On Tuesday, December 10, voters in the Fifth Congressional District of Massachusetts will select its next representative in Congress.
What a waste of money.
Now, i love elections. I really love a good contest, a debate of the issues. However, the December 10 election is going to have none of that. Frank Addivinola is going to attempt to sell bacon cheeseburgers at a vegan convention, bringing tea party rhetoric into a deep blue district.
The problem is simple. You now have a runoff between the first place finisher (Katherine Clark) and a distant sixth-place finisher on Primary Day. Addivinola’s 4,759 primary votes were closer to Paul John Maisano’s 1,498 votes than fifth-place finisher Karen Spilka’s 9,057 votes.
I will certainly walk across the street to my friendly polling place, and keep my friendly and lonely polling workers company for a few minutes while ensuring my district dispatches a Democrat to fill this seat. But, friends, wouldn’t it be better if the voters of the Fifth had a better choice?
Just to set the stage, here’s a look at the votes cast last Tuesday (Republicans and Democrats grouped together).
| Katherine Clark | 21,959 |
| Peter Koutoujian | 15,290 |
| Carl Sciortino | 11,185 |
| Will Brownsberger | 10,142 |
| Karen Spilka | 9,057 |
| Frank Addivinola | 4,759 |
| Mike Stopa | 2,477 |
| Tom Tierney | 2,456 |
| Paul John Maisano | 1,498 |
| Martin Long | 394 |
Clark won 27% of the votes cast last Tuesday, Addivinola won 6%. Clark will go to Washington because she was able to get about a quarter of the folks coming to the polls to vote for her, which led to her narrow-cast strategy.
What if Katherine Clark had to get to 50% against another strong candidate? If Katherine had to run against the second place finisher, instead of the sixth place tea party guy, would her campaign be any different?
Of course.
If we had a “top two” primary, we would have Clark versus Koutoujian, not Clark versus Addivinola. We would have a real race. Clark would need to expand beyond the “women’s issues” that dominated her primary to appeal to a group of voters who would see Koutoujian as a reasonable alternative. She would need to talk about poverty, transportation, Afghanistan, education, sequestration, and the other topics of the day. So would Peter. It would be a great race, and the winner would be stronger as a result.
There have been two articles in the past 24 hours supporting this concept. The New York Times describes the top-two primary as one of three reforms that have turned the California legislature from gridlock to productivity. A Washington Post article goes even farther, describing the top-two system as the basis for ending the nonsense in the House of Representatives. Reid Wilson writes, “A top-two primary system, one that incentivizes candidates in even the most conservative or liberal districts to appeal to the vast middle that otherwise plays a limited role in picking members of Congress.”
My Instant Runoff friends are going to chime in here, saying their solution will fix the problem and save the cost of the second election. It might be purer democracy, but I think a little too much goes on under the hood. Ballot switching isn’t very transparent, and I think the final election with the two top candidates is more likely to support the discussion of issues and priorities we deserve. I also suspect an Instant Runoff ballot question in Massachusetts would be soundly defeated, while a top-two primary would be easy to understand and would be the kind of reform that would be likely to gain an affirmative vote in a referendum.
Masachusetts Republicans have driven themselves into political irrelevance. We need to find a way to restore the democratic process in a state where the GOP is not a viable option. Top-two is the answer for Massachusetts.
I bet he would win a general election.
I don’t know who I would vote for in that race. I voted for Brownsberger. Sciortino would have been my second choice, Spilka my third. Clark went down my list because of her campaign.
Clark has my vote in December. No contest. I just wish she would need to do a little more to earn it.
I think Clark would win again. She would get the vast bulk of Sciortino supporters, and likely the bulk of Spilka and Brownsberger supporters as well. In a matchup that probably wouldn’t have a large jump in turnout from the primary, I think it would be Clark in a walk.
But you also predicted her to finish 4th in the primary . . .
Just wondering upon what you base that assertion. I know about a dozen people who were deciding between Sciortino and Koutoujian in the final days. Only one Sciortino supporter I know was not considering Peter.
But that’s too small (and too local) of a sample to allow me to make a broader assertion.
Many of his volunteers would volunteer for her, because many of them have in the past.
In 200+ conversations in Cambridge, in Medford, and on phones with voters, Sciortino and Clark were the two candidates most often connected. I never met a single Koutoujian supporter in Cambridge while canvassing.
Maybe that’s a small sample because most of this was in an area where Koutoujian did not perform well (<7% in Cambridge).
I get the intent here, and it’s well-meaning, but frankly this is screwy. The three Republicans all ran knowing they had better odds of getting the other nomination slot, and ran on that basis.
Anyone who wants to vote for Koutoujian or any other Democrat can write them in, and the candidates who lost either nomination are welcome to run independently, To change the rules under which we run elections is unfair to the only other recognized alternative party, the GOP, and you can be sure that implementing this would mean it would be done to us in Texas and other places.
