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Consider Alvin Green, an unfunded candidate who looked like a deer in traffic in a recent interview. To be fair, I suspect the problem with that interview was akin to the Bush debate where he wore a transmitter to let someone feed him the answers. Apparently playing Cyrano de Bergerac doesn't work in Live Television.
That said, his victory in the SC primary does not appear to be luck, but neither does it appear to be the result of Democratic support. Rather it seems he was the beneficiary of a whole lot of Republican votes in the open primary. With their own nomination secured, the GOP seemed to focus their efforts to push a non-viable candidate to center stage.
Watch carefully California. You'll see more of the same once our own open primary takes effect. Let's expand on the example of the last post, where the Purple party shuts the Black party out of the election use the open choose-2 format we just adopted. In this variant, the Black Party has candidate Black-B step down to create a safe primary. Having investigated Purple A, B, and C thoroughly, they find some devastating scandal information on Purple-C, perhaps that he took a Black Party bribe.
Black keeps this information secret and using a secret email campaign, gets a sizable chunk of its voters to open-primary their vote to Purple-C. Now the primary vote looks like the added column to the table from my last post:
Viola, the Purple Party favorite Purple-A has been replaced with Purple-C, who can be soundly defeated on election day. The core problem with an open primary is that members of one party get to tell members of another party who they should support by casting their primary vote for someone they have no intention of voting for in the general election. That's corrupt.
That said, his victory in the SC primary does not appear to be luck, but neither does it appear to be the result of Democratic support. Rather it seems he was the beneficiary of a whole lot of Republican votes in the open primary. With their own nomination secured, the GOP seemed to focus their efforts to push a non-viable candidate to center stage.
Watch carefully California. You'll see more of the same once our own open primary takes effect. Let's expand on the example of the last post, where the Purple party shuts the Black party out of the election use the open choose-2 format we just adopted. In this variant, the Black Party has candidate Black-B step down to create a safe primary. Having investigated Purple A, B, and C thoroughly, they find some devastating scandal information on Purple-C, perhaps that he took a Black Party bribe.
Black keeps this information secret and using a secret email campaign, gets a sizable chunk of its voters to open-primary their vote to Purple-C. Now the primary vote looks like the added column to the table from my last post:
| Black-A | 25% | 35% |
| Black-B | 20% | 0% |
| Purple-A | 17% | 17% |
| Purple-B | 15% | 15% |
| Purple-C | 10% | 20% |
| Purple-D | 7% | 7% |
| Minor | 4% | 4% |
| Purple-E | 2% | 2% |
Viola, the Purple Party favorite Purple-A has been replaced with Purple-C, who can be soundly defeated on election day. The core problem with an open primary is that members of one party get to tell members of another party who they should support by casting their primary vote for someone they have no intention of voting for in the general election. That's corrupt.
