The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their p

The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their party: they skew towards the extremes, because those people can be more easily mobilized. This means that primaries don't produce candidates capable of representing the median voter very well, and we end up with a choice between the canonical Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich. That's why the Freedom Caucus doesn't want McCarthy to use funding to influence primaries in their states; it would allow him to enforce party discipline on them. This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be. All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed. [https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]