Separating Party Selections from Public Elections
America’s candidate selection system is caught between two paths. While political parties are treated as private associations with the right to control membership and nominations, they rely on taxpayer-funded primaries and receive legal privileges unavailable to independent candidates and emerging parties. The result is a system that weakens party cohesion without producing broadly representative candidates or consistently competitive general elections.
This three-part series examines how the United States arrived at this uneasy compromise and proposes a clearer division between party selection and public election through the privatization of political parties. The first installment diagnoses the current system’s shortcomings; the second explains what privatizing political parties would mean in practice; and the final installment considers how general elections could be modified to operate within a privatized party system without undue burden on voters or election administration. Together, the series argues that parties should be free to choose and finance their own nominees, while the state should administer fair and competitive general elections in which all candidates play by the same rules.