Most states and all presidential elections are conducted under a partisan election process. This means that candidates for political office must run for election first as the representative of their party, before they appeal to the people as a whole. Because of gerrymandering and campaign finance laws that favor partisan candidates, open primaries, that have been enacted in a few states like California, Washington, and Louisiana, allow non-partisan voters to make their voice heard in the all-important primary elections, where most races are decided.
A new Gallup poll measuring the positive intensity of Republican presidential candidates, as well as President Obama, has yielded an interesting result. Candidates who don’t evoke strong emotion from partisans.
Last week, I noted in this column a long-standing paradox of American public opinion. Even in times of record high anti-incumbent sentiment, when a vast majority of Americans state that.
With the gradually dwindling field of Republican presidential candidates setting its sights on ousting President Barack Obama, electoral energy in the next election may not be as intense among Republicans.
On November 21st, the Libertarian Party of California, the Peace and Freedom Party of California, and the Green Party of Alameda County joined a handful of voters and third party.
The California Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s ruling denying a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Proposition 14 in Field v. Bowen, one of the pending lawsuits against the top-two open primary system.
Republicans are worried that the new legislative district maps that have been drawn up by the Citizens Redistricting Commission favor the Democratic party. In conjunction with the top-two open primary, however, in some districts they may also favor an Independent candidate.
Political insiders all over California are scrambling to make sense of how the state’s newly-drawn legislative districts might affect next year’s elections. Any such calculations are made all the more difficult by virtue of the fact that next year’s elections will also be held under the state’s new top-two open primary system.
