Myths about what a direct primary will do for Utah. This is based upon my experience in being involved in Nebraska, Washington and Texas which all have direct primaries.
1. It will save money. No, it is the opposite. The political parties still need to have a caucus and convention to elect party officers and to direct policies and platforms. The direct primary simply means that the party convention will not take on the business of choosing candidates. One thing that the convention system does for the system is filter out candidates that are not too appealing or are not really serious about running. Most of the time, our convention system prevents the waste of time and money on a primary by making it not needed. If you have not been involved in a convention before, you may be surprised at how really poor some of the candidates are.
2. A direct primary will prevent extremist from controlling the party. This is also not true. In fact, without elected positions in the balance, only those who are really motivated get involved. Guess who those people are?
3. A direct primary is better because more people can be involved in the election of officials. While I agree, in part with this, there is a difference between can and will. More people can be involved because of early voting and the fact that the polls will be open all day. But WILL they? Often, the turnout in a direct primary is very low. One of the reasons, here in Clearfield, to justify an ousted mayor's write-in campaign was the low turnout at the primary. Let's say Senator Bennett had been ousted in a primary and the turnout had been around 10 to 15 percent, there would still be people upset at his defeat. There would be excuses, like the time of year of the primary. The lack of publicity. There would be all sorts of people making excuses for those who do not show up.
Let me also say, that the Tea Party was not the only group against Bob Bennett in the convention. There were at least four others. There was the 9/12 project, the Club for Growth, the Patrick Henry Caucus and two others that made such an impression on me, that I can not remember their names. In Davis County, they united. They chose precinct captains and trained participants to ensure that delegates were elected that would dump Bob Bennett. But even in these meetings, at least in the two that I attended, there were people that attended that were in support of Bob Bennett. These people were not chased away. Most people who fit in these groups want to end excessive government spending and the takeover of private industry. They are not looking at cutting school spending, except for some administrator pay.
I spoke briefly with a very high official in the Republican Party, I will not say who, but a top-3 official. That person hopes that the type of energy that we experienced in 2010 will continue. There was a record turnout at this year's caucuses...and estimated 75,000 on the republican side. That would also be a good turnout for a primary.
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