If your local Democratic Party Club chose our candidates would the picture be different?

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Way back in the 70s I was in the Labour Party in the UK. Our local 'ward' party chose the candidate for local elections to city council or county council They were interviewed by a panel of Labour members including the Chair and Deputy Chair, allowed to give a little speech and the local party would make their decision.
MPs were chosen by the constituency party and again interviewed, allowed to give a little speech and informed of the result.
The candidates were in place months before the election so that they could gain a lot of ground and focus on the opponent not squabbling amongst themselves. There was no need to spend any money so all the funds could go to the election campaign. No PRIMARIES! Wouldn't we save ourselves a lot of money?
If our local party here in the states chose a candidate it would be a very progressive one. On the whole clubs/local parties tend to be activists and know the best fit and history of the candidate.
How do you think the democratic political landscape would change here?

I dug out a paper from a journal below

http://www.jstor.org/pss/193779

[zipplewrath]

1. For state level, and congress critters, yes

It will depend alot on how the panels are chosen and comprised. If you're not careful, it just becomes the same old machine politics of the past, the infamous "smoke fille rooms". For senator, it would begin to look alot like what we already have. You'd have state wide "campaigns" to try to influence the potentially hundreds of "panel" members. I'd bet you'd still get TV commercials leading up to the interviews.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. maybe

they wouldn't be allowed TV commercials before the interview?

[Davis_X_Machina]

3. That's exactly how we do state legislatures....

...here -- a candidate comes and talks to the town Democratic committee (We fit into two booths at the pizza joint) but a US House seat is up to 10x the size of a Westminster constituency, and the largest states (for Senators) are up to 100x as large. Whatever you do has to scale to that level.

In the 1850's Lincoln was nominated for President by Illinois by a cascade of open Republican conventions at the town, then county, then state, then national level. So earlier. alternative structures to primaries existed once.

I live in a caucus state, myself, and don't have a problem with it. But the caucus -- and that's what the UK basically has -- has a terrible reputation in the progressive community for not being inclusive. Primaries were one of the big-P Progressive movement's slate of process reforms back at the turn of the 19th century.

[LiberalFighter]

4. I don't know about other states but in Indiana there is nothing we can do

to stop someone from filing for an office. We have a candidate for County Sheriff that we as a party want nothing to do. There is not a very good mechanism to remove or prohibit someone from filing. The local party failed to find a candidate to run against him in the primary and we are screwed.