Should We Automatically Renominate Incumbents?

The main function of elections is to determine whether to retain incumbent leaders.

Elections where there is no incumbent force voters to guess how the various candidates would do if they win.

When current officials run, voters can examine their actual record and decide on that basis whether to continue them in elected office.

Incumbents seeking re-election should be accountable to the whole electorate, not just to an unrepresentative part of it.

But today, incumbents face two hurdles to re-election: the primary and general elections. If incumbents are not renominated by their party, it undermines the principal function — should we retain the incumbent? — of general elections, making government less democratic.

Incumbents who rile up their party's "base" (those most likely to vote in primaries) may not be renominated even though they would have won the general election.

One obvious way to fix this problem: provide that incumbents wishing to continue in office automatically receive their party's nomination without having to face a primary election.

Automatic renomination of incumbents would remove a major barrier to legislative compromises between Democrats and Republicans. Compromises tend to produce middle of the road policy, maddening extreme liberals, the Democratic base, and extreme conservatives, the Republican base.

But as I already indicated, it is these respective bases of the two parties that turn out enthusiastically for primary elections.

So decisions by an incumbent that upset the base may lead to defeat in the next primary, even though those decisions were in the general interest and the incumbent would have easily won the next general election.

Automatic renomination would weaken party leaders' control over the members of their party in Congress or other legislative bodies. When party members offend their leaders today, the leaders often recruit and support someone to challenge them in the next primary.

We now even have a word for this strategy: the incumbent has been "primaried."

As I was writing this piece, the Republican National Committee voted overwhelmingly to condemn Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for participating in the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Kinzinger is not seeking re-election. Cheney is being primaried.

If party leaders have decreased leverage over their members in legislative bodies this would reduce strict party-line voting, increasing the freedom of all legislators to vote on proposed legislation as they deem best.

This would be a step back towards better times when party line voting in Congress was mainly for electing congressional leaders while other voting consisted of different ad hoc coalitions knocked together for each bill.

Such a reversion to the past would actually be a step forward.

Today, we see totally improbable voting in Congress, with all or nearly all members of the two parties lining up on opposite sides of an issue.

And when a few party members support something proposed by the other party, they are condemned by their party leaders even when the policy they support was negotiated as a bi-partisan one.

It's impossible to believe that this voting pattern reflects the best judgments of the individual members. We don't need legislators, like the one satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan, who boasted "I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all." (Sir Joseph, in "H.M.S. Pinafore")

Party line voting magnifies the leverage of extreme Left-wing Democrats or extreme Right-wing Republicans, whichever party presently holds a slight majority in the chamber.

Even a few defections from the "ruling" party can prevent legislation from being enacted.

Automatic renomination of incumbents would thus improve our political processes in addition to increasing officials' democratic accountability.

Party primaries should be reserved for offices where the incumbent from that party does not seek re-election.

Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.