My fellow Californians, your government is lying to you. Without conscience or remorse. About two very important subjects: democracy and elections.

The lie is not new. It is 14 years old. And in our polarized era, it is a bipartisan falsehood—parroted by both political parties and defended by media of all types—including, perhaps, the newspaper or website where you are reading this column.

The lie is not hidden. The state uses your tax money to publish it in the voter guide and ballots it sends you.

So, what is this lie?

It’s that the spring state elections you participate in—like the one scheduled for March 5—are primaries.

“Primaries” are elections in which voters belonging to a particular party select the candidate who will stand for that party in a general election. The truth is California no longer has elections like that for either state elected offices or Congressional representatives. I know because I was there when 54% of California voters chose to eliminate such contests in June 2010, by voting to approve Proposition 14.

But no one ever got rid of the name “primary.”

Prop. 14’s official name was the “Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act.” But what it did was eliminate the primary and establish in its place a two-round, “top-two” system.

In California’s top-two, the first election of the year is the opposite of a primary. It’s a general election, in which candidates of every party are on the ballot together.

That means that California’s fall election—in which the two top finishers from the “primaries” face off—is also mislabeled now. We call it a general election. But it’s actually a run-off election between the top two candidates from the spring elections.

This confusion, like so much in California’s crazy-quilt political system, is the fault of well-intentioned good government types. Reformers spent decades trying to make politics less partisan by eliminating primaries. But they often still referred to their proposals as “primaries,” because the term was familiar and court-tested.

You might think this is a meaningless matter of nomenclature—a small-time fraud, like the grocery stores that sell shrimp that isn’t really shrimp or call sparkling wine “Champagne.” But you’d be wrong. The “primary” lie suppresses turnout when it matters most: in the March elections.

Voters usually focus on November, when the whole country goes out to the polls. But California voters have more choices and power in the March election when their ballots have the widest variety of candidates.

For that reason, March is the election voters should prioritize. But they don’t. California’s turnout patterns are the same as they were before we eliminated primaries. In 2022, only 27% of eligible Californians cast ballots in the spring election, as opposed to 41% in November 2022. In 2020’s presidential election year, the figures were 38% for spring, and just shy of 71% for November.

That made sense before 2010, but it doesn’t anymore.

If you’re a California voter, and you didn’t know any of this, don’t blame yourself. No one ever made it clear. There’s been no real educational effort to explain this changed reality or to get Californians out to the polls for the more important spring election. Election officials, media, candidates—the whole world, really—still call the first election “the primary,” and treat it as if it’s a warm-up to November, rather than the main event.

That’s hypocrisy. This state’s leaders and media routinely rail against misinformation in the democratic process even as they repeat this basic and damaging “primary” misinformation every election year. They run their campaigns and sell their subscriptions as defenders of democracy, but their inability to correctly label elections means that people don’t understand the real stakes, and perils, of the top-two system.

For more than a decade, I’ve been a lonely voice asking our leaders to correct themselves, and label elections accurately. I’ve talked with state officials and media, including members of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times mastheads. I’ve suggested alternatives to the “primary” label. I prefer “general” but would be happy with “first round” or “the main event” or “The Big One.”

I’ve gotten nowhere.

Some people simply don’t see the problem. Some acknowledge the error but say their hands are tied—because Prop. 14 and state documents have called the spring election a “primary,” they need to call it that too. Others say it would just confuse the public to correct the record now.

But we shouldn’t give up.

So this year, let’s resolve to take The Big One seriously. If more Californians showed up at the polls on March 5, more Californians would get to winnow down the top two who make November’s runoff. With more voters, we’d get more representative verdicts on everything from our next U.S. Senator to whether we want to change California’s mental health policies, as Prop. 1 proposes.

This year’s spring contest provides an unusually promising opportunity to address the labeling problem. Because this March there is a real primary on the ballot—the presidential primary. Prop. 14 didn’t abolish contests among Democrats to nominate a Democratic presidential candidate, or among Republicans to nominate a Republican.

That makes this year’s ballot a mix—a true presidential primary alongside our statewide general election, in which Californians can choose from multi-party lists of candidates for the state legislature, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. Since this election is both a primary and a general, state leaders could use the ballot to explain the distinction to the public.

Donald Trump is all but certain to win California’s GOP presidential primary. His campaign is based on an election lie—that he won the 2020 contest. California media and Democratic politicians will rightfully condemn him for that in the weeks ahead.

