks, the primary will happen in Massachusetts, where voters will head to the polls, select a ballot from one of the two officially recognized political parties, and choose the candidates they think should be the party’s nominees.
An effort is underway to change the way we conduct primary elections in Massachusetts and replace them with a system that’s sometimes called “an all-party primary,” or a “top two” primary.
Jordan Berg Powers, committee chair for Voter Rights MA, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about why opponents are urging voters to reject the change to Massachusetts primaries. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Can you tell us your basic objection to changing Massachusetts primaries to this top-two system?
Jordan Berg Powers: Yeah, we’re worried about the effect of money in politics, and this is a billionaire-backed interest that they want to empower the most conservative voters to have more of a say in our election process. Massachusetts already has an open primary system. We already have a system that allows people, the majority of voters who are unenrolled, to choose the candidate they want and to vote in the primary that they want. This just says that there’s currently a message that just a few of the people can’t have a say, right? So if you are running in a Democratic primary, the only people excluded are people who say, ‘I am not in that party.’ If you’re running in the Republican Party, The only people excluded are people who say, ‘I’m not in that party,’ right? So people who are super partisan are the only people kept out of the September election primary that they may want to vote in, but most voters are unenrolled and they currently get to choose the election and the candidates they want to vote for. So this is really just an attempt to empower some of the most conservative voters. At this time in our politics, in Massachusetts especially, we really don’t need more money, more influence, more of the powerful sort of deciding the types of election systems that they want that works best for you.
Arun: I don’t want to extend your argument for you, but even those voters who are partisan, they can always switch to unenrolled if they wanted to vote in a primary either way, right?
Jordan: That’s right. At any time, you’re not stuck in a party. At any point, anybody can change their party affiliation if they feel that actually they’re the person or the candidate or there’s somebody they want to vote for. There’s still the mechanisms for people to choose and vote in the election that they want. What’s really important to note is that the reason that the backers have pushed this – and they’ve pushed this in many states now, right? It recently failed in Colorado, a version of this. It recently failed a version of this in Arizona – because they foresee a future where they’ll have more power in this system. And that’s why the few billionaires, the private equity folk who are paying for this ballot initiative, that’s why they want this to pass.
Arun: So with what you’ve said up to this point, I can understand why you disagree with the idea that this would increase voter turnout. Let’s break down the money side of this a bit more though. How exactly would this involve the influence of money becoming a larger factor in elections beyond the fact that there are big, some big moneyed interests apparently behind it?
Jordan: The first is it just becomes more expensive to run for office. You have more voters, they’re more conservative voters. You have to run an election twice where maybe before your meaningful election was maybe once. So you have a longer runway and you have more people that you need to talk to. And just by definition, that’s going to cost more money. It’s just simple math. And what we saw in California especially is that after the jungle primary system got put into place on their ballot initiative, the cost of elections skyrocketed. The other piece that I think is a little more subtle and sort of hard to exactly explain, but it signals to billionaires, to the sort of tech people, the AI, PACs, that Massachusetts elections are ready to be bought and sold for because you now have a system where the people that have the most ability to raise the most money as quickly as possible are more likely to succeed. So in California, for example, or in any state that has jungle primaries, you need more money to run for office, but you also need to elevate yourself as quickly as possible so that helps candidates who are well-connected to people. So this system really hurts people who are teachers, who want to run for office, social workers, people who work with their hands for a living — working class folks or just folks who are middle class but do regular jobs but aren’t connected to the sort of moneyed interests it takes to elevate yourself in this system, right? So you have a system that sort of, the candidates who are most connected to money are the candidates who are able to elevate themselves in this system. So that then makes people who have money be like ‘we can choose the sort of candidate and the sort of candidates we want.’
Arun: One of the arguments in favor of the top-two primary system that it’s easy for people to understand is this argument that a lot of races in places that are, say, heavily Democratic, they’re decided in the primaries, right? That’s where the election actually happens. Do you agree that that’s true? And what would you say to voters who think that that’s a problem?
Jordan: Yeah, I think a lot of the interesting thing about the proponents is that they take a lot of our complaints and none of our solutions. So if the thing you’re concerned about is having more choice for voters in the general election, then what you’re talking about is ranked choice voting. And the proponents love to confuse the two, but jungle primaries actually hurt our chances of ranked choice voting. And I was one of the 10 original signatories to that ballot initiative. I desperately wanted that to pass. So if the thing you want is what they’re saying, then the thing you would push for is ranked choice voting. The other things they’ll say they want more candidates.
Arun: I just want to be clear because people who are, just to make people familiar with that, ranked choice voting is when you list your choices in order. And so that is used as a winnowing technique.
Jordan: Exactly. And you could have more candidates in that system. So if that’s a desired option, then you should have a ballot initiative that fits that goal. Similarly, they’ll say things like, ‘oh, well, we want more people to run for office.’ Well, I’ve never met a candidate who says, ‘I’ll run for office only if it’s more expensive and it takes more time.’ That, does not make logical sense. But if you want more candidates to run for office, and as somebody whose job it used to be to encourage people to run, to teach people about the electoral system, I can say that there’s a lot of things we can be doing to encourage more people and more regular people to run for office. Those reforms might be anything from making Election Day more accessible to making it easier for people to run for office to public financing for elections. There are a lot of solutions out there to address some of the issues we want. Not a single one of the problems we have is fixed by having more jungle primaries.
To hear all-party primary supporters speaking with GBH’s All Things Considered, click here.
