Boring Title About Finance Reform and Nominations

Depending on who you ask, there can be negative effects of these political reforms and new rules involving the primaries. The blanket primary, for example, is “anathema to anyone who believes parties stand for something and they should be held accountable for the performance of the government” (Hetherington and Keefe pg .72). This system is the most open of primaries and creates split-ticketing, which shows a weakness in the party system because it is candidate-centered and gives responsibility to the individual. The Open Primary also has negative effects. Voters are allowed to vote outside their party and can potentially screw the other party before moving on to the main election. “Party Leaders suffer from a special anxiety in open primary states: the possibility that voters of the competing party will raid their primary, hoping to nominate a week candidate who would be easy to defeat in the general election” (Hetherington and Keefe pg. 70). This means that in the past election a Republican could/would have voted for Hillary Clinton as the choice for the Democratic Nomination because she would be easier to defeat by the Republican candidate. Our reading also tells us that Wisconsin 8 to 11 percent are partisan crossovers in the primaries.

It is next to impossible for a candidate to win office without a Party’s nomination and that nomination means money. There are constant attempts at regulating the means for attaining funds for campaigning. The court however, in Buckley v. Valeo, decided that it was unconstitutional to limit the independent spending of candidates or individuals because Political money is political speech (Hetherington and Keefe pg. 119). The wealthiest people will always win out in the candidate process because there will always be loopholes in political spending, especially when people are willing to spend their own money. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 “would, Democrats hoped, strike at the heart of Republican political power—while leaving untouched their own sources of influence, such as union-organized volunteers. The law tightly limited both political contributions and any expenditure that might “influence” an election.”( http://www.city-journal.org/html/ws2007-07-01bs.html) FECA attempted to limit the cost of elections, lower the influence of wealthy contributors on elections and has failed to an extent on both of those. There is no way to rid the election process of all factions. It seems like a nice idea that any intelligent person have a fair shot at becoming a president, but there has to be an elimination process, and money tends to be the easiest way to do this. The most important goal of these reforms should be to find a way to keep politicians from being heavily influenced by their financial contributors.