THE REAL SYSTEM FAILURE MIGHT BE THE OVERWEENING FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

Georgians have a choice between two objectively lousy major party candidates for a Senate seat.  That might lead to some introspection about the nature of candidate selection, and perhaps, about the role of the national government.

I've been on record for some time.  "I'd still prefer for elections not to be advance auctions of such large policy bundles, but one thing at a time."  The full Christmas list?

Plutocracy plus process-worship plus faith in Wise Experts plus the Cult of the Presidency produces rent-seeking.  But you have to be alert to those things in order to aid in the emergence of a more modest government in the wake of the failures of social insurance and nation building and Hope and Change and all the rest.

That's the aspiration.  What, though, about Georgia?

I do not know if Herschel Walker paid a woman with his own money to have an abortion. If so, that makes him a bad person unfit for the Senate.

I do know that Raphael Warnock wants to pay women with our money to have abortions, which makes him a bad person unfit for the Senate.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 4, 2022

That ship has sailed, notes Nick Catoggio:

It’d be passing strange for pro-life Republicans to punish a candidate who favors abortion on demand in his private life by throwing their support to a candidate who favors abortion on demand as national policy. Although it’d be less strange for them to withhold their vote from both.

The appropriate time to filter out damaged candidates is during primaries, we might say, when the alternatives on the ballot are palatable. Give conservatives a choice between a pretend pro-lifer and a real pro-lifer and that’s when you’ll see their commitment to the cause shine.

That's also something I've groused about. "You'll get better nominees when the party establishments have incentives to provide better nominees."  Unfortunately, the party establishments are subject to what takes place in the primary elections, and Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, who has noted the trouble with primary elections, also recognizes that it is support for something resembling a governing manifesto, rather than support for an individual, and in the case of both major party candidates in Georgia, a flawed individual, that influences voters.

First, the importance of partisanship is clear and is baked into electoral behavior. Candidate quality matters, but not as much as people think it does because, ultimately, people are voting for reasons that actually aren’t just about the candidate.

Second, nomination processes matter and ours does a lousy job of vetting candidates. Again, people can blame “The Republican Party” for Walker, but there was no centralized process that decided he was the best candidate for Georgia.**** No, he essentially self-selected and then rode his celebrity to a win in a low-information, low-turnout process.***** Since most people only have vague ideas about the candidates in primaries, it is hardly a shock that one of the most famous athletes from the state in the last 50 years won.

We simply do not have a nomination process that is designed to produce qualified candidates if “qualified” means meeting some set predetermined criteria. Instead, voters get what they get and are then faced with the partisan choice noted above. Worse, when voters are faced with that choice (or, more accurately, when voters behave as we know they will behave), the result is often the pushing of a given party is a negative direction due to poor candidate selection.

Third, we see here the consequences of only two viable choices in terms of parties. Voters faced with a bad choice within their own party have no other viable place to go with their vote, which simply means they are likely to vote for the bad candidate, which over time can reshape a party in a negative direction. It also means that partisans will likely stick with their own team even as it degenerates because switching teams is an unlikely behavior en masse.

Those endnotes do not have hyperlinks. It's worth reading Professor Taylor's post in full, including the endnotes, anyway.  His second and third points merit further consideration.  There's an instructive essay in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper that suggests even a high-information, high-turnout primary can go wrong.  A first-past-the post primary produces one winner.  A Georgia-style runoff produces a different winner.  An Alaska-style instant runoff produces yet another winner.  Perhaps the problem is in expecting too much of elections.  Those logical problems -- what the third point speaks to -- will be present under a different method of choosing representatives under which multiple parties have a chance.  But the bundles are too big.  All the same, "Is it too much to ask, though, for people to think beyond the two major parties?"  That might be a way around the "reshape a party in a negative direction," as disaffected voters support a minor party rather than punishing the major party that left them by supporting the other major party, which offers a worse policy bundle.