More well-read advocates of closed party primaries in Louisiana—particularly Republicans—may have become needlessly excited by a recent, if misleading, article about the possibility of applying these to all elective offices in Louisiana by the waving of a magical judicial wand.

Last year, when state lawmakers made considerable revisions to election process, they carved out closed primaries for certain offices – U.S. Senate, U.S. Representative, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Public Service Commission, and the Supreme Court, joining that of presidential electors – while excluding local offices, all other judicial posts, statewide single executive positions, and legislative offices. Conservative activists in particular were pleased to see this move away from the state’s nonpartisan/nonpreference election system – technically not even a primary (although often referred to as a “blanket primary”) but rather a general election with the possibility of a runoff where candidates regardless of party affiliation ran together – as it would produce candidates with greater ideological fidelity, without members of the other major party able to exert influence selection of favored candidates.

Party activists generally had hoped to see closed primaries applied to all elections, but political realities intruded—specifically, that the legislators and governor involved in making this change had all come into office under the blanket primary and thus felt their own method of selection wasn’t broken and needed no fixing. But recently, some false hope was offered for extension of closed primaries via a posting by a special interest group advocating legal and policy reforms through increased transparency.

Citizens for a New Louisiana circulated a piece by its executive director, Michael Lunsford, regarding Republican state Rep. Dixon McMakin’s HB 200, which would have imposed additional requirements on the Republican Party East Baton Rouge Parish Executive Committee. The state generally regulates the governance structures of its recognized political parties—demanding a state plenary organ, defining offices and their selection methods, and specifying parish-based equivalents with attached powers and duties. The bill would have made certain elected officials part of the parish party’s governing body, but it was defeated in committee.

However, Lunsford—while apparently disagreeing with the bill’s content—spun it as a method to advance closed primaries to all elected offices in the state. He attempted to leverage the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut, which affirmed that parties had the right of free association in terms of whether they could allow nonparty members to participate in their nomination processes. Specifically, a state couldn’t force a party to accept, or to prohibit, unaffiliated voters participating in the elections for elective office nominations.

But Lunsford then makes a complete apples-to-oranges leap. At its core, Tashjian is part of a line of cases dealing with a political party’s freedom to associate with or disassociate from voters—and has nothing to do with state regulation of nomination processes. While the First and Fourteenth Amendments grant associational rights to parties, there is also an extensive history of judicial affirmation that states may treat parties as quasi-agencies of the state—regulating their structures and nomination processes, so long as the state demonstrates an interest that corresponds to the severity of the burden imposed in the interest of conducting elections.

Lunsford also mentions Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, but that case similarly has nothing to do with nomination process regulation. Instead, it focused on internal party governance and held that the state couldn’t justify a heavy-handed approach in that area under the guise of producing a fair and orderly election. Far more relevant to the question of nominations are California Democratic Party v. Jones and Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, which placed guardrails on state regulation of nominations but reaffirmed that a state has the right to impose an electoral structure for nominations—including the use of a blanket primary system, which Lunsford claims cannot be imposed if parties don’t want it.

Most baffling is that, while none of this is new or difficult to find, Lunsford flatly states—through “research associated with” HB 200—that “political parties are private associations with the constitutional right to determine their internal leadership and nomination rules” (emphasis in the original). And in case readers missed it, “a political party (not the state) decides who participates in its nomination process” (emphasis in the original). Yet any basic textbook on American political parties (a course I have taught since 1989, three years after Tashjian and before the other cases noted above) will tell almost the exact opposite: with the exception that a state cannot completely close primarie—i.e., mandate whether unaffiliated voters may or may not participate in a state-authorized primary election—states are free to regulate the nomination process as they see fit, so long as the methods don’t create disproportionate burdens (such as making general election participation by unaffiliated candidates so restrictive as to be effectively impossible). Or, if you prefer, I wrote about this 15 years ago.

So, no, there is no back door or magic bullet to having Louisiana institute closed primaries for all of its elections. If they come about, they will through the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box, by voters who favor universal closed primaries electing enough lawmakers who agree with them and act accordingly.