"More of this is needed, to counter the rise of AOC/MTG style demagogues. We can’t make the voters who elect them (and people like Matt Gaetz, Eric Swalwell, Bernie Sanders, etc.) go away, but we can make moderates great again. Even, ahem, if it means voting for Democrats who happen to be moderate."
I'm worried that this won't be sufficient as long as the most motivated people to get out and work the primary system are each party's most extremist wings. It's great to vote for moderates in the general election when given a chance, but unless moderate folks get involved earlier in the process diluting the extremists' affect on selecting the candidates that make it to November, we're still going to have the problem of selecting from two ends of a spread-out bimodal (dumbbell) distribution instead of making a choice of two folks generally in the same area as a normal (bell curve) distribution.
To make any meaningful changes, moderates may need to buckle down and replay the "Precinct Committeeman Project" playbook that the Tea Party used to great effect a decade ago (and then evolved into Trumpists in the GOP):
I've been looking into whether this is still a viable strategy in my own community (Chicago), but haven't come to a firm enough conclusion to take the next step and start attending local GOP meetings.
"More of this is needed, to counter the rise of AOC/MTG style demagogues. We can’t make the voters who elect them (and people like Matt Gaetz, Eric Swalwell, Bernie Sanders, etc.) go away, but we can make moderates great again. Even, ahem, if it means voting for Democrats who happen to be moderate."
I'm worried that this won't be sufficient as long as the most motivated people to get out and work the primary system are each party's most extremist wings. It's great to vote for moderates in the general election when given a chance, but unless moderate folks get involved earlier in the process diluting the extremists' affect on selecting the candidates that make it to November, we're still going to have the problem of selecting from two ends of a spread-out bimodal (dumbbell) distribution instead of making a choice of two folks generally in the same area as a normal (bell curve) distribution.
To make any meaningful changes, moderates may need to buckle down and replay the "Precinct Committeeman Project" playbook that the Tea Party used to great effect a decade ago (and then evolved into Trumpists in the GOP):
https://redstate.com/diary/martin_a_knight/2009/05/05/the-committeeman-project-n169178
I've been looking into whether this is still a viable strategy in my own community (Chicago), but haven't come to a firm enough conclusion to take the next step and start attending local GOP meetings.