2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: We Should Only Let Democrats Choose Our Nominee [View all]David__77
(23,421 posts)The presidency is the only case in which there is a partisan primary. I believe that in the presidential primary, decline to state voters may vote in the Democratic primary and may not vote in the Republican primary.
For all other offices, any voter may vote for any primary candidate. It isn't a partisan primary for those offices; rather, it serves the purpose of identifying the top two candidates that will face off in the general election. In one case, there were actually three general election candidates (for assembly I think), because two candidates exactly tied for second place!
With this system, there were a number of instances of two Democrats or two Republicans facing off in the general election. I could foresee that a Democratic district could have the top two positions going to two Republicans, if the Democratic field was very segmented. I could also see the opposite happening.