Rhode Island primaries open to independent voters, but parties still exert outsized influence over elections

Governor McKee presses the flesh at a Ghana-unity World Cup event

in Providence in June.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Yesterday I voted in a Rhode Island primary election for the first time in my 15 years here, because a new state law allows voting without party affiliation.

The Governor's Race and the Problem with Not-So-Open Primaries 

I wanted to signal my displeasure with Governor Dan McKee. I did not think McKee a worthy successor to predecessor Gina Raimondo in 2021, when she joined the Biden cabinet, and I did not support him when he won election in 2022. I thought him a political insider more interested in party politics than bettering life for Rhode Islanders, and I regard my view as exonerated. 

But before this election, my vote was near meaningless. Rhode Island is a solidly blue state. The Republican party does not even put up candidates for most state legislative offices and often puts up non-serious placeholders for executive offices. So many voters simply "pull the lever" for Democrats automatically that most elections are decided in the primaries. Though Rhode Island has had Republican and independent governors in the past, such an upset is highly unlikely when the Democrat candidate is a party insider with easy name recognition, such as McKee.

Heck, yeah, I want my sticker.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I'm an "independent," or what Rhode Island calls "unaffiliated" voter. I always have been. I believe that America's two major parties have locked up the political system by making it almost impossible for a third party to get traction as other than a spoiler. Parties can no longer shift as they once did at pivotal moments in American history. And as they are locked in, both major parties have become unresponsive to American voters, who by and large are moderate. The parties are advantaged instead by playing to extremes. The two-party lock thus exacerbates our political and social polarization. Power in Washington shifts left or right, but congressional paralysis and executive unaccountability remain constant. I won't sign on to that. (There is a longer and more complicated explanation of why I have not affiliated with a third party, for another day. It is a proposition I have considered carefully.)

Refusal to join a major party meant that my vote in each general election was usually "thrown away" on state and federal races, because those matters were already decided. Rhode Island had more-or-less closed primaries when I moved here in 2011; unaffiliated voters were not allowed to vote in party primaries. Technically, Rhode Island had, since 1978, "semi-open" primaries, because unaffiliated voters who turned up at the primary could choose either ballot and go ahead and vote. However, the voter would then be registered as a party member for the ballot the voter chose. The voter could then file paperwork to disaffiliate from the party, but the onus was on the voter to do so. I don't consider that "open," no matter how consistently the prefix "semi" is interjected.

I'm not a political scientist, though I play one in the classroom. I have many political science friends who explain things to me. One reminded me last week that one problem with the closed primary is a counter-majoritarian effect. Suppose that, in Rhode Island, a moderate Democrat—who might incidentally, be something else that resonates with voters, such as libertarian, but would be effectively excluded from politics if so identifying—would command the majority support of the people when all voters participate. Yet that candidate never reaches all voters. Rather, the Democrat party first prefers candidates for the primary ballot who articulate more extreme differentiation from Republicans. Then party loyalists, the most fervent primary voters, prefer the more extreme of the balloted extreme. Our moderate Democrat stands no chance in this process, and the candidate who would have commanded majority support in the state never reaches the general election: yet another, and more subtle, way that our party-driven political system exacerbates polarization.

Half of R.I. registered voters are not party members.

R.I. SoS public domain

Here's a remarkable fact: Despite decades of compulsory party registration if one dared vote in a dispositive primary, roughly half of Rhode Island voters are, still are, unaffiliated. Present state data peg the count at 52%. It's 50% in Barrington, R.I., where I live. Turnout for primaries, never great, was disincentivized by the threat of compulsory party registration. And data show vigorous trading in party membership, disaffiliation and affiliation, for a few thousand who still wanted to participate.

Whether or not there is any merit to the mythology, I cannot say, but Rhode Islanders are said to be famously independently minded owing to the founding of the state by Roger Williams as a haven for church-state separationist, religious dissidents.

In 2024, the Rhode Island legislature at last passed, and Governor McKee signed into law, a bill allowing unaffiliated voters to choose and cast a party ballot in the primary without joining the party. Or otherwise stated, disaffiliation is instant and automatic. As an election supervisor put it to me, if you go in an unaffiliated voter, you come out an unaffiliated voter.

