Cite as: 530 U. S. 567 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
California's blanket primary violates the principles set forth in these cases. Proposition 198 forces political parties to associate with—to have their nominees, and hence their positions, determined by—those who, at best, have refused to affiliate with the party, and, at worst, have expressly affiliated with a rival. In this respect, it is qualitatively different from a closed primary. Under that system, even when it is made quite easy for a voter to change his party affiliation the day of the primary, and thus, in some sense, to "cross over," at least he must formally become a member of the party; and once he does so, he is limited to voting for candidates of that party.8
subscribed to it himself. His dissent from the order dismissing the appeals in Bellotti v. Connolly, 460 U. S. 1057 (1983), described La Follette thusly: "There this Court rejected Wisconsin's requirement that delegates to the party's Presidential nominating convention, selected in a primary open to nonparty voters, must cast their convention votes in accordance with the primary election results. In our view, the interests advanced by the State . . . did not justify its substantial intrusion into the associational freedom of members of the National Party. . . . Wisconsin required convention delegates to cast their votes for candidates who might have drawn their support from nonparty members. The results of the party's decisionmaking process might thereby have been distorted." 460 U. S., at 1062-1063 (emphasis in original).
Not only does the dissent's principle of no right to exclude conflict with our precedents, but it also leads to nonsensical results. In Tashjian v. Republican Party of Conn., 479 U. S. 208 (1986), we held that the First Amendment protects a party's right to invite independents to participate in the primary. Combining Tashjian with the dissent's rule affirms a party's constitutional right to allow outsiders to select its candidates, but denies a party's constitutional right to reserve candidate selection to its own members. The First Amendment would thus guarantee a party's right to lose its identity, but not to preserve it.
8 In this sense, the blanket primary also may be constitutionally distinct from the open primary, see n. 6, supra, in which the voter is limited to one party's ballot. See La Follette, supra, at 130, n. 2 (Powell, J., dissenting) ("[T]he act of voting in the Democratic primary fairly can be described as an act of affiliation with the Democratic Party. . . . The situation might be different in those States with 'blanket' primaries—i. e., those where voters are allowed to participate in the primaries of more than one
577
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