Closed Primary State? Affiliate!

Primary elections are important. Do not complain about bad general election candidates if you don’t vote in primaries. Primaries are the inter-party contests for who gets to be the general election candidate for the major political parties.

Primaries are often pretty clearly rigged. These systems have a lot of room for corruption. That doesn’t mean we should give up and not try to live in a functional democracy.

I think a lot of people are stuck in this fallacious belief system that you have to register for the party that you belong to and that you have to be a card-carrying member and adherent to the majority that party’s ideological line to register and vote in their primary. Or the belief that if you are truly independent, unaffiliated or of a third-party persuasion, you should register as such. Neither of these beliefs is true and they keep a lot of people from participating in primaries. The letter on your voter registration card means literally nothing but what primary you can vote in and what call or mailing lists you might be on. This means that if you’re not registered for a major political party, you are wasting an opportunity to vote in a race that might matter. You can generally change your affiliation very easily and frequently, but there are deadlines to do so ahead of primary day.

If you live in a closed primary state, you should figure out the deadline to register to affiliate with a party to vote in their primary. Depending on when you read this, it might either be coming up very soon or already too late. For the District of Columbia, where I live, it is on May 31, 2022, a few weeks before the primary election, but many other states will be sooner than that.

Once you know this date, get an understanding of which party you’d most like to influence the policy of. Maybe that is the party that you’re already affiliated with, maybe it isn’t. You should get an understanding of which primary candidates you’d most rather vote for, as well as which candidates you’d rather vote against. It sometimes might be valid or even important to use your primary vote in the latter manner. Register for that party and vote in the primary. This is how we should exist and utilize democracy in our horrible 2-party system.

If your local or state level politics are aligned into somewhat of a 1-party system, primaries are of even greater importance. The primary, in a lot of ways, is the election.

In an open primary state, any affiliation can go to the polls on primary day and select the ballot of their choice. This is really only one less step that people need to take than what I am encouraging in closed primary states.

Electoral politics might actually work to promote true representative democracy. One of the issues is that so many people have completely given up on it or never believed in it. Voter apathy is at an incredible high. Primary apathy is even higher. Lots of people don’t even think that primaries are a thing that is important.

Everyone should have the right to vote. Everyone should vote. Everyone should participate in primaries. Especially now. 2022 could very well be the most important election cycle of our lifetime to date. It has the potential to be a nail in the coffin of America, or it could be a new beginning. If we are fully utilizing our democratic rights, maybe we will get to decide. If you care so much about democracy, participate as fully as you are able. It can be taken or rendered further ineffective at any time by either political party.