McKee loses, about 1.7:1.
R.I. SoS public domain

It is somewhat ironic that McKee signed the 2024 bill. He lost in yesterday's primary, remarkably for an incumbent and insider in Rhode Island. Voters, including me, favored his opponent, more moderate on many issues and with a corporate-boardroom origin story, by about 1.7 to 1. In advance of the election, the conservative Rhode Island Current suggested that Rhode Island Republicans ought disaffiliate to take advantage of the new primary law to vote against the lefty McKee without, now, having to become Democrats.

While strategic voting is an arguably adverse result of opening primaries to the unaffiliated, the threat is minimal relative to the widely disenfranchising alternative of alienating the unaffiliated. Anyway, in truth, McKee's record was so poor, and voters are so angry, that polls disfavored him yesterday regardless of the 2024 change.

A sign at my polling place notifies independent voters
of the 2024 law allowing voting without affiliation.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC0 1.0

The Rhode Island voting system is improved by widening the "semi-open" primary with "automatic disaffiliation." For the first time since I moved here in 2011, I feel like I got my small say in the Governor's race. But the problem of locked-party choice still overshadows the system, just as it perpetuates dysfunction in American government writ large.

The Lieutenant Governor's Race and the Problem with Plurality Rule

What should Rhode Island's next innovation be? Another ill of party politics can be seen in the lieutenant governor's race and could be cured by rank-choice voting (RCV).

An advantage of the two-party lock is that general elections usually reduce the field to two choices. Majority rule works well when there are only two choices, because one of the candidates invariably wins more than 50% of the votes. But when there are more than two choices, "majority rule," in the United States at least, usually devolves into plurality rule. The election is "one and done," and the candidate with the most votes wins—even with less than 50% of votes.

Further complicating matters, because the party is the gatekeeper to the ballot, the outcome can be manipulated by allowing fewer or more candidates to be listed. For example, if the party favors an ideological position that the party fears a majority of voters, say 60%, will not support, the party can allow, say, three candidates with an opposing ideological position to reach the ballot. Opposition voters then split over those three candidates, 20% each, and the party favorite prevails, not with a majority of votes, but with a plurality of 40%.

Run-off elections avert this problem. But a conventional run-off requires voters to trudge back to the polls, so even poorer than poor turnout severely distorts representation. RCV effects a virtual run-off, using voters' second or third choices to calculate run-off results with one-time voter preference data and generating a candidate who enjoys majority support, at least in some sense. There are many, contested variations of RCV in the operational details, but overall, political scientists, they tell me, prefer it to plurality-rules for its obviously superior democratic methodology. Further explanation may be found at Ballotpedia, along with data from Alaska and Maine, which use RCV.

In the Rhode Island lieutenant governor's race, it's safe to presume that the party favored candidate Sabina Matos. She was the incumbent and another political insider, nominated initially for the job by Governor McKee. Naturally, her voter approval has faltered, same as McKee's. 

Matos wins by plurality.

R.I. SoS public domain

But unlike McKee, Matos was in a crowded field with four other candidates. I voted for the runner-up challenger, Xaykham Khamsyvoravong, who at the time of this writing won 26.4% of votes. The three other candidates collectively won 36.1% of votes. Matos is projected to win with only 37.4% of votes.

My wife aptly observed that Matos's share of the votes, 37.4%, is strikingly close to Governor McKee's losing share of 37.6% of votes. Given the political context, one might suppose that close to a two-thirds majority of voters in the Democrat primary wished, like me, to toss out the incumbency, both governor and lieutenant governor. But because messaging among the lieutenant-governor challengers was similar, and interest in the race is low anyway, no consensus emerged among a majority of voters on which challenger should unseat Matos. Anyone else, a majority of voters said. Yet Matos overwhelmingly likely will be reelected as lieutenant governor.

Again, the need for RCV is amplified by undemocratic party influence over the ballot to begin with. RCV will help, but will not solve the problem of democratically unaccountable party machinery making choices for us, much less the political polarization that results, amplified by the technologies of the information age. 

It is clear, though, that we should and can do better.