During Indiana’s historically competitive gubernatorial Republican primary election this spring, a bipartisan group of centrists emerged to encourage Democrats to vote for a moderate candidate in that Republican primary. They even erected billboards with the head-turning message, “Even Democrats can vote in the Republican primary.”
The people behind it, a group called ReCenter Indiana, were not surprised to see a bill filed for the upcoming legislative session, which starts Wednesday, that would put the kibosh on that.
“We were absolutely expecting it,” said Adrianne Slash, president of the group’s PAC.
House Bill 1029, written by Whiteland Republican Rep. Michelle Davis, would make Indiana a “closed primary” state by establishing a formal process for Hoosiers to affiliate with a specific party and allowing only those who’ve followed that process to vote in that party’s primary. Should the bill proceed, Indiana would join a national trend of Republican-led states seeking to close their primaries in the interest of wresting more control over ideological alignment within their elections.
“Primary elections should reflect the true will of a political party’s members,” Davis said in a statement to IndyStar. “By moving to a closed primary system, Indiana can ensure that the nominees selected by each party represent the values and priorities of its supporters.”
Louisiana lawmakers closed their primaries last year. A similar bill is working through the Ohio legislature. Wyoming passed primary voting restrictions after Democrats unabashedly crossed lines to vote for U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney in her 2022 primary, which she lost.
“These are states that are safely Republican, that are trying to ensure that there are no ‘RINOs,’ that the people that are winning these Republican primaries surely reflect the orthodoxy,” said Greg Shufeldt, associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis.
House elections committee chair Rep. Timothy Wesco, a Republican from Osceola who would decide whether the bill gets heard, did not respond to a request for comment.
The trend is more of a counter-movement to the longer-held pattern of opening up primary elections in the United States, Shufedlt said. Parties have gone from picking their own candidates in smoke-filled rooms to opening up the choice to voters, and in recent decades, the majority of states have shifted to “open” primaries in which one doesn’t need to register with a party to vote in their primary.
Indiana is one of those states, sort of. That’s how our system works in practice, though Indiana law actually states that a person can vote in a party’s primary if they voted for mostly that party’s candidates in the last general election, or intends to in the next one. It’s an honor system without an enforcement mechanism.
When Hoosiers register to vote for the first time, they don’t declare a party affiliation; voting at the ballot box is Indiana’s form of declaring a party affiliation. House Bill 1029 would require Hoosiers to file an official “party affiliation form” at the time they register to vote or not later than Dec. 31 before the primary election in which they want to vote.
That Dec. 31 deadline, however, is far earlier than the voter registration deadline, which in Indiana is 29 days before an election. That means first-time voters who wait until the voter registration deadline will have already missed their window to declare a party and participate in that year’s primary. (Under this bill, counties would mail out affiliation forms to already-registered voters in September.)
More:Indiana voter turnout is almost last in the nation. Many are working to turn this around.
Opponents of closed primaries argue that they exclude independent voters ― whose share of the voting bloc is ever-increasing, especially among young people ― from having a voice in elections, especially in states overwhelmingly controlled by one party where the primaries contain the real contests. In other words, since Republicans have the numbers to dominate statewide general elections, the primary is where voters can really determine their leaders.
Closing primaries, Slash argues, discourages participation and “sends a really big, loud and clear signal, you get what you get in November, let us handle May.”
“And I don’t think that that’s fair to Hoosiers,” she said.
The impact of the bill may be more symbolic than sizeable, however. So few people vote in primaries ― especially in Indiana, where an abysmal 14% of registered voters cast ballots in the 2022 primaries. That’s what drives ideological polarization, not necessarily the type of primaries states have, Shufeldt said.
“Whether it’s open or closed, the only people that are voting in these primaries are active liberal Democrats and active conservative Republicans,” he said. “It’s not really fundamentally changing who’s willing to participate in the system. And so much of it is kind of like, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.'”
Contact IndyStar state government and politics reporter Kayla Dwyer at kdwyer@indystar.com or follow her on Twitter @kayla_dwyer17.
