Reform NYC’s primary elections through charter changes to limit influence from the left

The Charter Revision Commission convened by Mayor Adams may have started as a politically motivated effort to fend off a City Council power grab — but on Monday, commissioners heard a reform proposal that could profoundly change Gotham politics for the better.

The possible change sounds simple: giving nearly one million more registered voters the right to participate in primary elections.

But its impact could be profound, offering New York City a way to take back local government from the hard left.

Today, voters not registered to a major party are shut out of primaries, our most important local elections.

They are, as progressive jargon would have it, disenfranchised.

The change discussed at Monday’s hearing would institute an open primary system in city elections, allowing independents, or in New York parlance “non-affiliated” voters who don’t choose a political party when they register, to participate in primaries.

As Susan Lerner of Common Cause said Monday, the city’s 925,000 independents are its second-largest group of registered voters, far outnumbering its 466,000 Republicans.

“The share of unaffiliated voters in New York [state] is greater than the total number of voters in 29 other states,” the good-government group noted in an October 2023 report.

A Common Cause survey found that 90% of those voters would participate in primary elections — if only they could.

Opening the primaries to non-affiliated voters would be more than a technocratic election law change.

Since Democrats dominate in almost every part of New York City, the Democratic Party’s primary is, in effect, the only election that counts.

In the current system, that means a tiny number of motivated Dems set the course for eight million New Yorkers.

Bill de Blasio won the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary with just 81,000 votes — a plurality of the paltry 198,000 total votes cast.

Yet that primary pulled City Hall leftward for the next eight years.

New York’s voting barriers are extreme when compared to other big cities. 

San Francisco and Minneapolis, for example, have joined New York in adopting ranked-choice voting, which was sold as a way to diminish political polarization. 

But New York stands alone for having both ranked choice and a closed primary that keeps independents on the sidelines.

What’s more, at the state level, New York is one of only nine states with a completely closed primary system, keeping 3.1 million voters from participating in key primaries like the looming fight between incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman and challenger George Latimer in the state’s 16th congressional district.

Bowman’s fellow Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got to Congress thanks to her 2018 primary win over John Crowley — in a district with 400,000 eligible voters, where only 29,000 cast ballots.

AOC, of course, took her victory as a mandate for socialism.

As open-primary champion John Opdyke has put it, “There are bad voting laws, terrible voting laws and then there’s New York, where the laws are systemically designed to disenfranchise.”

Not being able to choose a primary ballot at all is a lot worse than what Joe Biden likes to call the “new Jim Crow” in Georgia — where, by the way, primaries are open to all registered voters, regardless of partisan affiliation.  

It’s ironic that New York Democrats like to preen about claims of voter suppression in unenlightened red states, while in practice they’re the worst offenders.

Of course, bringing non-affiliated voters into the primary system wouldn’t inevitably change the type of candidates who get elected. 

But the very fact that these voters have chosen not to pick a party label speaks volumes.

These are voters who choose by candidate, not by party, and are therefore less likely to be ideologically bound. 

They are likely to be more concerned about clean streets, good schools and keeping “protesters” from blockading the Brooklyn Bridge than about diversity, equity, inclusion or Gaza.

There’s no single version of a more open primary system, as the charter commission was told at the Bronx hearing.

One variation would institute a “final five” system in which any voter could choose from a full field of candidates, with the top five vote-getters facing off in November.

Or there’s the Massachusetts system, in which a voter can choose either party’s primary ballot, or the Chicago or Boston mayoral systems, in which a non-partisan preliminary field is winnowed to two final ballot candidates in November.

Or California’s “jungle primary,” in which candidates’ party affiliations are made clear, but all voters can participate.

Any of these is far more inclusive than the city’s current closed system.

One could, of course, imagine an entirely different reality — a New York City with a real two-party system and a robust Republican Party that could nominate competitive candidates. 

But here in the real world, it’s the Democratic primary that selects our city’s leaders, contests in which voters must choose between centrists like Eric Adams and the far leftists who run the City Council.

A broader electorate could help guard against future Bill de Blasios — and could moderate the stances of ambitious pols who would be mayor, such as Comptroller Brad Lander. 

And any charter change, it’s important to note, would have to be approved via referendum — a choice made in a November general election, when all voters would be eligible to have a say.

Howard Husock is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and the author of “The Poor Side of Town — And Why We Need It.”