The problem is, they have their own record of lying about our elections. Sure, their lie isn’t as fascist or as dangerous to the republic as Trump’s election denialism. But it is a lie nonetheless. Right now would be a wonderful moment to admit error and fix this election’s label.

The post California Keeps Repeating Its Own Election Lie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of Roosevelt’s most enduring impacts was his crucial role in the rise of state-based primary elections, explained Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, professor at the University of Southern California, and author of the new book Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary. He shared lessons from his research with an overflow crowd at a Zócalo event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. on Friday.

“If the parties today still selected nominees the way they did [before] Roosevelt created these primaries, I think it’s pretty likely that everything would be dominated by party insiders,” Cowan said. “Jeb Bush would probably be the Republican party frontrunner, and Donald Trump wouldn’t be taken seriously. I don’t think Bernie Sanders would be taken seriously on the other side if there were not a chance for the public to participate directly in these decisions.”

Roosevelt had already served two terms as president from the Republican Party when he decided to throw his hat into the ring again in late 1911. Party bosses decided the nominee in the smoke-filled backrooms of political conventions. Roosevelt thought that his familiarity with these men would win him the nomination.

But within months it became clear that his chief opponent William Howard Taft, the incumbent president who had been Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, had locked up the bosses.

So Roosevelt decided that primaries had to be the centerpiece of his campaign. “Let the people rule” became his slogan. He lost the first three primaries in American history in 1912, including one in his home state of New York.

“Humiliated and furious,” Roosevelt started campaigning on the road with vigor, Cowan said. He took a train to Chicago, found enormous success with an “anti-establishment message of reform,” and won the Illinois primary in a rout. “It was the first primary in American history to change a campaign’s momentum,” Cowan said.

By June, he had won nine primaries and thought he had a path to victory. But of course, primaries weren’t the dominant way of choosing a party’s nominee in 1912. Roosevelt still was a long shot—Taft’s men controlled the nomination process and the delegates at the national party convention.

Roosevelt’s supporters set about trying to turn delegates to Roosevelt’s side. Perhaps a large number of African-American delegates from the South might be convinced to switch teams.

Unfortunately, Roosevelt couldn’t capture enough of them. So he went across the street from the convention and announced that he would start his own party: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” he famously told the crowd.

In one of the more disappointing twists of history, Cowan said, this new party wouldn’t seat any of the black delegates from the Deep South who had switched teams for Roosevelt or the biracial delegations they came with to the Bull Moose convention, opting instead to seat the all-white delegations from those states.

Cowan said he struggled with why Roosevelt made such a decision. Perhaps Roosevelt thought this move would win him some southern states. Perhaps he thought he’d get credit for seating black delegates from the North even if the ones from the Deep South weren’t seated. Perhaps he planned to help blacks once he was in power.

In any case, Cowan said, he considers Roosevelt’s decision to exclude southern blacks as a “stain on his reputation,” and a “disgraceful” example of self-interest and racism.

A half-century after Roosevelt, Cowan himself got involved in primary reform. It was 1968, and Cowan saw a great unfairness remaining in this “mixed” system of primaries and backroom dealings.

In a clip from a black-and-white </a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=298X18RnYIQ>ABC news report played for the audience, the newscaster Howard K. Smith talked about how a Yale student named Geoffrey Cowan put together a pamphlet that described how the methods for choosing 600 delegates at the Democratic nominating convention were not even open to the public. That set in motion a string of events, including U.S. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota leading a commission to write new rules and convince the states to accept them. Eventually the states agreed to a more open process and the newscaster pronounced Cowan as someone “who did more to change Democratic conventions than anybody since Andrew Jackson first started them.”

During the Zócalo event’s question-and-answer session, audience members asked Cowan his opinion on a variety of issues in the presidential nominating process. How does he feel about caucuses? What does he think of a primary decided by national voting rather than going state by state? What does he think about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which has made it much easier for money to flow into campaigns? What does he think of the media’s role in elections?

Cowan found much fault with the current system: When people caucus, their bosses could be in the room and sway their opinions. He disagreed with Citizens United that money was the same as speech and both should bear few restrictions. But he also dismissed common reform ideas; a national primary, he said, would benefit those with the most money and the most name recognition.

Cowan left one of his most pointed criticisms for the media. “The press has been almost entirely wrong this season and yet I don’t think the press has a lot of humility about that,” he said.

But Cowan wasn’t sure there were many viable alternatives. “There are problems with every system,” he said.

