Chad Selweski covered state and regional politics for The Macomb Daily for nearly 30 years. He contributes to Deadline Detroit and blogs at Politically Speaking.
By Chad Selweski
At a time when both political parties have come under fire in recent months for a supposedly rigged presidential nominating process, Michigan voters on Tuesday will mostly ignore the state primary election, not knowing that by doing so they’re getting scammed by a truly rigged system.
Some 80 percent of voters typically will stay home on primary day, letting others choose the nominees for offices in Congress and the Legislature. Because of partisan manipulations by the Democratic and Republican parties, those sitting out the primary will show up in November only to learn that the election results have -- essentially, already, unfairly -- been decided.
In legislative districts for U.S. House, the state House and county commissioner, the playing field is drawn in such a way that there are Republican districts and there are Democratic districts – and not much in between. The winner of the dominant party’s primary inevitably will be the winner in the general election. Geography is destiny.
The biggest manipulation at play is the undemocratic process of gerrymandering, where zig-zagging district lines are drawn by the party in power to favor the party in power. In Michigan, currently that means the Republicans, though the Democrats also engage in hyper-partisan maneuvers when they get the chance, including at the county level.
Consider this: According to Inside Michigan Politics, only one U.S. House district, the 1st, covering northern Michigan and the U.P., will feature a competitive race in the fall; and as few as a dozen of the 110 state House seats will be competitive.
We vote in August and November but this is not a two-step process. The primary does not represent the preliminaries before the main event.
Nov. 8 Just a Formality
Voters can bet that a whole lot of candidates have planned a nice long vacation after Tuesday’s primary because they know that the general election is merely a formality in their districts.
At different points in the recently concluded presidential primaries, Donald Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders backers each felt that the party elites were tilting the playing field against their candidate.
In the end, the fact that Trump won the GOP nomination decisively and Sanders lost his bid as a Democratic candidate by 3.6 million votes should provide some solace to those who denounced the system.
In contrast, at the state and local level, party leaders quietly choose sides in primaries on a routine basis, hoping their man or woman comes out on top. The behind-the-scenes system is skewed from the beginning as the parties aggressively recruit the candidates they prefer. The strategists don’t sit back and wait to see who will rise as a contender. Often, the chosen one racks up a huge cash advantage during the primary season, thanks to big party donors and special-interest political action committees (PACs).
Each of the two major parties is a club, a partisan team focused almost exclusively on winning.
Reasons for Concern
Two factors explain why this procedure is disturbing.
First, the system is unfair to independents who are not loyal to either party.
Independent voters cannot split tickets on primary day, so their choices are limited to one party or the other. For example, in a heavily Republican area, they may want to vote for their favorite in a hotly contested GOP primary for Congress. They also may want to vote against that one particular candidate they are convinced is a jerk – a Democratic state House candidate running in a district shaped for Democrats. Yet, it’s one or the other.
Second, Michigan’s archaic process encourages polarization and partisan gridlock within the state’s congressional delegation and in the Legislature in Lansing.
Low-turnout primaries encourage candidates to pander to a party’s most ideological political base. A primary that is dominated by the loyal partisans produces single-minded nominees, not candidates who are willing to seek a middle ground.
Because our state primary traditionally produces a voter turnout of about 20 percent – roughly 10 percent in the Republican primary and 10 percent in the Democrat primary – the outcomes surely cannot serve as a measurement of the mainstream.
In August, voters who decline to participate in the nominating process lose their voice. Then in November, they face a ballot that offers no real choice. Is this the process we want to preserve?
I have to believe that, when striving for a truly democratic election system, we are all pro-choice.
