In Our View: Cancel a Primary?

Gov. Chris Gregoire has decided that spending $10 million on a largely ceremonial event is unwise in economic times as tough as these. She’s right, and that’s why we support her recommendation last week that the state cancel its 2012 presidential primary. We hope the Legislature agrees with the governor when lawmakers convene next month.

Denying voters a chance to participate is seldom a good idea, but let’s face facts. In this state, a presidential primary is largely irrelevant. In fact, it’s completely irrelevant in the case of the Democratic Party, which uses results from precinct caucuses to select delegates to the national nominating convention. To their credit, Republicans use presidential primary results to select half of their delegates to the nominating convention. Even so, estimated costs for the 2012 presidential primary are $10 million, an excessive amount to spend on a political process that — in terms of impact — achieves only 25 percent of its potential. Think how many critical programs and services could benefit from that $10 million.

Remember, a primary is not an election. It is a nominating process. And, considering the turnouts in Clark County two years ago, a presidential primary is not considered overly important by voters in these parts. Less than 43 percent of registered voters here participated in that Feb. 19, 2008, presidential primary. (In the local Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton took 50.1 percent of the votes to Barack Obama’s 46.4 percent. Among local Republican voters, John McCain took 44.0 percent of the votes to Mike Huckabee’s 26.8 percent.) In the fall general election, though, the voter turnout soared, almost doubling to 85.3 percent, likely because many voters knew it really mattered.

Supporters of keeping the presidential primary correctly point out that participation is far greater than precinct caucuses. According to The News Tribune in Tacoma, almost 1.4 million people voted statewide in the 2008 primary, and that was believed to be about 10 times the number estimated to have attended the caucuses.

Others point out that a presidential primary is an excellent way to engage people in the democratic process. That’s true, but when that participation has little effect (and no effect in the Democratic primary), one must ask if it’s worth spending $10 million of public money while the state is mired in a long series of revenue shortfalls.

The best solution would be to have the presidential primary as the sole determining factor in selecting convention delegates. The political parties, of course, will have none of that because it would dilute their power, and they’ve already lost plenty of clout in this state’s conversion to the top two primary. Our belief: People matter more than parties, and eventually we’d all be better served to let all of the people — and not just caucus attendees, most of them hard-core political junkies — make these types of decisions.

Finally, we point out that the 2004 presidential primary was canceled in our state for the same reason, to save money, at the time about $6 million. And that seemed to cause no lingering harm to the political process in Washington.

Secretary of State Sam Reed, the state’s elections director, noted in a statement last week: “Whereas caucuses require a voter to seek out the local gathering place and attend on a particular day … the presidential primary allows us to vote by mail over a period of several weeks. But at the same time, we acknowledge that Washington faces a grave budget shortfall and that many important public services must be suspended or eliminated.” Reed supports Gregoire’s recommendation and “I look forward to Washington resuming the presidential primary in 2016.”

Perhaps. For now, though, Washingtonians simply don’t have the money.