Should We Change the Primary Process in Illinois?
Anyone familiar with the legendary ferocity of Illinois’ no holds barred politics should feel somewhat slighted that California claimed the title “Law of the Jungle” primary in its 2010 election reforms.
Under that revamp, which voters approved by referendum, all candidates regardless of party labels competed on the same ballot in the March 5 nonpartisan primary. The top two vote getters, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey, will face off in November to fill the state’s open U. S. Senate seat.
Why did California turn to a radical remake of their party-based primaries?
“The theory is you get more turnout, more participation, and more moderate candidates. Or less extreme anyway,” said Kent Redfield, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois-Springfield. “That was the thinking behind what they were trying to do with the referendum. And they won, even though the party organizations were vehemently opposed because they wanted to be able to control the primaries, control the nomination and identify their partisans.”
The group Unite America, a nonprofit dedicated to abolishing partisan primaries, highlights what it calls “the primary problem” with this statistic: In 2020, “only 10 per cent of eligible Americans nationwide cast ballots in primary elections that effectively decided the winners in a supermajority (83 per cent) of Congressional seats.”
What’s more, the shape and political sentiment of the voting public is shifting.
“What’s happened is the electorate has gone through a massive sea change in the last 25 years,” said Jeremy Gruber, senior vice president of the advocacy group Open Primaries. “Now, independents are the largest and fastest growing group of voters in the country. Over 50 per cent of our young people – the next generation of voters, millennials and Gen Z voters – are independent.”
Voters who aren’t aligned with either party can be reluctant to choose up sides to vote in partisan primaries, leaving the nominating process to party regulars who, on the left and right, are generally more extreme than the general electorate.
But whether the reforms created in California’s Jungle Primary, also known as a “Top Two” primary, produced greater moderation and participation is not completely clear.
A 2017 study published by Cambridge University said, “The evidence for post-reform moderation is stronger in California than in Washington, but some of this stronger effect appears to stem from a contemporaneous policy change – district lines drawn by an independent redistricting commission – while still more might have emerged from a change in term limits that was adopted at about the same time.”
A newer study published in 2020 from the University of Southern California, however, did find evidence that the top two system in that state “reduced ideological extremity among legislators, relative to those in closed primary systems.”
Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois, said it makes intuitive sense that primaries would be contributing to polarization and gridlock.
“We hear from candidates and elected officials that they feel like they have to act in more extreme ways in order to get through a primary or that people are deterred from running because they’re more moderate they feel like they won’t be able to get through a partisan primary,” said Kaplan. “We hear that. It seems to make theoretical sense.”
However, there’s little in the way of hard facts to back up the perception.
“As far as I know, the political science literature says there are many different reasons for the polarization we’re facing right now and it’s not at all clear that reforming primaries would be a silver bullet that would solve those problems. There are advocates that feel that way. But from the research it’s not clear that’s true,” Kaplan said.
In California’s primary, Schiff and Garvey squeezed out Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, a three-time winner in an Orange County district and Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, a progressive Democrat from Oakland in Congress since 1998.
That avoided another possible outcome of the “Top Two” primary system, one which is seen as troubling by election experts and political science researchers: two candidates from the same party ending up in the general election.
John Jackson, visiting professor at Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simom Public Policy Institute, dislikes the Jungle Primary for precisely that reason.
“If you have two candidates from the same party in the general election, you face the same issue the Top Two primary was supposed to address, lack of participation,” said Jackson. “What do members of the party not represented in the general election do? They’re probably going to just skip that race. Stay home, or whatever. There’s going to be a roll off in participation.”
“Top Two” primary results can also be “gamed” for political advantage and that’s precisely what happened in California. The Democrat Schiff boosted the candidacy of the Republican Garvey, figuring that in overwhelmingly Democratic California, Garvey would be much easier to defeat in the final election than Democrats Porter or Lee.
Of course, the same kind of shenanigans can occur in a partisan primary as well, as we witnessed in Illinois last year. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his allies spent millions to promote the candidacy of hard-right State Sen. Darren Bailey in the Republican primary, calculating that he’d be far easier to defeat in the general election than a more moderate GOP contender, African American Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin. Pritzker was correct. He buried Bailey in the November election.
Jackson doesn’t believe the primary system is necessarily broken. He said polarization is caused by many factors that have nothing to do with primaries.
