[EM] Primaries?

[Bart Ingles]

Adam Tarr wrote:
> 
> >I think the issue with multi-winner primaries is not whether they are
> >proportional, or even whether the elect clones, but whether they advance
> >at least one winnable candidate to the general election.  But I suppose
> >a proportional system would be more likely to do so due to the "shotgun
> >effect" of advancing dissimilar candidates-- resulting in at least one
> >electable candidate, along with a few destined to crash and burn.
> 
> Right, this is exactly what I meant by:
> 
> > > Again, none of this argues that perfect PR is needed in a primary.  But
> > > completely ignoring PR issues is a mistake, too.
> 
> To look at it another way:
> 
> >>So, you think it would be acceptable, even desireable, to have three
> >>candidates from a party's centermost faction enter the general election,
> >>even when the party has a broad range of viewpoints?
>  > Yes, especially if this faction has the best possibility of winning the
> general election.
> 
> If this is what you want, then electing every candidate from the same
> faction is a BAD idea.  Lots of redundancy, no robustness.  That faction
> might be the one with the best shot in the GE, but it might not, too.

Better than the PR vs. CW dichotomy, assuming you want three nominees,
would be to advance all three from a moderate, electable faction.  If
there is any practical value to nominating multiple candidates, it would
be to accommodate subtler differences of opinion regarding what it takes
to be an "electable moderate" who remains true to the party's
principles.

I don't think I'd seriously support having multiple nominees.  But the
CW from within the party is clearly not ideal, and any deterministic SW
system that elects someone other than the CW could just as easily
nominate a hard-liner as it could a moderate (relative to the party CW).

I suppose you could use Condorcet and hope people rank based on
electability, but then you have to assume that the voters know which
candidates are the more electable.  The CW would then represent a sort
of consensus view of which candidates are electable, but this wouldn't
necessarily be an accurate one.  The strategic CW may still be too
hard-line to be electable, or may be unnecessarily centrist.  Given that
level of imprecision, you might as well go back to FPTP and hope the
primary voters vote for their strategic CW.

As I tried to propose earlier, at least Approval adds some "lubrication"
to the process, making it easier for a hard-liner to support an
electable moderate alongside his ideological favorite.  Although I
suppose it could backfire to a limited extent, if a voter who would have
strategically voted for a moderate under FPTP instead approves of both a
moderate and a sincere hard-line choice.  It may still be preferable to
other approaches, such as open primaries.

Bart