Danielle's Column: Don’t Be Afraid to Free the Bear

The trap we’re in is not merely the institutional problem of party primaries. It is also fear of our fellow citizens.

In case you missed it:

• America as a bear in a trap, Part I

• A bear in a trap, Part II

If you’re a bear in the woods, being attacked by wolves, with your paw in a trap and a wildfire raging toward you, and someone tells you, “Ok, the way you get out of the trap is by getting rid of party primaries,” you are unlikely to spring into immediate action to get rid of party primaries.

There are lots of reasons why. There are still those wolves attacking you, after all, and their bites are excruciating. For instance, maybe you run a labor union, and your members’ jobs are being hacked away by AI. You might reasonably think, I must devote every ounce of energy I have to fighting off this threat. You would not be wrong.

But here is another question to consider: Would you have a better chance of reining in the power of big tech if you could turn toward democratic institutions that were not captured by parties that have been captured by big money, including tech money, but that instead actually work for the whole American people? If another weapon of self-defense — through reform to political primaries — is within reach, maybe it makes sense to grab it?

Or maybe the wildfire makes you think, “What is the point anyway? Even if I could get my paw out of this trap, is there anything that can be done about the wildfire?” The wildfire is enormous global forces – globalization (and now deglobalization) and technological transformation, which have in turn spurred climate change and historic migration – that would place pressure on even the healthiest democratic system

Maybe you’re a young person who has already decided not to have kids because of climate change, or maybe you’re one of the terrifyingly growing number of young people experiencing suicidal ideation. You’ll need to believe that the future can be saved — that we can beat back the wildfire. We can, and I will take up that question in my next column, because it deserves its own treatment in full.

But the most paralyzing question of all is this: “Hey, if getting America’s paw out of the trap means getting rid of party primaries, and if that means politicians always have to campaign to the whole electorate, won’t they be less responsive to my particular needs and the needs of my community?”

This is a question that often comes from people who believe so much in democracy that they participate vigorously in our existing institutions, including our current primary system. Which means they have correctly observed that sometimes the small turnout in a party primary makes it easier to overcome an incumbent politician and elevate a new voice in our politics.

We need to acknowledge that our most activist lovers of democracy draw some real benefit from the current system. As a former head of the Democratic National Committee once quipped to me, “Democrats don’t actually care how many people vote; they only care how people vote — there could be five people in the electorate, as long as three of them vote Democrat.” Republicans feel pretty much the same way. And after all, since the number of members the parties have doesn’t currently impact their degree of control over our institutions, why not let membership shrink, to have a more cost-effective route to power?

The most powerful force in the universe may be not gravity or compound interest but negative partisanship: In our community, this can be expressed as a belief that a reform cannot be good for me if it is also good for my political opponents. Power corrupts, and it can even take its toll on lovers of democracy, who sometimes think that the steel trap may not be so bad if they can figure out how to take advantage of it. Maybe swing it around with that injured paw to beat back the other side’s wolves? Find a way to brandish it to give an advantage to the set of wolves that (sometimes) helps you?

In Massachusetts, 64 percent of our voters are not enrolled in any political party. Over the past decade, across both primary and general elections, we’ve had only one candidate in 52 percent of races. With such a low degree of competitiveness in our elections, it’s impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. No surprise, then, that we have one of the least effective and least transparent state legislatures in the country on standard metrics. Our turnout rates have been on a steady decline for years.

Those of us seeking to replace Massachusetts’ party primaries with an all-party primary via a November 2026 ballot initiative has been building a cross-ideological coalition (I’m part of the coalition’s leadership) — with progressives, centrist Democrats, pro-democracy Republicans and third-party leaders all having signed on. This is because the reform really is good for everyone.

Here's why all-party primaries are the key to breaking free of the bear trap: If we are successful at establishing them here in my state, more people will be able to run on the primary ballot. Voters will routinely have actual choices, not the sparse subset of candidates one of the major parties puts forward. Public debate will be improved. Challengers will have a better chance of winning. Incumbents will be rewarded for figuring out how to work for and run in relationship to the whole electorate. Democrats will see more general election races pitting two Democratic candidates against each other, restarting the engine of ideas for the party. Republicans will see less blocking of pro-democracy Republican candidates in the primary process. Third-party candidates will have more opportunities to carry their message and potentially breakthrough.

In short, getting rid of all-party primaries puts the whole electorate back in the driver seat. Yes, this does mean that, if you’re an activist with a cause, you’ll have to make your case to everyone. It won’t be possible to slip something through just with a sliver of the voters. But it seems to me that if one prefers the party primary process as it currently exists for getting one’s causes through, that suggests a surprising lack of confidence in the value of one’s policies for society as a whole.

Because if a policy is good for the broad community, then one should be able to win elections by advocating for it.

This does not mean, of course, that democratic majorities are always right, but only that we should have confidence in being able to work with our fellow citizens. Democratic theorists have been worried about the tyranny of the majority since at least James Madison. Strong rights protections and fair courts are necessary. Yet the election system must be tethered to the whole people – that is the purpose of universal suffrage, after all.

Someone said, in the 19th century, that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Wrongly attributed to Lincoln, this quotation does nonetheless capture Lincoln’s strong faith in the American people and his belief that the durability of self-government depends on the permanent attachment of our political institutions to the broad population. Lincoln did say, I’d note: “The people — the people — are the rightful masters of both Congresses, and courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.”

To fix democracy, to renovate democracy, requires confidence in constitutional, rights-protecting democracy. The party primaries that dominate our current system have been created and sustained by interests that lack that confidence. And so the American people are caught in a cramped, painful trap that does not respond to our aspirations and needs.

The task of undertaking to win policy victories via a competition for the allegiance of the whole electorate is bracing and hard. Yet it is fundamentally the necessary work of constitutional democracy -- even for activist causes. The work starts by shutting down fear of one’s fellow citizens and replacing it with curiosity.

It turns out, then, that the trap we’re in is not merely the institutional problem of party primaries. It is also fear of our fellow citizens. There will be cultural work to do to get ourselves out of our trap. That, too, will be the subject of another column. But for now… let’s start beating back the fear by scenario-planning how to fight elections in new conditions. There is a better world on the other side of freeing the bear. Let’s not be trapped by fear itself.