Hillary Clinton

There also has to be a reasonable standard to allow third-party candidates to get on the ballot. My state has some of the most prohibitive rules in the nation. Only the Libertarian Party has managed to clear the bar and it took them decades. I don't have much patience with the Greens, but I sign their petitions for ballot access every single time someone holds it in front of my face.

And we need to get some public funding for campaigns, give the newbies some seed money to get started.

I have little patience for Sanders and his minions coming and trying to change the rules of the halfway through the game when it became evident they were losing. That is sour grapes. But the frustration they are expressing with the two-party system and candidate choice is real and has been evident to me for ages. Most districts are not competitive. Whoever shows up with a D or R next to their name in the GE wins. It is impossible for third-party candidates to even get on the ballot in many states and then they get shut out of the debates. So the only way to win is to be a D or an R. The independents and third-party people are effectively shut out of the system. Like it or not, there are more of those every year. People who are not mainstream Dem or Rep are frustrated. Hell, *I* am frustrated. This is not a good system. Something has to give.

IMO, either the Democratic Party makes a SERIOUS effort to fix the gerrymandering and states lower the bar for third-party ballot access or we open the primaries. If we don't do something we will face more rebellion in our ranks in coming years.

Also, from my experience doing tons of voter registration and GOTV, most who don't register with a party don't because they know nothing about what the parties represent. I only do this work in high-poverty, predominantly minority areas and I can assert that the lack of party ID has nothing to do with purity or privilege. Either the parties are not doing good outreach or they are not addressing people's issues. Both?



If we made primaries more competitive, it might be GOOD for the party. Clinton won against Sanders, even in open primaries, because she was a better candidate and ran a better campaign. She EARNED it. I am not afraid to see more unaffiliated voters come into the system because I support strong candidates and believe they can win. It would also give the party a chance to make their pitch to unaffiliated voters who are unfamiliar with our values, revitalizing the base in the process. I dunno. Seems like there is a big upside to open primaries if we are willing to take some risks.