Why every Republican owes the primary election a vote, every time

There is one sentence you can set your watch by. It gets spoken at every cookout, every church fellowship hall and every county fair, in every cycle, in every state. "I cannot believe that is who we nominated." The speaker is sincere. The speaker is also, very often, the person who skipped the primary because it fell on a Tuesday, the weather was nice, and the ballot looked like a tax form.

Let me say this as kindly as I can: you do not get to complain about a menu you refused to order from. The nominee did not fall out of the sky. Somebody picked that nominee, and the somebodies were whoever showed up. If you want a say in what your party looks like in November, the price of admission is a few minutes in the spring or the summer. This post makes the case in plain steps, puts some made-up numbers on the table so you can check the math yourself, and then takes on the best argument for staying home.

The question and the terms

The question: does a Republican voter who cares about the outcome in November have a duty to vote in the Republican primary as well? My answer is yes, and I mean "duty" in the ordinary sense, the way you owe a neighbor a hand moving a couch. Nobody will arrest you for skipping it. You just leave the couch on the porch.

Two terms first. A primary is a party election that chooses the person who will carry the party's label onto the general-election ballot. A general election is the November contest where all the nominees meet. States run primaries differently. Some are closed, meaning only registered members of the party may vote in them. Some are open, meaning any registered voter can choose a party's ballot on the day. Some are in between. A few states hold runoffs when no candidate clears a required share. And some parties, in some states, choose certain nominees by caucus or convention instead. Your county election office or your state's election website tells you which rules apply to you, and our post on Can I vote in the Republican primary? Your registration questions answered walks through the registration questions.

One more distinction, because it keeps the argument honest. "Voting in the primary matters" is a factual claim about how nominees are chosen. "You owe it to your party and your neighbors to do it" is a value claim. I will defend both, and I will tell you which one I am doing at any given moment.

Premise one: the primary writes the November ballot

Here is the argument in numbered form, the way a debater would lay it out.

One. The general-election ballot has a finite number of names on it. In most races there is one nominee per major party.

Two. Those names are chosen before the general election begins, by the party's own process. For most offices in most states, that process is the primary.

Three. A voter who skips the primary therefore has no say in which names appear. By the time November arrives, the menu is printed.

That is the structural point, and it is worth sitting with for a second. The general election is a choice among finalists. The primary is where the finalists are selected. If you only vote in November, you are a judge at a talent show who never saw the auditions. You will have strong feelings about the finalists and no influence over who they are.

This is not a small matter of etiquette. The Constitution does not mention primaries at all. Parties grew up in the states, and in the early 1900s reformers pushed to replace smoke-filled convention rooms with a vote of the party's own rank and file. You can read how that played out for our party in How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses. The whole point of the reform was to hand the decision to ordinary voters. Skipping the primary hands it right back to the insiders, the very people the reformers were trying to get around.

Premise two: in a safe seat, the primary is the real election

Four. Many districts and many local offices are drawn or settled so that one party reliably wins the general election. A Republican county commission seat in a deeply Republican county is an example. So is a statehouse seat in a district where Republicans win every cycle by wide margins.

Five. In those places, the winner of the Republican primary is, for practical purposes, the winner of the office. The general election is a formality with fireworks.

I am careful here, because I do not want to claim more than I can prove. I am not saying every race is decided in the primary. Competitive districts are real, and in them November decides everything. I am saying that in safe seats, which exist in every state, the person who wins the primary will almost certainly hold the office. That means the primary is the only contest in which your vote can change the result. In November your vote in that district is a ceremonial vote, as nice as a bouquet and just about as likely to change the outcome.

A good test is to look at your own ballot from the last cycle. Look at every office where only one party had a realistic chance. For each one, the real decision was made months before, and the question for you is whether you were in the room.

Premise three: the crowd is small

Six. Turnout in primaries is generally much lower than turnout in general elections.

This one you can check for yourself. County and state election offices publish turnout for every election, and the comparison is not close in the ordinary run of things. I will not quote a figure here, because the numbers vary by state, year and office, and a figure I cannot cite is worth nothing. Pull up your own county's results. Find the primary and the November election for the same office and divide the votes cast by the registered voters. You will see what I mean.

Why is the crowd small? Several reasons, and none of them is mysterious. Primaries are held at odd times of the year, often with little advertising. Many voters are not sure whether they are allowed to take part. Many assume that the real election is in November. And the campaigns themselves are often quiet and local, run in the shadow of whichever big race tops the ticket. Add those up and you get a smaller, more dedicated, more intense electorate. That electorate has opinions, and it votes them.

It is not a criticism of those voters. They are doing exactly what I am telling you to do. It is a statement about arithmetic: when few people show up, each person who does counts for more.

Premise four: small crowds set the tone for everyone

Seven. A nominee tends to answer to the voters who nominated them, because those are the voters who can end a political career at the next primary.

Eight. Therefore the small group that decides the primary has more influence over what the party stands for, and how its candidates behave, than the larger group who vote in November.

That is real power, and it is available to anyone. A voter who turns up to the primary is not just picking a name. That voter is telling every officeholder in the state what the party's base will and will not accept. An officeholder who cast a vote the base hated knows to expect a challenger. An officeholder who ignored the base knows the same. Now notice what happens when the base stays home: the officeholder gets to ignore it with impunity, and the only people left to listen to are the donors and the consultants.

This is also why The Republican Party org chart, from your precinct to the RNC begins at the precinct, not in Washington. The party is built from the ground up, and the ground is the small, local elections where a few dozen votes make a difference.

The arithmetic, with made-up numbers

Let me show you what low turnout does. Everything in this section is a hypothetical, with round numbers chosen so you can check the math in your head. It is not a real district.

