Did you know? 1,058,000 Democrats are eligible to vote in the upcoming Special Senate Primary in August!
If any real life example serves to demonstrate the importance of closing our primaries, the upcoming August 11 special election for US Senate should do it.
South Carolina Republicans Must Close Their Primaries!
We Republican voters in South Carolina have a simple choice to make: risk letting outsiders help pick our nominees, or finally lock the door and let Republicans choose their own Republican candidates.
The numbers tell the story. If South Carolina has about 1.43 million registered Democrats, and only 372,000 of them voted in the June primaries, that still leaves roughly 1,058,000 Democrats eligible under current rules to vote in the upcoming special Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
That is not a loophole. That is a gaping hole.
No serious political party should accept a system where the other side can walk into its most important nomination contest and help decide who will carry the banner. Republicans would never tolerate Democrats choosing their nominee in a closed-door meeting or a private club. Yet in South Carolina’s open primary system, that kind of outside influence is built right into the process.
This is why a Closed Primaries Bill is not some inside-baseball procedural tweak. It is a basic matter of fairness, integrity, and self-government. If the Republican Party is going to stand for anything, it ought to stand for the right of Republican voters to choose Republican nominees.
Open primaries invite mischief. They encourage crossover voting, strategic interference, and political gamesmanship that distort the will of the party faithful. They weaken accountability because candidates stop answering first to their own voters and start calculating how to appeal to the other side’s activists and operatives.
This Special Primary Election is a rare case, but an especially egregious one: there is no competing Democratic primary. That means Democrats do not even have a real nominating fight of their own to settle, yet under South Carolina’s open rules, they can still help shape the Republican primary where the real decision is being made.
That is not the type politics we should tolerate. That is sabotage dressed up as participation.
Republicans in the General Assembly should stop dragging their feet and pass a Closed Primaries Bill now. The argument for reform is not complicated: If you are a Republican, you should be able to trust that your nominee was chosen by Republicans. If you are a Democrat, you should choose your own nominee as well. That is the way a serious political system protects its identity and its voters.
The SCGOP has been working hard for years to get a Closed Primaries Bill passed, but, as usual, our Republican majorities in both houses of the General Assembly just cannot manage to get it done.
We must double-down, and keep fighting!
South Carolina Republicans do not need a system that invites the opposition into the party’s house and hands them a key. We need a system that respects party loyalty, protects nominee selection, and restores common sense to our primaries.
