View this post on the web at [link removed]

Much is made of America’s primary system being broken, and that conventional view is correct: primaries are low-turnout elections [ [link removed] ] that basically give the most partisan voters an extra vote. Primaries tend to select candidates who are more extreme than and less representative of the electorate [ [link removed] ].
Based on ratings from Cook Political Report [ [link removed] ], there are 69 competitive House seats at the moment, which means that 84% of House seats are functionally decided in the primary. If you remove the Likely Democrat and Likely Republican seats, that number pops to 90%.
Subscribe to receive new posts about politics—and where conventional wisdom is wrong.
There are a lot of reasons why so few seats are competitive, stemming largely from the way that states draw their Congressional maps [ [link removed] ]—something I am way more familiar with than most [ [link removed] ].
But here is what’s Not Quite Right… Most Americans can vote in the primaries of their choosing. If you’re a Democrat, there’s no shame in crossing over and grabbing a Republican ticket. In many cases, it’s strategic.
Get out and vote (where it matters)
According to my back-of-the-envelope math, at least two-thirds of Americans aren’t restricted when deciding which party’s primary to vote in. In most states, that means you can request either a Republican or a Democratic ticket, regardless of who you’ve voted for in the past or any party affiliation you have.
Let’s say that you live in a state like Hawaii, which has open primaries. Hawaii is, almost uniformly these days, a Democratic state. And yet some 75,000+ people chose to vote in a Republican primary [ [link removed] ] that was entirely meaningless.
I am sure that most of those people were committed Republicans who find Democrats thoroughly objectionable. But they could’ve voted in the Democratic primary and had a say in picking a candidate more palatable to them, even if they don’t actually like them.
Instead, they took time off work, went to their polling place, and in almost every election, got to choose who had the honor of finishing a distant second to the inevitable Democratic winner.
Missourians (and others), pick a winner!
Like most of the people on this list, I live and vote in Missouri. And in Missouri, as much as I wish it weren’t the case, there aren’t a lot of races lately where voting on the Democratic side makes much of a difference.
Missouri, despite repeated efforts to close its primaries [ [link removed] ], allows voters to pick any primary ballot they want when they go to vote. So: while I am not a Republican, I will be grabbing a Republican ballot come August 6 [ [link removed] ].
Unless you live in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District and have the opportunity to vote for Wesley Bell [ [link removed] ], I would encourage you to grab the Republican ballot too. Whoever wins the Republican primary will almost certainly be the winner come November; this way, you can at least vote for people who are the least crazy, the least anti-democracy, and the most pragmatic in their approach to politics.
To vote in the Democratic primary is something like voting in Hawaii’s Republican primary: you’re offering input on who gets to finish in a robust second place.
You still won’t like a lot of what they do. But at least you’ll have had some input. Though it doesn’t always feel like it, not all Republicans are created equal.
Some final thoughts
If you live in one of these states, with open or semi-open primaries, always grab the primary ballot of the party whose candidates win elections: Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont.
This doesn’t betray your values as a Democrat, and this doesn’t preclude you from voting for Democrats in November, like I will. But it gives you a say in deciding who your all-but-certain representatives will be.
In the next edition of Not Quite Right… I will talk about what’s going on with younger voters, and how all over the world, young men and young women are all of a sudden voting in drastically different ways [ [link removed] ].
Finally, please take a moment to fill out this survey. I’d love your thoughts and ideas.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?