A Paul Simon Institute study of the 2020 election in Illinois showed Republicans gained geographical ground but at the same time lost votes in the state’s major population centers. Illinois’ political parties have undergone a geographical realignment since the late 1990s that mirrors a national shift.
The study, which Jackson co-authored, found that “Democrats now have a stronghold in vote-rich large cities and most suburbs while Republicans have taken almost all the rural ground and small cities.”
“Republicans lose in that tradeoff because the larger metropolitan areas are where the votes are in Illinois, and Republicans aren’t competitive there,” Jackson said. But that polarization had nothing to do with primaries.
According to the study, “The geographical party realignment is a key factor that explains the deep polarization in the nation – and the state of Illinois – have experienced in the last three decades.”
Despite moves to change primaries in other states, there’s no such movement in Illinois.
“The thing in Illinois is that we are so cautious and status quo oriented,” said Redfield. “You know how to play the game, and you know how to win, and you know where the leverage points are. Adopting a new set of rules is always dangerous. That’s the way the party bosses see it.”
Moreover, enacting change without the political parties’ support is almost impossible, given that it takes a three-fifths vote in the General Assembly to place any referendum on the statewide ballot.
“Party leaders control the legislature and control the system and they don’t like change,” said Redfield.
Put another way, “Party leaders fear losing control of the areas they dominate more than they look forward to increasing their influence in enemy territory,” said Jackson. “Totally risk averse.”
Given the Democratic Party’s stronghold in statewide elections (Democrats control all statewide elective offices) and their supermajority iron grip in the General Assembly, they’re not anxious to change what’s working. And Republicans, who are more conservative politically and slower to enact change, don’t want to threaten their hegemony in Southern and rural areas.
According to the Illinois State Board of Elections, fewer than 1.8 million Illinoisans voted in the 2022 primary, about 22 percent of the state’s registered voters. That was the lowest total since 2014 and the number of first-time voters dipped below 2 million for the first time since then.
By contrast, the 2016 primary drew 3.6 million Illinois voters, 47 percent of the registered total; and the 2020 primary drew 2.3 million, 28 percent of the registered total.
Illinois has what election experts consider an open primary, since any citizen can vote in any party’s primary simply by asking for that party’s primary ballot at their polling place. Only 16 states have closed primaries, in which voters must formally register with their political party of choice in advance of the election date to vote in the primary.
Five states run non-partisan primaries with all candidates regardless of party listed on one primary ballot. In addition to California, those states are Nebraska, Washington, Alaska and Louisiana. Like California, in Nebraska and Washington the top two finishers move on to the general election. In Alaska, top four vote getters move on.
In Louisiana’s unique system, if any candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the first round, they win. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two finishers meet in a second election with the candidate receiving the majority of votes the winner.
Jackson believes more modest steps could be taken to increase turnout in Illinois’ primaries.
“For example, you could change it so that you’d declared your party inside the voting both as opposed to the registration table, with all your neighbors listening and watching ,” said Jackson. That would solve another problem.
“Historically in Illinois, middle level bureaucrats in Springfield wouldn’t be caught within shouting distance of a polling place during primaries because they didn’t want to be labelled as a Democrat or Republican in such a heavy patronage state,” said Redfield.
Reform for Illinois, a political watchdog group, doesn’t have an official position on reforming primaries. But it does support ranked choice voting in partisan primaries as a first step in making the voting process more fair.
In ranked-choice voting, citizens rank candidates for public office in order of preference. If a candidate receives 50 percent of first-choice votes, that candidate wins outright. But when no candidate receives a true majority of first-choice votes, the person with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from contention.
At that point, supporters of the dropped candidate will have their votes go to their second choice. That process repeats itself until one person receives at least 50% of all first-choice votes.
Ranked choice voting will receive its first Illinois test in the leafy lakefront suburb of Evanston, located just north of Chicago. The city has adopted the voting method and will put it to the test in its April 2025 municipal elections. New York City also used the system for the first time in its 2021 municipal elections. Turnout increased 29 per cent.
Kaplan believes ranked choice voting could be adapted for use in a partisan primary.
“Let’s say you have five Democrats in a primary. One of the problems you have now is that the candidates have the potential to split the vote,” said Kaplan. “That could mean you’d have a party nominee win with a small plurality, a minority of the votes cast, where more people didn’t want this person to win than did. Ranked choice voting gets rid of all that.”
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