Separating Party Selections from Public Elections Part 2: What would it mean to privatize America’s political parties?

This is the second installment in a three-part series on improving America’s candidate selection system by privatizing political parties. Read the series overview and see other posts here.

Part 1 of this series argued that America should privatize its political parties. But what would that look like in practice, and how do parties currently benefit from legal advantages? 

This piece attempts to answer those questions by examining the two key policy steps toward privatization: 

• An end to public funding for party nominating processes 
• An end to special legal privileges for parties and their candidates

Public or Private

Protected by the First Amendment, “freedom of association” is the right for people to come together to advance shared political beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized political association as a right implicit in the freedoms of speech, assembly, and petition. For political parties, that right includes substantial authority to identify their members, determine their message, and choose the candidates who will represent them.

Modern freedom of association rights developed through a line of cases concerning the boundary between party autonomy and state control. 

• Cousins v. Wigoda (1975): State courts cannot override a party’s rules for seating convention delegates. 
• Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut (1986): States cannot prevent a party from inviting independent voters into its primary. 
• Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee (1989): States cannot regulate parties’ internal governance and endorsements. 
• California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000): States cannot force parties to allow nonmembers to participate in selecting their nominees. 

But freedom of association is not absolute. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Court held that a party conducting a primary under authority of state law could not exclude Black voters. Later cases likewise prevented nominally private organizations from exerting control over the decisive stage of an election to evade constitutional protections. The resulting doctrine reflects a persistent tension: While political parties are private associations entitled to shape their own membership and message, nominations can become part of the public electoral machinery when the state delegates power to parties or makes their contests effectively decisive.

The system continues to struggle with this dichotomy. Parties frequently cite their status as private entities when they do not wish to be subject to public requirements like open primaries or particular voting methods—even as primaries have become the decisive election for a staggering number of elected offices. In 2023, the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. pushed back on an initiative to impose open primaries and ranked-choice voting, arguing that doing so would violate the “D.C. Democratic party members’ and voters’ right to freedom of association guaranteed by the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” In a rare instance of bipartisan overlap, the Texas GOP launched its own lawsuit to close primaries using the same argument: “Political parties ‘enjoy a constitutionally protected right of political association,’ including the right to determine their own membership.” Decades of legal battles have produced similar claims.

Ending Public Funding for Party Nominations

Taxpayers—even those excluded from participating by one or both parties—currently finance political nominating contests. Counties and local jurisdictions bear much of the administrative cost of elections in most states, although some or all primary-related costs are often reimbursed. 

• Arizona reimburses counties for presidential primaries on a per-voter basis.
• Arkansas reimburses counties for party primaries.
• Michigan reimburses localities for the full actual cost of presidential primaries.

Open Primaries attempted to put a price tag on primary administration in a 2016 analysis. Using traceable expenditures, it estimated that presidential primaries cost taxpayers across America at least $427 million while excluding more than 26 million otherwise eligible voters.

This structure allows parties to separate control from cost. Party officials can invoke associational autonomy when determining who may participate and what rules will govern the primary contest while transferring much of the administrative expense to the public. Meanwhile, state lawmakers have an incentive to preserve familiar primary systems because election officials already possess the voter rolls, equipment, and personnel needed to operate them. Voters may consequently experience a party nomination as a public election even though the governing party retains its authority to define the electorate and the rules.

Under the proposal advanced here, parties would retain their freedom-of-association rights but would select candidates entirely on their own dime via their chosen method. This would create two general paths.

First, a party could contract with state or local election administrators to conduct a conventional primary. The government could supply ballots, polling places, equipment, personnel, voter-list services, and tabulation, but the party would reimburse the full attributable cost. Legislation would have to establish transparent accounting rules, advance deposits, and procedures for allocating shared costs when more than one party holds a primary on the same day. This option would preserve the accessibility, professional administration, and familiar safeguards of a public election without requiring nonparticipating taxpayers to subsidize it.

Second, a party could organize its own process. It might use a convention, neighborhood caucuses, a party-run mail ballot, an online or hybrid vote, or some combination of these methods. Party-run caucuses already provide a real-world example. In Nevada in 2024, the Republican Party operated caucuses separate from the state-run presidential primary, with the allocation of the party’s delegates determined solely by caucus results. This episode demonstrated the potential for parties to conduct their own contests as well as the difficulty of navigating the current system.

