The Case for Reforming Primaries
How do we start a new party out of nothing?
Ever since the Democrat Party has succeeded in promoting cultural and economic Marxism over the past half-century, the Republican Party, with rare exceptions, has failed to serve as a counter-balance. Over the past few years, this dichotomy has reached critical mass, in which Democrats are now able to win 50-year culture war battles without even firing a shot. We conservatives are left without a party that fights for conservatism on any level, even among the state and federal officials in the reddest states, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters agree with conservatives on the issues. There are only a handful of Republicans that are willing to fight for anything, but they are too marginalized to affect any change. It is incontrovertibly clear that we need a new party.The age old question is how do we start a new party out of nothing? The short answer is that we begin by operating as a third party within the Republican Party by defeating incumbent Republicans and replacing them with conservatives who will remain loyal to the Constitution.
The reason conservatives have failed at replacing incumbents is because the ability of the grassroots to knock off incumbents in primaries has been such a dismal failure. I’m here to warn everyone that this cycle of failure will continue unless we succeed in returning the nomination process, at least for congressional elections, to representative forms of state conventions instead of media-driven popular primary contests. That is the only way to place everyone on an equal playing field and elect enough committed conservatives in a short enough time period to either take over the Republican Party nationally or have a large enough platform from which to launch a new party.
The Failure to Win Primaries
The level of betrayal and the degree of perfidy among Republicans elected on a both the state and federal level is so bad that we can’t even fight the most extreme policies of the Left in the most conservative states, much less in Washington, D.C. And yes, despite the “rebellious” electorate looking for change, every single House and Senate incumbent has been re-nominated and the Establishment has won most of the open seats this cycle.
What gives?
Knocking off incumbents in House races in nearly impossible and doing so in a Senate race is virtually impossible. And for a variety of factors, it has become even harder in recent years. Waiting to change the party quickly enough through primary challenges under the existing rigged system would work as well as trying to drink a big gulp with a fork.
It can truly be said that just one individual over the past 100 years has successfully challenged a sitting elected Republican senator from the Right in a direct popular primary and came out stable enough to win the general election. Yes, it happened only once in the century since the progressives replaced party conventions with popular primaries: Alfonse D’ Amato beating incumbent Senator Jacob Javits in New York in 1980. And even that race was an anomaly because Javits was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease before running for reelection. Also, it’s not like D’ Amato was Ted Cruz in terms of his commitment to conservatism.
The only other time a right-leaning challenger won a primary and general election was when Sam Brownback knocked off RINO Sheila Frahm in 1996 in Kansas, but Frahm had just been appointed to the seat a few months prior and was never elected. Bob Smith was knocked off by John Sununu in New Hampshire in 2002, but that proves our point: Smith had lost the support of the party establishment and Sununu challenged him from the Left with the support of the media and the elite donors. Joe Miller in Alaska and Richard Mourdock in Indiana are the only two recent success stories in primaries, but they both failed to close the deal in the general election because they were so weakened and undermined by the party.
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Source: The Case for Reforming Primaries|Conservative Review
