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Nothing lasts forever, but a Senate seat from Illinois is pretty darned close.
Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin is retiring after 30 years, and he is only the third person to hold that seat in 60 years. Sometimes things get very weird in Illinois politics — the other seat produced one Star Trek-adjacent sex scandal, one president and a criminal bribery prosecution in the span of six years — but barring such vagaries as those, Durbin’s successor can reasonably expect a very long tenure.
And we already know who it will be. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won the Democratic primary on Tuesday in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1. It would take something more than sci-fi fantasy to imagine a Republican winning there this fall. Stratton is 60, but she is a triathlete with an enthusiasm for plant-based protein alternatives, so there’s no obvious reason she might not serve until at least the same age as Durbin, who is 81. That could put her almost into the 2050s.
So what? A lot of states have long-serving senators. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was elected alongside Ronald Reagan in 1980. A person born the same year that Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was first elected to the Senate would be old enough to run against her in 2028 if Murray seeks a sixth term. In a body that rewards seniority and where incumbents break term-limit pledges with impunity, it’s not surprising that folks stick around.
The bigger consideration here is who is picking those senators who then attach themselves like hearty barnacles to the ship of state.
Turnout in Tuesday’s Illinois Senate primary was about 21 percent of registered voters, including all those stubborn Republicans who showed up anyway. There were something like 1.3 million votes cast on the Democratic side, and Stratton will have received a little fewer than 500,000 of those. That means that the preference of about 6 percent of Illinois’s 8.4 million registered voters will pick a senator who may serve until the middle of this century. In a state where the plurality of voters — 41 percent — aren’t members of either major party, a sliver of the voters had the power to make a very consequential choice. That’s democratic, sure. But it’s not representative.
If I had my way, Americans would get rid of primaries altogether. I think having nominating conventions within the parties themselves was a far better way to pick candidates than state-administered elections. State elections officials (and taxpayers) shouldn’t be responsible for overseeing what is ultimately the choice of these private institutions.
But I doubt there will be a return to smoked-filled rooms and floor fights anytime soon. After 50 years of living with our current system of publicly administered, publicly financed elections, democracy-loving Americans would be hard-pressed to go back to the world of party bosses for picking candidates.
Something, though, needs to be done to create some better incentives for selecting general election candidates and to offer better incentives for officials once they are in power.
To whom will future Sen. Stratton owe her station? That 6 percent who chose her. And in six years, when her term is up, she will be dependent on the support of a majority of the 15 percent or so of eligible voters who will participate in that year’s Democratic primary.
Perhaps never since the Civil War have the two major parties been this weak. The share of Americans rejecting both goes up and up. And yet, seldom has the power of small segments of voters in these parties been greater.
For both Democrats and Republicans, the principal objective of primary voters tends to be in choosing candidates who will refuse to compromise with the other party. The way you show your status as a Democrat is by vowing to destroy the Republicans, and vice versa. And if a lawmaker or a president is ever tempted to think about what most voters would like — which tends to be effective compromise — they are reminded that the 6 percent that controls their destiny wants exactly the opposite.
Look at Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who would probably have little trouble winning reelection among the Texas general electorate. He is working his fingers to the bone to prove to Texas primary voters that he is not a principled person still capable of compromise, but rather a red-hot partisan. A superb legislative career and the esteem of his fellow senators is more of a liability than an advantage as Cornyn tries to fend off Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose major criticism of the incumbent seems to be that Cornyn has been too good at his job.
So, if we’re stuck with a democratic mechanism for the parties choosing their candidates, how might we make the outcomes more representative of the electorate as a whole?
California has one answer, which is to basically have two general elections. In their first round, all candidates from all parties compete in June, then the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the November finals. As California Democrats are currently coming to understand, this produces some different pressures for consensus building. In a slew of recent polls, two Republicans have been at the top of the list in a state that is even more lopsidedly Democratic than Illinois.
If the Democrats stay divided they could, conceivably, get locked out of the November election. That probably won’t happen. In fact, the anxiety of Democratic voters to clear the field may end up with consolidation and the Republicans being the ones locked out. But if either party is locked out, the incentives for consensus building are redoubled. If it was two Democrats, there would be major incentives for one of them to make themselves appealing to Republicans and right-leaning independents. The same would be true in reverse for two Republicans.
Other states, meanwhile, have been experimenting with ranked-choice voting. While I’m not a fan of the practice for general elections, as a tool for sorting out crowded primary election fields, it’s got lots to like.
Think about 2028, when there will be the first truly open presidential election since 2016. The initial field of candidates in each party could comprise two dozen candidates or more. The incentive in such cases is to build a small, intense base of support and then outlast the others who are trying to win broad-based approval. These bowling-ball campaigns stay compact and then knock over all the wobbly pins. And that’s how winning a plurality of a plurality can be good enough to get the nuclear codes.
If voters could choose their own slates of candidates, though, it would create new incentives for unity and decency. If you’re trying to be everybody’s second choice, you would run in a way to not antagonize or offend the rest of the field. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of reasons to explore it further.
Unless, of course, you’re part of the powerful 6 percent that decides so much about our nation’s politics. Efforts at primary election reform are a direct threat to radicals and well-organized interest groups that prosper in low-turnout primary elections — the same abilities that they are now using to block reform itself.
On the same day that a sliver of a sliver of Illinoisans were choosing a senator for everyone else, a bipartisan brigade of Ohio lawmakers succeeded in banning ranked-choice voting in a state that doesn’t even use it. Ohio became the 19th state to adopt such a ban after a bipartisan coalition in the state Senate got behind a measure that would proactively forbid the practice.
The math here is pretty simple. If you’re part of the 6 percent, you don’t want anything to diminish your power. The incumbents mostly don’t want to change the system under which they have prospered. Like term limits and the other efforts at breaking the political logjam that have died under the inertia of a system in which dysfunction is a feature, not a bug, primary election reform is in big trouble.
But if you wonder why the pendulum keeps swinging so far, so frequently, and why this boiling populism permeates our public life, just remember that for the few who are prospering, the frustrations of the other 94 percent are something to be exploited, not resolved.
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