Many years ago in my more politically active days, I remember talking to a woman about a primary election in which Sharron Angle ran against Bill Raggio for state Senate in 2008. “I can’t believe he had to actually knock on doors,” she huffed, as if Raggio (or anyone else) were somehow entitled to be re-elected.

Raggio was clearly the better qualified candidate in that race (yes, I’m aware of my gift for understatement), but it was a good thing he did knock on those doors – he only defeated Angle by 548 votes. What’s more, it required him to engage his constituents and defend his record and policy approach, which is a healthy thing in a republic. For those reasons, I generally think primary elections are a good thing for the long term benefit of both a party itself and a free society generally.

But the following cycles set up increasingly shrill arguments in Republican primaries over who the Truest Conservatives™ were. You had all sorts of factions – more traditional religious folk, purist libertarians, personality cult followers like the Ron Paulestineans, increasingly sparse Reaganites…  The arguments weren’t about the merits of various policies supported by various Republican candidates, but were rather more akin to religious inquests with self-proclaimed keepers of the faith looking for heretics to burn.

This was decidedly NOT healthy.

In such a toxic environment, primaries draw some ridiculous characters who in saner times would earn about three votes, and that’s only if their mothers felt bad for them. Take the Republican primary race for state Senate District 16, where incumbent Ben Kieckhefer is being challenged by Gary Schmidt. Schmidt, whose policy, er, proposals, such as they are, are rabbit holes of barely literate ravings scattered about a website best described as a relic from 1997.

Schmidt was actually disqualified in the race last week, because he doesn’t actually live in the district – the judge who disqualified him just didn’t buy Schmidt’s claim that he lived under the collapsed roof of the Reindeer Lodge (pictured below). And yet the state Republican Party actually endorsed Schmidt the last time he ran against Kieckhefer in 2014.

The result of this type of thing has an estranged base and a fractured, ineffective party. Individual politicians (such as Gov. Brian Sandoval) have been enormously successful and popular in the short term, but the teamwork the party is supposed to provide to move a comprehensive agenda forward has been sorely lacking. That’s why reforms in 2015 – when Republicans controlled basically everything – were so modest and ultimately ephemeral compared to what otherwise could have been.

So naturally, Nevada Democrats have decided to repeat all of these mistakes.

***

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the lack of substance from the candidates in one of our local county commission races. This prompted a note from an Assembly candidate who had the same complaint about his opponents (all Democrats). I was curious, and so I went to the websites, where every one of them was touting themselves as the Truest Bestest Most Progressing Progressive Around. In almost every case, they openly advocated for government monopolization of our health-care decisions, education options and personal self-defense. Given the repeated demonstrations that a too-big government becomes awfully ripe for those who would steal from or otherwise abuse taxpayers, this rabid belief in the magic of Big Government to solve all of our woes is frankly scary. (As a lifelong government employee, I am very aware of the limits of our powers, and the dangers when those powers become unlimited.)

But it isn’t merely obscure local legislative races that are drawing out the extremists on the left. U.S. Senate candidate Jacky Rosen is conspicuously penning articles with Elizabeth Warren and scheduling fundraisers with Jane Fonda. Congressman Ruben Kihuen sent out a press release celebrating International Workers Day on May 1st and presumably the radicals celebrating that day with signs that say "Capitalism Kills." Ah, May Day – a celebration of socialism which began with the murder of eight American police officers in the 19th century and rose to greatest prominence when the Soviets and their various satellite states used the day to celebrate the most murderous political philosophy ever devised by man with massive parades of military equipment. (If you see phrases like “Workers of the World Unite!” and it doesn’t evoke secret police, gulags, 100 million dead people or at the very least the complete collapse of Venezuelan civil society and its economy, then you need to revisit the last century or so of world history.)

The marquee Democratic primary is, of course, in the governor’s race between Steve Sisolak and Chris Giunchigliani, with Giunchigliani, aided by the state teachers union, professing to be the “true” progressive because Sisolak apparently opposes all school funding and is OK with people in Las Vegas building things. The first is so obviously a lie that she should be disqualified from ever being taken seriously again on anything, and the second reveals her to be anti-economic growth and anti-job for the laborers she claims to champion.

The partisan in me hopes for a Chris G win, because running as a cartoonish caricature rather than a serious, policy-making grownup makes winning general elections hard. (Not impossible – just ask Hillary Clinton. But still hard.) She also has an awfully suspicious history of funneling campaign funds to family members, which doesn’t exactly make me want to trust her with my money. And even if she were to win, she would find governing much harder than tossing red meat to an increasingly radical base.

But the citizen in me understands how destructive this cycle is for everyone in the long term, and so while I’m unlikely to vote for him, it’s encouraging that Sisolak is so far ahead of his more radical opponent at this stage. The more tribalistic either of our parties become, the more impossible it becomes to successfully govern ourselves. Eventually, we stop talking about actual policies or philosophical approaches, and start voting for whichever candidate shows the most Tribe Spirit. That’s how the party of Reagan becomes the party of Trump, with litmus tests being personal loyalty to a politician rather than to a set of governing principles. Political purity tests and hunts for heretics always, ironically, lead to a complete abandonment of principle.

In a two-party system, the long-term health of both our economy and our culture depend on both parties being populated by serious adults concerned with effective governance rather than merely defeating the other tribe at all costs. It will be interesting to see what the Nevada Democratic Party will choose to become now that the iron-fisted and little-missed control of Harry Reid has begun to loosen its grip.

Disclosure: Steve Sisolak and Chris Giunchigliani have donated to The Nevada Independent. You can see a full list of donors here.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].