For those of you still waiting to mark your ballots, consider this post—a sampling of our non-endorsement of Measure 90, one of several election picks in this week's Mercury—a friendly reminder to get to work before it's too late.
THE PROMISES of the top-two election system pushed by Measure 90 sound remarkably reasonable: an increase in engagement—especially among young, non-affiliated voters shut out from major-party primary ballots—and a decrease in partisanship and gridlock.
And some very reasonable people are supporting the measure.
Both major gubernatorial candidates have given Measure 90 their blessing. So has the Working Families Party, a reliable bastion of progressive causes. And the Independent Party of Oregon, which is on the cusp of becoming Oregon's third major party. A former Bus Project leader has even agreed to help the campaign, whose chief petitioner, Rejuvenation founder Jim Kelly, has been a longtime donor to left-leaning causes.
As they see it, Oregon would walk down a road most recently taken by Washington and California. We'd have a primary ballot where all candidates, from any party or no party, could compete—with the top two going on to slug it out one more time in the fall. That road, proponents say, would lead to political moderation and a happily humming government—by taking primary elections away from the few thousand Democratic and Republican partisans who typically decide them.
And along the way, many of the 668,000-plus voters who've chosen not to register with either major party this year—giving up the right to vote in partisan primary races—might finally feel invested.
If we say yes, some of those dreams might really come true. Or not! Nothing might happen!
Worse, we might also wake up to a nightmare—especially if deeper-pocketed business interests (like the millionaires and billionaires funding this push) figure out they'll have two chances to outspend Tea Party groups and labor unions alike in pursuit of business-friendly candidates.
And that's the problem. It's still too early to say whether top-two primaries have left things better or worse or no different in California and Washington. Both states have had open primaries for only a handful of election cycles—and, in fact, some of the early signs haven't been so good.
All of which explains why we just can't bring ourselves to say yes to Measure 90. Not now. And maybe not ever.
In California, according to a Common Cause Oregon report, most of the "moderation" so far has been among Democrats, not Republicans. It's unclear how many of the state's competitive races are due to some other factors: term limits and citizen-led redistricting. Turnout, one measure of engagement, hasn't made any marked gains in either state. And there's been weirdness—like the heavily Democratic congressional district in California won by a Republican in 2012 after all four Democrats who ran in the primary so diluted the vote that none of them made the cut.
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