Why It’s Time to Embrace Open Primaries

The Lutheran Conundrum:

The Lutheran Conundrum:

Why It’s Time to Embrace Open Primaries

By Barry O’Connell

The Maryland Wire

If you’ve ever heard the old church joke, you already know where I stand on shaking up the status quo.

How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?

The answer, of course, is none. Lutherans don’t like change.

I’m a Lutheran, and by nature, I don’t like change either. I like structure, I like tradition, and I prefer the old ways of doing things. For years, I’ve been a steadfast defender of closed primaries. My baseline assumption has always been that if you aren’t committed enough to join a political party, you don’t deserve a vote in its nominating contest. Why hand the keys to people who can’t be bothered to pick a side?

My longtime friend Len Foxwell has been working on me to rethink that stance for several years now. Len teaches at Johns Hopkins University so he is used to applying academic logic to the messy theater of Maryland politics. Len’s thesis is simple: Maryland is fundamentally a state of a middle temperament. Most Marylanders are reasonable, practical people who want good government, not ideological warfare. But because our closed primary system leaves the gates guarded only by the low-turnout fringes, we keep running the risk of being hijacked by the extremes.

And let’s be honest: there comes a time when stubbornness stops being a virtue. When the system starts serving up radicals who spew hateful, divisive nonsense—particularly the open and vicious antisemitism echoing from the far-left progressive wing—even a change-resistant Lutheran has to admit the rules need fixing.

The Danger of the Split Field

We’ve seen how this movie ends in Maryland. When a primary field gets crowded and the total vote gets fractured among four or five mainstream, reasonable candidates, a disciplined, hyper-ideological minority can sneak right up the middle.

Remember Ben Jealous? The man was a Rhodes scholar, yet when he ran for governor, he marched down to the Eastern Shore and couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to pronounce the names of the local counties. It never occurred to him to check. Instead, he leaned into a Bernie Sanders-style, far-left platform, made wild promises the state could never afford, and got soundly rejected by Maryland voters in the general election because he was wildly out of step with our state’s pragmatic streak.

Maryland is not a state for extremists. We don’t like them on the left, and we don’t like them on the right. When candidates try to substitute societal warfare talking points for actual governance, the voters eventually hand them a reality check.

Using Open Primaries as a Shield

So why look at open primaries? Because in heavily blue jurisdictions or one-party districts across Maryland, the Democratic primary is the general election.

When those primaries are locked down behind closed doors, a tiny, radicalized fraction of the electorate gets to choose the nominee for everyone. That is how antisemitic rhetoric and fringe progressive dogma find a foothold in mainstream legislative bodies—protected by a low-turnout primary bubble where moderate, sensible voters are legally barred from entering the voting booth.

If we open our primaries, we shatter that bubble.

Allowing independent voters and pragmatic centrists into the primary process builds a bulwark against the extremes. It gives the reasonable, middle-temperament majority a mechanism to filter out candidates who peddle hate and division before they ever reach the general election ballot. It forces candidates to appeal to the broad, sensible center rather than pandering to the loudest, most radical voices in the room.

Time to Adapt

I still prefer my traditions. I still believe in party accountability. But the political landscape has shifted, and clinging to a broken mechanism just because “it’s the way we’ve always done it” is bad strategy.

Len Foxwell is right. Maryland’s strength has always lived in the sensible middle. If we want to keep the radicals and the antisemites from hijacking our elections, we have to give the good, reasonable people of this state the tools to stop them at the very first ballot box.

Even a Lutheran can recognize when it’s time to change a light bulb.