To win more seats in Congress, the GOP must rethink primaries

Almost inevitably, the president’s party loses congressional seats during a midterm. Between 1934 and 2018, there were 22 of these elections and the incumbent party shed House seats in 19 of the 22 and Senate seats in 16 of them. The average loss per chamber was 28 in the House and 4 in the Senate. 

All of this should have the Democrats in utter panic. Democrats have incredibly slim majorities today: eight in the House and one in the Senate (if you count Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker). Their president and party leader, Joe Biden, has a high disapproval rating — 53 percent, far worse than Barack Obama had in 2010 when voters threw out 63 members of Team Donkey.  

Yet, credible election-watchers are now suggesting that November might not be so bad for congressional Democrats. The Cook Political Report, for example, says “the red wave looks more like a ripple.” Partly, these assessments are based on Democrats’ better-than-expected performances in a few special elections and Kansas voters’ rebuke of a right-to-life amendment. Partly, they are predicated on the possibility of higher liberal voter turnout due to angst over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

But the dampened expectations are also undeniably the product of the GOP running some suboptimal candidates. My colleague Gary Schmitt mordantly describes the choice the Pennsylvania GOP faced earlier this year. They could select “an American vet, former senior government official, and very successful businessman” or “a highly trained surgeon but one who, in recent years, has given a public platform to dubious diet and COVID-19 remedies, faith healers, and psychics who commune with the dead.” Partisans went with the latter candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, a man who lives in New Jersey and is lagging in the polls against an exceedingly beatable Democrat. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been forced to raise and pour millions of dollars into Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia and other states due to this “candidate quality” problem, as he put it.  

To be clear, candidate Oz and the others could still prevail. President Biden is a gaffe machine, and Democrats’ brand has become synonymous with high crime, inflation and political correctness. But it should not have been this hard for the GOP. The party finds itself in this anxious position partly due to Donald J. Trump, who has backed some of these weak candidates. The former president’s endorsements helped boost Republican voter support for Oz and other flawed candidates and ran contrary to the wishes of many GOP biggies in D.C. 

But blaming the man in Mar-a-Lago misses the bigger factor at play: party primaries.  

By their nature, party primaries are not especially well suited to selecting Republican candidates who can win general elections in districts or states with divided electorates. The reason is straightforward: only a small number of GOP voters participate in primaries, and those who participate tend to be intense partisans. 

Consider Ohio, for example. About 77 percent of its voters are independents. Only 10.4 percent registered with the GOP. A mere 1 million of the state’s 7.9 million registered voters participated in Team Elephant’s primary. J.D. Vance, the victor, got fewer than 341,000 (32.2 percent) of those GOP votes. Is it any wonder that Vance — who needlessly offended tens of thousands of Ohio voters with his dismissive comment about Russian atrocities in Ukraine — is not cake-walking to victory?  

This phenomenon of GOP primaries in purple states producing candidates beloved by the base but of limited appeal otherwise has repeated itself in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and too many other states to mention.  

The candidate selection process can be made worse by the huge amounts of often-dark money that gets poured into primaries by people who are not aligned with the party. Consider Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist. Nobody would mistake him for a standard Republican. Yet, he has poured millions into GOP primaries, to major effect. Consider the Club for Growth, an outfit headquartered in Washington, D.C. with various administrative offshoots. It also dumped big dollars into GOP primaries around the country. Even Democrats have dropped dollars into these GOP races in hopes they will produce candidates more likely to lose in general elections. 

One could go on, but the point is pretty clear: partisan primaries should not be romanticized as a grassroots-driven exercise in politics. They are low-turnout exercises that are the playthings of big money and interest groups.  

It does not have to be this way. Virginia’s GOP showed one path forward last year. Rather than hold a party primary, they convened a party convention and used ranked choice voting (RCV) to pick their candidate for governor. It worked spectacularly. They chose Glenn Youngkin, a candidate who had appeal beyond the base, and trounced deep-pocketed Democrat Terry McAuliffe.  

Being conservative means conserving what is worthy. Party primaries are a product of the Progressive Era a century ago. Times have changed. To win more consistently, the GOP should think about other ways to select its candidates. 

Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the coeditor of “Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform“ (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He hosts the Understanding Congress podcast.