Governor Phil Weiser. Get used to saying it. Because now the only questions are how big a margin Victor Marx will lose by, how many more times he will end up on late-night comedy shows, and how many other Republican candidates will he drag down with him. The Republicans who voted for Marx in the primary have a party death wish, and voters will gleefully grant it come the general election.
Republican primary voters had the choice between a competent legislator with a quarter-century of relevant experience and a circus clown. So, naturally, they chose the latter.
Problems with the primary
My regular readers know that I have been railing against our current primary election rules for years. The new results only reinforce my case.
As of July 10 postings from the Secretary of State (still unofficial results), Marx had 208,350 votes out of 522,730 votes cast in the Republican primary, 1,411,485 votes cast in all primaries for governor, 1,443,915 total primary ballots cast, and 4,024,717 active voters.
In other words, Marx will appear on the ballot as a major-party candidate with a mere 5% support from active voters. That our voting rules encourage such an outcome is absurd.
Okay, you say, only people who really care about politics vote in primaries. Marx still won a spot on the ballot with fewer than 15% of all primary ballots cast. Still absurd.
Interestingly, Scott Bottoms, who came in a distant third, has said he will not support Marx, even though Bottoms and Marx are similar in many respects—both are religious figures—and probably pulled from the same set of voters.
If we’d had approval voting (vote for multiple candidates if you want) or ranked-choice voting in the Republican primary, then Bottoms’ voters would have had an opportunity to also give their vote to Marx or Barb Kirkmeyer. We can’t know which candidate that would have pushed over the top. We can know that the outcome would have better-reflected voter preferences.
Also, given our semi-open primaries, I can’t help but wonder if some Democratic-aligned unaffiliated voters voted for Marx just because they thought the Democrat would more easily beat him. I doubt that happened too often, but the difference between Marx and Kirkmeyer was only 2,414 votes. This would have been more of a problem if the Democrats had only one candidate in the race or an uncompetitive primary. (That said, Weiser surprisingly spanked Michael Bennet.)
But I don’t just favor approval voting in party primaries; I favor party-free primaries in which all candidates appear on the same ballot. Would that have meant a general race between Weiser and Bennet? Not necessarily. Bennet only got 383,082 votes. Granted, that’s 84% more votes than went for Marx. But, combined, Republicans got 522,730 votes. In a unified primary with approval voting (or ranked-choice voting), a lot of Republican-leaning voters would have picked Kirkmeyer as their first or second choice.
But, whether it had ended up Weiser versus Kirkmeyer or Weiser versus Bennet, we would have had a real general election for governor rather than a farce.
Here is yet another indication of the ridiculousness of party primaries. A total of 271 votes were cast for Unity Party candidates. And a random person whose name you don’t need to remember “won” with 146 votes. Sheesh. What a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.
How to complain about the rules
Notice that, in complaining about the existing rules, I am suggesting that we change the rules for future elections. I am not saying that our elections are somehow fraudulent.
I mention this because, as soon as Marx took the lead, some of Bottoms’s supporters claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, that the elections were fraudulent (because of course they did).
Here is an analogy. In 1978, a distance shot in the NBA counted for two points. In 1979, the same shot counted for three points. Does that mean that the two-point rule led to “fraudulent” scores? Of course not. In 1978, you could argue that moving to a three-point shot would improve the game without calling into question the existing scoring.
If you want something more recent, baseball adopted the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System prior to this season. Maybe that was a good idea; it seems to lead to more-accurate calls at the margins. But the rule change doesn’t mean we’re going to throw out last season’s results.
Likewise, I’m saying that we have to accept the results under current election rules. Crying fraud like a petulant toddler just because the election doesn’t go your way is foolish and wrong. Saying the rules are stupid and should be changed for future elections is a different story.
Liberty in trouble
Although, in his statement on Marx winning the primary, Weiser promised to fight “for the rights and freedoms of all,” we all know that Weiser often does not regard the rights and freedoms of producers as worth protecting. He’s basically a tax-and-regulate Democrat. He’s also a very decent fellow, which is not nothing. Hopefully he will remember his promise to listen to all Coloradans.
The general election is going to suck for liberty advocates in Colorado, no doubt about it. What we need is intellectual seriousness, moral integrity, and a long-term plan for rebuilding. Who will step forward to play a role in that project?
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
