this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
-42 points (8.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43750 readers
1211 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm wondering if there is a bit of misunderstanding or miscommunication going on here? I don't know the statement or the context, but my interpretation based on OPs title is that this person is implying ...
Registered Democrats will switch their party affiliation so that they can vote for Haley to be the Republican nominee for president.
The implication that enough Democrats will do this that it will affect the outcome is, how shall I put this nicely, wholly unsupported by data or reality. On the other hand, the intellectually dishonest types will actively seek examples of people doing this (or claiming to do it) and use that as "evidence" that it is happening on a wide scale.
The fact that some number of people will switch parties to vote in a primary is inevitable and happens every presidential election cycle and is not a tool used only by members of one party. You might as well predict that someone will get into a car accident in the USA in the next 24 hours.
I have read about individuals doing this, but to my knowledge it has never happened in any sufficient numbers to tilt a primary in any state.
Some states run open primaries, so that any person can vote in any (but only one) primary. Other states run closed primaries, such that any voter who has registered as a member of that party can vote in that particular party’s primary. Yet others (eg, California last time I checked) have mixed modes. I believe the CA GOP primary is closed by the Democratic primary is open.
You can tell relatively easily by the number of votes in any given primary election whether they’re consistent in terms of turnout with previous years. As far as I’ve ever read, they tend to be year over year consistent. The one trend that has been noted in recent years is a small but as far as I know steady increase in independent voters (who as stated may or may not be able to vote in primaries depending on their state, but based on number of votes cast do not seem to have been a deciding factor in primary votes).
I generally have suspected that the idea of people switching parties to act as primary spoilers is largely just projection, as we tend to expect malfeasance of the Other, but the hard truth is that you can barely get large numbers of people to vote in actual elections, much less in something like a primary.
So, it varies by state because everything is a certain degree of a shit-show here. In my state, you show up at the primary election site and you ask for one of two ballots. That's enough to "register" you as a Dem or Rep. It's pretty meaningless.
I know of one coworker who voted for Trump in the 2015 primary to "take down the Republican party from the inside." Great strategy, Steve. I'm guessing that some similar idiocy is what's being talked about here.
thank you.