Picture a state House district with 180,000 registered Republicans. Suppose that in the primary, 15 percent of them vote.

• 180,000 x 0.15 = 27,000 ballots cast.

Suppose five candidates are running, and the winner takes 36 percent of the votes cast. In a crowded field, that is easily enough to win outright.

• 27,000 x 0.36 = 9,720 votes for the winner.

Now compare that to the district as a whole. The 9,720 voters who chose the nominee are what share of the registered Republicans?

• 9,720 / 180,000 = 0.054, or 5.4 percent.

And suppose 400,000 people vote in the general election, as they might in a district that size in a big year.

• 9,720 / 400,000 = 0.0243, or about 2.4 percent.

So in this hypothetical, fewer than 3 people in every 100 who show up in November chose the person they will be voting for in November. If that is the winning party in a safe seat, those 9,720 people effectively chose a lawmaker for a district of hundreds of thousands.

Now change one thing. Suppose instead that 30 percent of registered Republicans had voted.

• 180,000 x 0.30 = 54,000 ballots cast.

The same 9,720 votes would now be:

• 9,720 / 54,000 = 0.18, or 18 percent of the ballots.

A candidate on 18 percent does not win a five-way race against opponents who can reach the rest of those 54,000. Somebody else does, probably the one who appeals to more of them. Doubling the turnout changes the winner. That is what I mean when I say every vote in a primary is a heavy one. In this made-up district, finding the extra 27,000 voters could have changed the result, and every one of them could have been talked into going by a neighbor who simply asked.

The strongest objection: nobody is perfect, so why bother

Here is the opposing case at its best. I will state it so its holders would nod.

"Look," the skeptic says, "I have watched the primaries. The candidates are all mediocre. One is a careerist, one is a loudmouth, one has a record I do not trust. None of them speaks for me. Voting for any of them is endorsing a flawed choice. I would rather save my energy for a candidate who deserves it, or for the general election, when the stakes are clear. And my one vote will not change anything."

That is a reasonable frame of mind, and I have sympathy for it. Here is why it fails.

First, it confuses the goal. The primary is not an endorsement of a saint. It is a choice among actual, available human beings. If you wait for a perfect option you will wait forever, because perfect options do not file for office. Politics is a choice between the real candidates on the ballot, not between a real candidate and an ideal one. A voter who agrees with a candidate on most of what matters has found a candidate, not a traitor.

Second, it ignores the differences between the candidates. "All mediocre" is almost never true when you look closely. Candidates differ on taxes, on spending, on how they treat their own voters, on whether they show up, on whether they will still be answering the phone in the second year. Differences between flawed candidates are still differences. The gap between a careerist and a loudmouth, or between either of them and a competent county official who has never missed a meeting, is the very gap you are voting on.

Third, the "my one vote will not matter" argument is the argument every other voter is making. If everyone who thinks it stays home, the people who do not think it decide everything. That is not a theory. It is what low turnout means.

Fourth, and most important, the choice to skip the primary is not neutral. It is a vote for whatever the active voters prefer. If you do not like the active voters' preference, the only remedy is to become one of them.

A second objection: primaries make parties extreme

The other serious critique goes the other way. It says that low-turnout primaries reward the loudest voices, push candidates toward the edges, and leave a candidate who could win a general election on the sidelines. There is something to it. Candidates do run to the energetic part of the electorate in a primary, and a candidate who wins by appealing to a passionate minority may have to stretch back toward the middle later.

But look at the remedy. If the problem is that the primary is decided by a narrow slice of the party, the answer is a wider slice, not a narrower one. The cure for a small crowd is more people. It is not a smaller room with a more comfortable chair. Mainstream conservatives, business owners, retired teachers and busy parents all have the same ballot access as the activists. When they skip the primary they do not make the party more moderate. They make it more dependent on the activists, by definition.

That is also a lesson from our own history. The story in The 2016 Republican Primary and How a Field of Seventeen Became One is a story about a primary electorate deciding a question that many in the party's leadership thought was already settled. You can like the outcome or dislike it. You cannot say the voters did not decide it.

What it means to owe the vote

So what does "owing" the primary actually involve? Not much. That is the beauty of it.

1. Know your date. Primary dates vary by state, and so do runoff dates. Put them in your phone the day they are announced. Your state election site and county clerk publish them.
2. Check your registration and your party rules. In a closed or semi-closed state, your registration or declared party may determine whether you can vote in the Republican primary at all. Fix it before the deadline, not on election morning.
3. Study the whole ballot. The primary ballot has more than the top race. County commissioners, judges, sheriffs, state legislators and party officers are often chosen there, and those are the offices where one vote counts for the most. Our post how to read your ballot before you get to the voting booth covers how to read it ahead of time.
4. Use early voting or an absentee ballot if your state offers it. Then you do not even have to rearrange your Tuesday.
5. Bring someone. Ask one neighbor, one relative, one co-worker. In the hypothetical above, the whole election turned on finding more voters. The most reliable way to find a voter is to ask one.
6. Do the math on your own race. The the win-number worksheet, how many votes does your race really take shows how to work out how many votes a race really takes. It is usually fewer than you expect.

If you want a ritual, make it a rule: a Republican who is eligible votes in the primary, every time, and then has earned the right to be disappointed in November, if disappointment is coming.

The bottom line

• The general election picks among finalists. The primary picks the finalists. If you skip it, you hand your say to whoever shows up.
• In safe seats the primary is the real election, and the winner can be decided by a few thousand votes, sometimes fewer.
• A small electorate means each vote is heavy. In the made-up district above, doubling turnout from 15 to 30 percent would have changed the likely winner.
• "Nobody is perfect" is true and beside the point. You are choosing among real people, not saints, and the differences between them are real.
• Look up your next primary date today, check your registration, and ask one other person to go with you.