Partying

The raison d'etre for political parties is to find, and nominate, a candidate who most represents your personal political views.

The theory being that a given party will consistently reflect the mores of the people who get together and support it.

I've seen a lot of commentary about changing from closed to open primaries to select candidates.

It's a double edged sword.

A closed primary means that only people who took the time to register as a member of that party can vote to choose a candidate.  It also means they give up the opportunity to chose a candidate from the another party.  Commitment.

An open primary lets anyone vote for any candidate.

In practice, open primaries have not gotten us better candidates, what they've done is eliminate decent candidates by supporting candidates who couldn't beat the other team.  The spoiler effect in full force.  It's a formalized version of how Bernie Sanders keeps getting elected.

You don't get the best conservative candidate by letting liberals choose who gets to be the conservative candidate.  You get the conservative least able to compete with the liberal candidate.

But none of this matters when we have the problem described in this video:

Note: The author of that vid has a solution (in a different video) he likes that I don't think will work better.  First past the post is the worst way of doing an election; except for all of the other ways.

Libertarians, take note, you need to take over a party to win and you need to take over one of the big two.  Socialists captured, gutted and killed the Democrat party; libertarians should do the same to the Republican party.