Finally, Georgia sees real, two-party competition: Which one… | Kyle Wingfield | www.ajc.com

[T]he Georgia GOP is meeting Saturday to plot its own path toward possible self-destruction.

The state party’s leaders will be taking up a measure, held over from last month’s convention in Athens, that represents a first step toward moving from holding primaries to choose their nominees to holding a nominating convention at which activists would make the selections. This is touted as the “Virginia Plan,” named after the state whose own recent GOP nominating convention offers just a terrificexample of why everyone should be rushing out to copy it.

The activists claim that the big money in party primaries mean “very few people” are choosing Georgia Republican nominees. So their plan is to broaden the tent to … several hundred party die-hards? As opposed to the several hundred thousand people who now vote in GOP primaries?

The activists seem to think their will is being blocked by something called the Georgia GOP establishment. What they apparently don’t realize is that, to the other 9 million-plus Georgians, these same activists are part of the Georgia GOP establishment.

Nor are the other 9 million-plus Georgians likely to buy the argument that these activists — the ones willing to give up multiple Saturdays over a couple of months every year or so to go through the process of becoming members of the party establishment convention delegates — are going to somehow be more “representative” of the party, and less likely to choose candidates that don’t risk consigning the GOP to “permanent minority status” than the collective wisdom of all those primary voters.

After spending several hours sitting through the state convention’s Saturday agenda last month — before they even got around to voting for party officers! — it occurred to me that the current system is a big turn-off to people with children. Doubling down on that system by tying party nominations to it strikes me as the exact opposite direction the Georgia GOP ought to be moving in. In short, it strikes me as the kind of thing the proverbial “stupid party” does.

via Finally, Georgia sees real, two-party competition: Which one… | Kyle Wingfield | www.ajc.com.