Politics and Elections, Part 2

Bart Cocchiola, 14 December, 2022

At all levels, government exists “For the People”.   The taxes we pay as citizens are our investment in the effective and efficient administration of our state, county, and local governments for the benefit of all residents.  What we do in New Jersey to elect candidates and to fund our government isn’t for the benefit of the DNC or RNC, it is for New Jersey.

Having presented the basics of how our government and politics are organized in Part 1, let’s look at how political parties and their leadership dominate what happens in the state.  

Our two established political parties are complicated, privately run entities which can be subject to, and which benefit from, public regulation. They are each structured so as to include national, state, county, and sometimes local committees with each level having leadership that influences both party activities and election outcomes. 

Political parties should exist as groups of voters with common beliefs and values interested in helping citizens to fulfill their role in our democracy as voters. Instead, both parties have evolved as extremely wealthy, powerful and influential organizations that often promote their own interests over the values and needs of their own members.  In fact, Americans across the country have never been more dissatisfied with our two political parties

Political committees at all levels endorse candidates for office, a practice that was illegal in New Jersey until the mid 1970’s.  Laws prevented political parties from endorsing candidates in order to prevent unreasonable and inappropriate influence on voters during primary campaigns/elections.  After all, how can primary elections be free and fair if one candidate for each office is running with the virtually insurmountable advantage of an endorsement from their local political committee?  

It gets worse.  Legislative and congressional districts are intentionally designed to give the advantage to one party or the other.  In those districts that are designed to heavily favor one party, the endorsement is the election.  The candidate that receives the party endorsement is all but guaranteed to win the primary election and then go on to win the general election. 

The endorsement of candidates by their political parties prior to their primary elections has shown that, not surprisingly, endorsed candidates win primary elections.  As a result, fewer and fewer people bother to vote in primaries because of the persistent expectation that endorsed candidates will win regardless of who runs against them.  Furthermore, the few people that actually do vote in primaries are likely to be those that are most enthusiastically following directions from party leadership.  With groups of the most extreme voters choosing endorsed candidates via primaries, non-endorsed candidates have little chance of winning.  You might be thinking, why would anyone even continue a campaign once they’ve failed to secure their committee endorsement?  Now you understand why there aren’t more candidates running for these positions!

And what about the campaigns of endorsed candidates? They are directed towards their party’s most extreme voters using the most extreme ideas.  Once elected, they have difficulty explaining to the people that endorsed them why they might need to compromise in working with elected officials from the other party to solve problems and get stuff done.  In this environment, compromise is political suicide so very little gets done, voters lose, government remains ineffective, our tax money goes to waste.

Democracy reform is about getting more people involved in our political and election practices, it is about having elected officials represent greater segments of our population, it is about creating conditions where elected officials can collaborate with greater numbers of other elected officials to build consensus around better solutions to help more people.  I hope you see now that our current system of primary elections does none of this.

But wait, it gets worse!  Once those candidates are endorsed by their political committees, they get the best spots on the ballots.  For each office that is up for election, there is an endorsed candidate and all of the endorsed candidates are arranged in a line with each having a label below their names showing they are their local party’s endorsed candidate.  It’s referred to as ‘The County Line’, there is no other state in the country that designs their ballots this way and 65% of voters polled in New Jersey disapprove of it.  Here is everything you could ever want to know about ‘The County Line’ written by Brett M. Pugach, Esq. for the Rutgers University Law Review in 2020;

https://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/72_Rutgers_Univ_L_Rev_0629_Pugach.pdf

The link below includes a video; click ahead to the 55 minute mark of the video where the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee Chair, Arlene Q. Perez, is introduced.  She explains everything I’ve just said in stunning and frank clarity.  Arlene is the sister of Wanda whom I served with as a school board member so we are all neighbors, for what it’s worth. I respect Arlene’s service to her community and appreciate her honesty.  

Political parties should not accept a culture and practices that discourage a broad variety of enthusiastic candidates from being involved. Political parties should not accept a culture and practices which encourage candidates to narrowly focus their campaigns on the most extreme voters, that discourage more voters from participating, and which exclude unaffiliated voters.

The fact of the matter is, local political committees, even on their best most credible day, shouldn’t conduct what amounts to a privately administered candidate endorsement process, ahead of the primaries, when there is already a publicly funded, statewide, primary election process in place that appropriately places that responsibility on voters to select their candidates. 

Political parties can make sure voters are educated as to what the issues are and can create opportunities for voters to hear about candidates directly from the candidates themselves.  Parties can make sure a maximum number of voters show up at polls and cast ballots on the day of the primary election.  Parties can ensure their candidates are prepared should they become their party’s nominee when the primaries have been completed. Lastly, parties can create and sustain a culture that encourages their elected members to seek out the best ideas to solve problems on behalf of all residents, regardless of where those ideas come from.