The post Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Should Thank Theodore Roosevelt appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the main message of Zócalo’s first event of 2016, a talk by Richard L. Hasen, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. In front of a full house at Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, Hasen broke down the nuances and complexities that are often missed in discussions of campaign finance, and what he believes are the key steps to limiting money’s current outsized influence on the political process.

Hasen opened with an anecdote about the power America’s wealthiest campaign donors have over presidential hopefuls: In early 2014, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accidentally upset billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a prominent supporter of Republican candidates, by using the phrase “occupied territories” in discussing areas like Israel’s West Bank. Christie hastily apologized, meeting with Sheldon, a conservative Zionist, in private to clarify his support of Israel.

Who could blame Christie the candidate, asked Hasen, for his obsequiousness? Adelson represents a small group of super-elites who contribute most of the money that goes into presidential campaigns. In the first part of the 2016 election campaign cycle (through June 2015), just 158 families and the companies they own or control contributed nearly half the funds that were raised to support presidential candidates. Adelson himself spent upward of $150 million on the 2012 election—only a third of which was reported to the Federal Election Commission.

And yet, Hasen pointed out, the Republicans who raise the most money aren’t winning elections. Newt Gingrich, a huge beneficiary of Adelson’s spending in the 2012 presidential race, didn’t become president. Jeb Bush, whose super PAC raised more money in the first half of 2015 than President Obama’s main super PAC did for the entire 2012 election cycle, still trails in popularity behind Donald Trump, who has spent just a fraction of Bush’s campaign.

This goes to show, said Hasen, that money isn’t corrupting 21st-century elections in the way that liberals claim it has since the landmark 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission removed restrictions on campaign financing. “The new Citizens United era is not full of politicians taking bribes or elections going to the highest bidder. To claim this puts the spotlight in the wrong place,” he explained. “The more central problem of money in politics is something just as troubling, but a lot harder to see. It’s a system in which economic inequalities, inevitable in a free market economy, are transformed into political inequalities that affect both electoral and legislative outcomes.”

He went on to detail how this system plays out in subtle, granular ways. Money skews public policy toward the interest of the wealthiest political donors, for instance. Even the threat of big money being spent against a person or cause is enough to influence policies, Hasen contended.

And while expensive advertising alone isn’t enough to sway well-informed and engaged voters, “we know that in a close election, advertising can swing voters, who are generally the least informed,” he said. And that can influence election outcomes.

Hasen contended that money’s influence on politics is only growing and creating greater inequality. But there are ways to reform the way we handle money in politics—without completely overturning the Citizens United ruling.

The challenge, Hasen said, is toeing the line between promoting political equality and “not squelching too much political speech”—i.e., imposing censorship. He proposes creating a voucher system in which every voter in an election is given $200 to donate to whatever campaigns and interest groups they please. The idea is to guarantee public funding that goes into what people actually care about.

On top of this voucher system, Hasen would like to impose a $25,000 cap on campaign spending per federal election—and a $500,000 cap per two-year election cycle. This limit would apply to candidates themselves, and any combination of individuals’ contributions to organizations and direct contributions. Overall, the limit would affect very few voters, but would keep the exclusive group that has an outsized influence in check.

In a lively question-and-answer session, Hasen elaborated on his vision for change, reflected on the media’s importance in educating voters, and underscored how important the upcoming election is in determining the country’s future—largely because of the influence it will have on the Supreme Court. Considering the advancing age of many of the justices, the next president is likely to appoint multiple new members, which Hasen notes will give the president immense power over many issues, including election financing.

“No one pays attention to the Supreme Court,” he said. “But if you think of all the hot-button issues, it all goes through the Supreme Court.”

If Hasen had to boil his overall project down to a single mission, he said, it would be “trying to show these new justices that the time has come to rethink 40 years of mistakes, and to accept that political equality is a reason for limiting money in elections, so long as it can be done in a way that has the ability to protect First Amendment rights of political competition.”

The post Money Isn’t Corrupting American Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But today, with a new campaign season upon us, our presidential primaries don’t seem to meet anyone’s standards for popular rule. Tiny, unrepresentative states have outsized power. Billionaires and their money are often the most important factors in the contests. Media coverage rewards extremist rhetoric and partisanship, and only a tiny fraction of American voters end up having a say in the presidential nomination process.

In advance of a January 15 Zócalo event, “Do Primaries Really Make Presidential Elections More Democratic?,” we asked scholars, pundits, and political practitioners: How should we improve the presidential nominating process?

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