Well, Kansas sure picked a heck of a year to bring back presidential primary elections.
On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump has already steamrolled pretty much all comers, and former South Carolina governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is the last credible challenger standing — barely.
On the Democratic side, it’s President Joe Biden versus token opposition.
So why vote at all?
The best reason I can think of is so we can keep having primaries, a far better way for our small state’s voice to be heard on the national stage than the random caucus system that we’ve used, or skipped, every presidential election year except 1980 and 1992.
Primaries are more credible than caucuses and a lot fairer to the voters.
The problem with caucuses is that they only attract the most committed partisans who are willing to travel sometimes significant distances and spend the better part of a day politicking before casting a ballot (in the case of Republicans) or standing on one side of a caucus hall to be counted (in the case of Democrats).
Primaries are real elections, so if you’re elderly or disabled, military deployed overseas or otherwise unable to participate in a one-day caucus, you can vote by mail.
There will also be advance voting sites open in the upcoming March 19 primary.
And the process will be handled by the professional vote-counters in election offices across the state, so we can have more confidence in the results.
I previously criticized the bill the Legislature passed establishing the primary, because it’s set up as a “preference primary,” where the state reports the results and the parties can choose to honor or ignore the wishes of the voters.
Since then, in fact just a couple of weeks ago, both parties have filed delegate-selection rules binding themselves to the public primary vote.
Democrats will commit their delegates to the party’s national convention based on the proportional share each candidate gets.
On the Republican side, it’s winner-take-all.
A primary would have come in handy for the Democrats in 2008, when the Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton caucus was held during a blizzard that kept many Kansans at home.