May I recommend Gail Collin’s column today, a Ted Cruz in every corner? If Texas had what is proposed here, we might actually get moderate Republicans representing Texas rather than the insane kind.
That would be a substantial improvement.
Why write off those seats forever for hope of moderates? Better if we compete everywhere and eventually elect moderate Democrats.
Why? It’s different, but that doesn’t make it screwy. It’s how the Boston Mayor race works. It would make it very rare that the poorly-attended primary rather than the better-attended general is the election that actually decides who gets the seat.
because the mayor’s office is nonpartisan.
We can’t locally change the way a federal office election works because we think we’ll get a better result.
California and Washington use it for federal elections – read the supporting story from the Washington Post. You couldn’t elect a president in this manner, as you are really electing delegates to party conventions and presidential electors. Everything else on the ballot, it would certainly be possible.
I must yield to facts.
But I stand by my point, I think it’s unfair in our system. If we had a third or fourth party, I might look at it differently.
We don’t even have a second party, and that is a huge part of the problem.
HA. Agreed. The Republicans’ ineptitude in MA is really staggering. Such an obvious observation, but such an important one.
Democrats and DINOs. In fact, in a lot of ways the Democrats are the ‘minority’ and have been so for decades.
For heaven’s sake, after the Governor’s hopes of a good transportation bill was whittled down to $500m in spending from the needed billion a year just to maintain current services, the legislature went and cut the bulk of the new revenue out of that bill in a tax cut only weeks later and bitterly refused to replace that revenue, blindly hoping everything will add up (this year — it won’t in years future).
It’s a Republican idea designed to get Democrats to spend more money and against each other, rather than against Republicans, during the general, creating lots of bad blood.
Republicans put it on the ballot in California and it won. Very recently. Because it helped them and has already had some of the intended results, forcing Democrats to waste money against each other in incredibly bitter and divisive general elections.
There’s a reason why Republicans didn’t try to put the sucker on the ballot in Alabama or Mississippi, but I’m sure they’d love to see us inflict that wound upon ourselves here in Massachusetts, one of the states that donates most in federal elections to blue candidates.
Yeesh.
But wouldn’t it force both Clark and Koutoujian to the right in the general election rather than working to get out the Democratic base? If it moderates out Ted Cruz it also moderates out Clark. And we have not enough liberals in the House as it is.
Proposed in blue states and designed to force Democrats to spend more money — against each other, no less — so they have less left over in other races and create bad inter-party blood.
A shame it’s found cache among a progressive or two here.
We have a primary system. Your candidate lost. So did mine. The world will not end — and we’ll send a solid person to Congress who will far exceed 50% of the vote on election day.
.
“f we had a “top two” primary, we would have Clark versus Koutoujian, not Clark versus Addivinola.”
Nonsense. If we had a top two primary, people would have behaved differently. The candidates [who might not even be the same set of people], the volunteers, the donors, the voters all would have done things differently were the rules different. Jungle primaries are a bad idea. The problem is that the group from the party of the majority [in this case Dems] could find themselves spread so thin that the minority group, with just two candidates, can win both slots. Crazy? The GOP won in CA exactly this way. And that, my friend, is a terrible outcome.
You are right that IRV will come up in the conversation, but I disagree that “Ballot switching isn’t very transparent.” It’s perfectly transparent — paper ballots, they’re all right there on the table. Easy to audit, easy to understand.
We are not as an intensely partisan state as California, for example. Their parties are actually more extreme (being controlled by progressives, I think this is a good thing) than we are. Therefore, I think a top two primary would only cement our slow move to progressive policy. Ironically, there are less Democrats proportionately in CA’s legislature than ours, but they are more on the same page. If we had top two primary here, the DINO if they are really that much more conservative, would have the benefit of getting GOP votes that don’t stay home. It would make it harder, not easier to elect progressives in the districts that should be more liberal than they are right now.
All that said, I do think it is worth exploring for special elections. If a candidate ges 50% of the vote, the game is over. No second election. If it is under than we hold a general. That way we have less fractured results on tiny-turnout primaries like MA 5, but could save money if there is a real out-front winner.
It is all a balancing act and we don’t have to go all the way to strike the balance.
Remember those last minute mailers supporting the winner in MA-05? Well the source of the funds is coming out… Nothing against those superPAC donors (several of whom are likely for campaign finance reform, unlike their Republican counterparts) but… the FEC web site as of October 16 shows a large contribution from a single donor to the women vote! PAC, on the last day of September.
http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/dcdev/forms/C00473918/
While a runoff might be a good reform, I think the money problem has to be addressed again at some point (as it was 15 years ago in MA).