Letters to the Editor: Centrist voters are powerless in presidential primaries. We must fix this

To the editor: Jonah Goldberg offers some salient observations on the reasons for the closeness of the 2024 presidential election, but he fails to highlight what many centrist voters believe lies at the heart of our deep political divide.

The two major political parties have too much of a stranglehold on the nomination process. For many centrist voters, that stranglehold essentially sidelines them completely at the primary stage if they no longer register as a Democrat or a Republican.

The impact can be similar, however, for someone like me who has remained a registered Democrat but would have crossed over to vote for Republican Nikki Haley in our March primary had I been given the opportunity. Instead, the only non-laughable option I had as a registered Democrat was to vote for President Biden or not vote at all.

Finding a solution will not be easy, but perhaps it is time to begin exploring the possibility of a single, nationwide presidential primary in which voters would not be limited by their party affiliation or lack thereof. This is akin to what California now does at the state level.

Russ Swartz, Granada Hills

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To the editor: The subheadline for Goldberg’s column was, “This election reflects the fact that Republicans and Democrats have both become minority parties.” Reading this, I believed he would write about independents such as me.

But he did not mention independents once, so I will.

Independents became the largest voting block because voters got tired of seeing both Democrats and Republicans being controlled by Big Business and Big Money. Generally, we are fiscal conservatives (don’t spend more money than you take in) and liberal on social issues (pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and so forth).

Hopefully, a candidate will emerge one day who reflects America’s largest voting bloc.

Vaughn Hardenberg, Westwood

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To the editor: Goldberg writes as if this election is simply a political battle. This ignores the Trump campaign’s culture war posture and pandering to a “Christian” electorate; ignores his criminal behavior and still-unresolved criminal accountability in multiple cases; and it ignores the stoking of fear and anger by constantly lying about history, current events, his non-solutions to those events and his own past behavior.

This is not political. The Republicans do this by using race, religion and gender as wedges driven into the fabric of our society.

This is no longer a sun/moon or a moon/moon political battle; it is a man-made assault on the country’s democratic principles and institutions. The handicapping of this race is close because the corporate-owned media has sane-washed Trump’s authoritarian leanings and mental decline.

David Echt, Torrance