Suppose I did implicitly support that un-American crack with a blanket reference to “sentiment”, didn’t I? Was mainly going for the former undemocratic complaint and not its latterly component of un-American-ism. Mea culpa, chihank. A little more specific parsing on my part of the complaints of obnoxious twats is required in the future.

At least before I stick my neck out again for any of them, at any rate.

I had assumed that a sore loser statute’s operative text would something like the following:
“Any person who has participated in a political party’s primary election, and failed to win that party’s nomination, shall not appear on the ballot for the general election for any elected office in which he or she ran for in a political party’s primary election.”

Such statutory language, I think, could be argued to deprive primary losers of valid liberty interests, in contravention of Due Process Clause of either the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment. It is not a particularly persuasive argument, from my vantage point, but most arguments in favor of substantive due process underwhelm me while impressing the courts well enough to be read into the constitutional canon. I think a claim ground in the Equal Protection Clause would fare better: The idea of the draft language above surviving the rational basis test seems implausible, as it is hard to imagine any kind of rational government interest it could tie to. (Though I would love to be a fly on the wall when trying to come up with one.) And Article IV’s Republican Government Clause is, certainly, a rather large stretch: I fail to see how banning primary candidates from running in the general for the same office deprives a state of a republican form of government, but we live with enough other constitutional oddities that, while implausible, someone could at least try to make the argument with a straight face.

I was musing aloud, as much to myself as you, about the Ninth, Tenth, and First Amendment. Which was a mistake, given that they’re the result more of my legal mind’s seeing a shiny widget which it wants to gaze at. Rather than the result of sober thought and analysis.