Reply #18: And, yet again, none of the third-party enthusiasts wants to acknowledge that ugly word "primaries"

[Jim Lane]

If you have enough votes to elect a North Carolina First party candidate, then you have enough votes to run that candidate in the Democratic primary and win the Democratic nomination. It doesn't work the other way, though. Given the millions of voters who have an institutional loyalty to the Democratic Party, and who will strongly tend to vote Democratic, it's eminently possible that a progressive running on a third-party line would lose, but would have won if running as the Democrat.

Please don't tell me that IRV will cure this problem. We will not have IRV on a major scale anytime soon (nor am I sure that we should -- it has its own problems).

Primaries came from the push for democratization. Reformers fought hard for decades to have candidates selected by the voters, in primaries, rather than by party bosses in a smoke-filled room. Why are some progressives today so willing to toss that aside?