One of the worst features of the election primary system in our polarized “Red vs. Blue” time is the tendency of primary voters to flock to the candidate they most want to “destroy” the other party, not the candidate best positioned to do so.

Let’s say a zombie is scratching at your door. You’ve got a shotgun, a handgun and your favorite frying pan. The shotgun has the greatest chance of success, the handgun — if one is careful and skilled — has a solid chance of working, and the frying pan? It probably won’t dispatch the threat but, come on, how cool would it be to take out a zombie with a frying pan? So, you go with that.

In this extended metaphor, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the Democrats’ frying pan and Attorney General Ken Paxton is the Republican one.

In a bunch of races, Democrat primary voters preferred the candidate who was more ideologically pure, more pugnacious, or — in the President Trump era — the most committed to “resistance.” Once nominated, they were ill-suited to appeal to swing voters in a general election.

Just a few examples of Democratic candidates who excited the base but not mainstream voters: Mandela Barnes, the very progressive Wisconsin Senate candidate in 2022; Kara Eastman, the preferred candidate of “Justice Democrats” in Nebraska’s second district House race in 2018; Stacey Abrams, the election-denying two-time candidate for Georgia governor; and Andrew Gillum, the Florida progressive underdog who beat out more centrist candidates to get the Democrats’ nomination for governor, only to lose narrowly to Ron DeSantis in 2018.

Some of these races were indeed close. But the populist left and populist right

take the wrong lesson from the narrowness of their defeats. Like the ugly Americans who think foreigners will understand English if they just shout louder, each side convinces themselves that if they only fought harder, wasted a little more money, they could’ve won.

To be fair, sometimes they’re right. But even in those cases, they’re merely making a down payment on bigger losses to come. Because by electing bomb throwers and crackpots they hurt the brand of their party for the next election.

Which brings me back to Texas. The Senate primary is heating up. On the GOP side it’s a three-way race among solid, reliable, moderately boring conservative incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, Republican two-term Congressman Wesley Hunt and the rabble-rousing, wildly corrupt (sorry, “ethically challenged”) populist demagogue and hard-core MAGA loyalist Ken Paxton.

Although nothing is assured given what might be a Democratic wave year, Cornyn would probably beat Crockett, who most analysts and Democrats (when speaking anonymously) think cannot win against anybody except maybe Paxton. But she can soak up an enormous amount of money and attention.

Crockett is very smart, but she is in many ways a Democratic version of Republican bomb throwers and social media phenoms Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert.

When Crockett announced she was running, Rep. Colin Allred, a more moderate candidate who was positioning himself to be a safe alternative to the Republicans, announced he was no longer pursuing a Senate bid.

And so here we are. Two parties, once again, are poised to nominate candidates so flawed they have a chance of losing to the other.

This is what happens in a polarized age when parties outsource their nominating process to the angriest voters in their coalition.