Making parties bear nomination costs would align control with responsibility. A party choosing a more expensive and accessible primary would need to persuade members, donors, or candidates to finance it, while a party choosing a cheaper convention or caucus would bear the political consequences if voters should view the process as exclusionary. The reform would also encourage experimenting with methods and approaches to improve the candidate selection process.

The principal trade-off is participation. State-run primaries generally offer more polling locations, longer voting windows, mail-in voting, and professional administration than conventions or caucuses. It is also less demanding to appear and vote than it is to engage in a long debate with one’s neighbors. Requiring parties to pay could push them toward cheaper methods that demand more time from participants and give committed activists greater influence. Reliance on party donors could also create concerns about donor influence over the nominating process. A transition would need rules requiring advance publication of party procedures, basic financial disclosure, and compliance with generally applicable civil-rights and election-integrity laws. The government could regulate fraud, violence, bribery, and discriminatory conduct without dictating a party’s political message or membership.

Ending Special Legal Privileges in Public Elections

Even as private organizations, political parties enjoy significant legal privileges in the arena of public elections—starting with access to the ballot. In a majority of states, a recognized major party’s official nominee advances directly to the general-election ballot, while independent candidates and candidates from unrecognized parties face additional qualifying conditions. In practice, the legal status of the organization endorsing a candidate can determine whether that candidate receives automatic ballot access or must collect thousands of signatures under tight deadlines. Automatic ballot access constitutes a state-conferred procedural advantage, which encourages political competition within the major parties rather than in a general election.

The distinction is not merely between parties and independents; it also separates candidates endorsed by a recognized party from party members who challenge the organization’s chosen nominee, as well as candidates associated with unrecognized smaller parties. States have legitimate reasons to require evidence of support: Ballots must remain manageable, frivolous candidacies can impose costs, and election officials need firm filing deadlines. The question is whether those interests require different legal tracks based on party status rather than a common threshold applicable to every candidate.

Beyond privileged access to the ballot itself, major parties have secured other advantages. For example, in Florida, New York and Texas, the party that received the most votes in the previous gubernatorial election receives top placement on the ballot. Party status also shapes the selection of election officials and access to special campaign-finance rules.

To privatize parties, state and federal law should no longer grant a candidate automatic or preferential treatment as the result of recognition by a particular party. Instead, a single, reasonable demonstration of support requirement would govern access to the general-election ballot. A signature threshold is the most familiar option, although a state might also accept a filing fee or some other criteria. A uniform route to the ballot would separate party endorsement from legal qualification. While parties could still provide candidates with a valuable label, volunteers, money, expertise, and an organized constituency, they could not provide a privileged route through election law. Candidates would decide whether a party’s support was politically valuable rather than legally indispensable. And new parties and independents would face the same entry requirements as candidates backed by established organizations.

This approach is likely to produce larger general election ballots with the potential for multiple candidates affiliated with the same party. The third and final installment in this series will examine how elections can be structured to accommodate this new reality without overburdening voters.

Rules surrounding ballot design, election administration, and campaign finance should be clear and equitable. Electoral success should in no way affect the application of the rules, and administration should be nonpartisan or equitably distributed.

As private entities, parties should not enjoy legal advantages or privileged access to our electoral system. Equality before the law should remain the governing principle where elections are concerned. Candidates should meet universal standards to participate, and the functioning of election machinery should be unbiased.

Conclusion

Political parties frequently identify themselves as private associations while struggling to reconcile candidate selection with party cohesion. The proposal outlined here would make the division of responsibility clearer. Parties would control their own organizations and choose their candidates as they see fit. In exchange, they would relinquish taxpayer funding for those nominating processes and special legal privileges in public elections. The state’s role would begin in earnest at the general election, where it would administer a neutral process and guarantee candidates access under the same rules.

Of course, that arrangement would not eliminate every dispute. Courts would still have to identify when formally private conduct becomes part of the state’s electoral machinery. Legislatures would still have to define reasonable ballot-access thresholds, protect individual rights, and ensure election integrity. Parties would still face hard choices between broad participation and affordable administration. Nevertheless, the privatization of political parties offers a pathway to greater fairness, increased party integrity, and more competitive general elections.