One of the nine ballot questions going to Massachusetts voters this November is a proposal to change the way that we vote for candidates for all offices except the President. This proposal would replace our partisan primary process with an “all party” primary, in which all candidates run on the same primary ballot, and all voters vote in the same primary election. The two candidates who receive the most votes in this primary advance to the general election. This process risks dangerously misreading the will of the voters, incentivizes strategic voting, and strengthens donors and insiders.
Why Top Two Primaries are Bad for Democracy
Spoiler Effect and Lockouts
Washington State is one of the few states in the country that currently uses a top-two system. In the 2016 race for Washington State Treasurer, 51.57% of voters picked a Democratic candidate. Yet, voters were forced to pick between two Republicans in the general election.
Under a “top-two” system, the more popular party risks being locked out whenever they run a large number of candidates. This year, In California’s 6th congressional district this cycle, 55.7% of voters picked a Democratic candidate, yet a lockout of Democrats was very narrowly avoided (note that the “independent” in this race had run as a Republican until this year). Congressional seats should not go to a minority party because they played the system better, ran fewer candidates, and strategized to make sure that roughly half their supporters voted for each of their candidates. That is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Pressure to Coalesce
Because of the possibility that vote splitting within a party could result in a lockout, voters in top-two systems are often more motivated by a desire to support the strongest candidate in their party, rather than supporting the best candidate in their primary. Perhaps your statehouse district has a well funded candidate in your party, but they have a history of bad behavior, or you disagree with them on major policy issues. Under a top-two system, you may have to pick between risking the other party pulling off a lockout or voting for a candidate you dislike.
Candidates know they can rely on this pressure to coalesce that voters feel, and get away with bad behavior. Although the current partisan system is far from perfect, it allows a time to hold your party members accountable for bad behavior without having to worry about helping the other party. With top-two primaries there is no ballot where politicians can be held accountable, because they can always pit partisan interests against each other.
A system that incentivizes voters to think like this and vote against their true beliefs is a bad system.
Strategic Campaigning
In the 2026 LA Mayoral race, the LA County Federation of Labor, which was backing incumbent Democrat Karen Bass, funded ads “against” Republican candidate Spencer Pratt. However, the ad seemed to be promoting popular Republican policies, and the federation did not deny allegations that they were intended to boost Republican turnout.
Why would a federation supporting Karen Bass want to boost a Republican? Bass was in a comfortable first place in the polls and almost certain to advance past the top-two primary. However, head-to-head polls between Bass and progressive challenger Nithya Raman showed a potential close race in the general election. Karen Bass would certainly have defeated Spencer Pratt in a general election; it seems that her supporters wanted to help give her the easiest path by boxing out the progressive challenger.
A system that incentivizes reverse psychology promotional attack ads is not good for democracy.
Shadow Primaries
Voters feeling the pressure to coalesce behind the strongest candidate in their party to avoid a lockout look to signals to determine who the strongest candidate is. In high attention races they might look to early polling, but in state legislative races, where there is usually no polling, they will likely look to fundraising. Early polling is usually much more reflective of money and name recognition than popularity, so both signals disempower grassroots candidates and give more power to megadonors.
Because top-two primaries incentivize parties to limit the number of candidates running from their party, “shadow primaries” take place, where a party’s strongest candidates are informally chosen. Shadow primaries are often entirely focused on fundraising numbers and notions of “electability,” meaning they are more easily bought than real primaries, where outspent candidates can often pull off upsets (see Abdul El-Sayed or Peggy Flanagan).
Top-Two primaries claim to challenge the two-party system, but they actually remove the only election where voters don’t have an incentive to get behind the party candidate.
Who is Backing This?
The group leading the campaign for top-two primaries is called Coalition for a Healthy Democracy. CHD has raised about $5.1 million, from some very interesting donors. I categorized their donors into a few different categories, and made a pie chart to show how much of CHD’s money raised from individual donors came from each group (the private equity donors are in orange).
As you can see, over 70% of the money that Coalition for a Healthy Democracy raised came from current or former private equity executives. The twenty-two individual donors from Bain Capital, Berkshire Partners, and other private equity firms raised $3.7 million to try to bring about top two primaries. Only one of these 22 individuals is a woman.
The Coalition for Healthy Democracy also shares several big donors with a not-so-distant dark money movement behind charter schools. Among CHD’s 22 big-dollar private equity donors is Andrew Balson, who gave $790,000—more than four and a half times the entire “other” category. Ten years ago Andrew Balson gave $300,000 to “Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy,” (FESA) an organization supporting a ballot initiative to expand charter schools. The ballot question was criticized for “dark money” fueling the Yes campaign, which made the ballot question the most expensive in Massachusetts history at the time. FESA was ultimately sanctioned by the state for failing to disclose campaign finance information, an egregious display of dark money influence that led to the largest forfeiture in the history of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
In 2017, the chair of Governor Baker’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Paul Sagan, was criticized when it was revealed that he had donated nearly half a million dollars to FESA. Perhaps it is a coincidence that Paul Sagan also gave $100,000 to Coalition for a Healthy Democracy (although Sagan is not one of our 22 private equity guys). One of those 22 is Mark Nunnelly, who was Baker’s Secretary of Technology Services and Security when he gave $275,000 to FESA. Nunnelly must feel that this initiative aligns with him even more than that one did, as he gave $500,000 to CHD, more than 2.9 times the entire “other” category.
In summary: the private equity bros who tried to use illegal dark money to pass a charter school initiative have regrouped to bankroll top-two primaries. In 2016, an incredible coalition of teachers, unions, students, and progressives was able to stop them in their tracks, despite being outspent by large margins. We can do it again this year by opposing Question 3.