The Republican Party could Guarantee closed "private" primaries by simply paying for them.
The instant a party accepts public financing, the primary is "open." The dirty big secret here is that when one's campaign entity accepts public funding, one (the candidate, with appropriate kickbacks) gets to keep any unspent campaign funds by means fair or fairly foul.
The RNC thus gets to save its own money, while adding to oddly dispersed funds supplied by taxpayer funding. This issue of "leftover campaign funds" is murky indeed.
The Pat Buchanan family fortune is based entirely upon unspent federal matching finds. John Kerry creamed some $15 million in unspent funds, and down the line it goes. If a Congressman can last three terms, he (and his family) are multi-millionaires. Case in point, Dirty Harry Reid: comes to town with zilch, now worth hundreds of millions. Joe Biden? Orin Hatch? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Nancy P., whose husband almost managed to steal the Presidio? Feinstein and Boxer, who are in the Bbillionaire category? Check'em out.
In almost every case, that first couple of million? Unspent campaign funds. The rest? Well, on Wall Street the SEC might very well call it, "Insider Trading."
It is always up to the states to determine their own election rules and regulations.
Some time ago, liberals began claiming that what "we" needed was to "open primaries" that way, one could merely vote in whichever party's primary you wanted without having to do something "so partisan and exclusionary as having a closed primary election."
They even went so far as to hold "non-partisan" local elections even for Mayor, etc.
The only people that this ever helps are liberals, whether Democrat or Republicans!
Those 27 states with open primaries can vote at anytime to close their primaries but my thinking is that as many of those states are ruled by liberals, it won't happen.
I'm all for deciding whom to choose as a Presidential candidate by holding the first primaries only in closed primary states, that way we don't wind up with John McCain, Mitt Romney or Bob Dole!
Thank you for pointing out the funding issue. It’s more complicated and entrenched than I thought, since I was not aware of candidates getting rich off of keeping public funds that are left over.
By the way, NY is a blue state but the primaries are not open. I don’t know whether that is the law or not. There is certainly plenty of money here for the parties to fund their own primaries but I don’t think they do.
Priebus would not want to get into funding primaries from the national party, even if it did suit his political purposes, since he is all about money.