What Is the Primary Problem? (with Nick Troiano)

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The topic of this episode is, “What is the primary problem?” Every two years, we have congressional elections, which feature both primary elections and general elections. For nearly everyone who listens to this podcast, this seems like an eternal feature of governance system: primary elections are used to winnow the candidate field, and then general elections give voters the choice between two or maybe three finalists. But in truth, congressional primaries are a more recent development in our political history. They became the norm only about five or six decades ago. And like any other system of rules—be it the laws restricting investments or the rules of baseball—primaries are imperfect…