Why the Primary System Is “Clearly Failing”

The Washington Roundtable: In the Michigan primary on Tuesday, more than a hundred thousand Michigan Democrats chose “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, as a protest of his support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In Dearborn, which is home to a large Arab American and Muslim population, fifty-seven per cent of the vote was “uncommitted.” And, while former President Trump has so far swept the Republican contests, Nikki Haley has seized on college-educated and moderate-to-liberal Republican voters, taking forty per cent of the primary vote in South Carolina, her home state. This week, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments on Trump’s claims of immunity, delaying the possibility of a trial before the election in the federal January 6th case.“It’s practically a kind of game-over moment for our democracy, what the Supreme Court did this week,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Will apathy among Democrats and the Supreme Court’s delay of Trump’s trial lead to a second Trump term? The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to weigh in.