This sentence from a story in The Hill caught my eye: “Senate Republicans … say the battle between the Justice Department and Trump, who pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges that he violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice with his handling of classified documents, will become a primary litmus test — just as his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen became a prominent point of debate in last year’s GOP primaries.”

As regular ELB readers know, for the last couple of years I’ve been emphasizing the need for reforming the process of partisan primary elections, and their relationship to plurality-winner general elections, as a way to liberate the overall electoral system from the distorting effects caused by the current dynamic. During this period, it has continued to perplex me why the traditional wing of the Republican Party has not embraced this kind of primary reform because in this context what’s in the public interest happens to coincide with the self-interest of this faction of the GOP. As long as current conditions remain, GOP traditionalists will continue to be eclipsed by the now-dominant MAGA wing of the Republican party. But if innovative reforms of the process are pursued, like a non-partisan primary that employs round-robin voting followed by a California-style “top 2” general election, traditional Republicans whose views are much closer to the center of the electorate in many states will prevail over MAGA extremists to their right and progressive Democrats to their left.

Yet traditional Republicans continue reflexively to resist electoral reform, suspicious that it’s somehow leftist agenda masquerading as pro-democracy. How can they be persuaded to overcome their own self-defeating hostility to this kind of reform? I’m not a Republican, and so I don’t have any personal reason for caring whether or not traditional Republicans become extinct like the dinosaurs, in this case because they are unable to adapt to changing political circumstances. But from a nonpartisan perspective as a scholar interested in how the electoral system can be structured to best reflect the views of the electorate as a whole, it worries me deeply that there is insufficient political will to reform primary elections to remove the distorting effect they cause under the current conditions of increased polarization.

If Senate Republicans recognize that primaries keep having a skewing effect, forcing their candidates to cater to extremist positions out of the mainstream, can they come to understand also that the solution is structural–to change the process so that it no longer has this repeated skewing effect?