Presidential Primaries

Ever wonder how we ended up with a complex nominating process where elections are held through completely different means on various dates throughout the year? On this episode, Brad and Professor David Andersen explore the presidential nominating system. 

Listen in to learn how we ended up with today's system, how electing delegates to national conventions actually works, and whether there are reasons to change things up. 

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Transcript

Cold Open 

In 1968, Americans fought in a battle that shocked millions.  

*Riot and battle sounds* 

And unlike most battles, the news media had a front row seat. Through a haze of tear gas and an eerie chorus of screams and sirens, cameras broadcasted the conflict to the world. Men and women were beaten indiscriminately and whisked away in vehicles. Amidst all the chaos, a chant broke out. 

[The Whole World is Watching]

 "The whole world is watching"

At this point in history, the US had been fighting in Vietnam for over 10 years and the military was actively drafting millions of young people and sending them overseas. 

But this battle broke out over 8,000 miles from Saigon. In fact, this wasn’t part of the Vietnam War at all. And if you were fortunate enough to find yourself safely inside the International Amphitheater just a block or so away, you might have heard this: 

[Hubert Humphrey acceptance of nomination]

This was the Battle of Michigan Avenue which took place in Chicago, right outside of the Democratic National Convention. The lawlessness and brutality of this conflict was shocking. But it showed the country just how bad things could get when nominating a party’s presidential candidate goes wrong. 

On this episode of Why and Why Not, we’re looking at the elections before the election and exploring Presidential Primaries. 

Intro to Primaries & History 

Even the most passive observer of American politics will know that every 4 years we elect a President. And ahead of that election, parties nominate a candidate to face off for the White House. 

But unlike in the general election where there is national election day that every state schedules, the Primary Election is a long, virtually state-by-state process. And not every primary election is done the same. In fact, some states don’t even have traditional ballot votes for presidential primaries at all, holding community events called caucuses instead.

And this state-by-state approach leads to candidates building momentum as they separate from the rest of the field by winning contests. Here’s how a former presidential candidate eloquently explained this momentum:

[Howard Dean 2004]

With the craziness of politics today, it seems so wild that Howard Dean’s auctioneer bit sank his campaign. 

This piecemeal system is a mesh of different types of elections that culminate in a national nominating convention where delegates formally select their party’s nominee. And this is just so unlike how we do other elections in the US. 

Could you imagine if the nominee for your town’s mayor was done neighborhood by neighborhood over months and each group cast their votes in their own unique ways? Anybody looking at that would wonder who in their right mind would set up a system that way. 

Well the same is true for presidential primaries. So is it the founding fathers that we need answers from?

[Constitution Says]

That’s Dr. David Andersen a professor of American politics at Durham University who is an expert on the presidential primary system. And Dr. Andersen went on to explain how the framers could just weigh in so little about this important process. 

[Parties] 

They really were. But you can see why the framers wouldn’t provide guidelines for selecting party nominees since that in itself would have incentivized the creation of parties which they saw as deeply problematic. In fact, in his farewell address at the end of his second term as President, George Washington famously warned against the party system. 

And I’ll do a future episode about how we ended up with a two-party system. But for the purpose of this episode, I think it's important to point out that the Electoral College really incentivizes national parties. As you probably know, its not the popular vote that rewards a candidate with the presidency. Rather, to become President you have to win a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Each state gets a number of Electors equal to the number of members in their Congressional delegation. I live in Maryland where we have 8 members of the House and 2 members of the Senate so we have 10 Electors. But imagine if we had candidates for President that had regional support instead of national party support. You could see a circumstance where New England would vote for a candidate, the South would vote for a candidate, and Texas would vote for a candidate. 

And no, I’m not including Texas as part of the South here. Because Texas is Texas and does its own thing. *funny* 

But ultimately you’d have a number of candidates each with significant portions of the Electoral votes but you’d be unlikely to have any candidate with a majority of votes. And since it takes a majority and not just a plurality to win, this would leave us without an elected winner and the election would go to the House of Representatives. 

To avoid this, Americans in states around the country can vote for candidates with shared interests. Having parties helps identify who that person is and increases the likelihood that they could win a majority of electors. 

So this started happening ahead of the 4th Presidential Election. 

Thomas Jefferson won second place in the most recent presidential election and, given the rules of the time, this landed him as John Adams’ Vice President. But this time, Jefferson intended to win. But he realized that if that was going to happen, he needed to coordinate with his supporters all around the country. 

So he did what any person bent on change does: He wrote a letter. Then another letter. And then another letter. And his supporters started making copies of these letters and passing them around. And over years this allowed people with similar ideas to weigh in on policies they’d like to see and, most importantly, candidates for office. This allowed supporters of Jefferson’s style of politics to band together and he ultimately won the election of 1800. 

From that point on, national parties were a major force in American politics. 

But these parties were nothing like they are today. And as with all things Presidential, they were largely influenced by the model George Washington set. 

[Early Nominating Processes]

And as this developed, we ultimately just had Congressional party caucuses picking who their party’s nominee would be. Congressmen would literally gather in Washington and debate and discuss until they could vote on a nominee. These would become the very first party conventions. 

And besides the obvious undemocratic nature of the people having no say in who could be elected President, this really seemed to step over some checks and balances lines. I mean in practice you’d have the legislative branch essentially picking the President. While there would be various nominees, the ultimate winner would owe their presidency to the members of their party in Congress who nominated them. That’s a lot of power for the Legislative Branch to hold over the Executive Branch. 

And that idea is actually something that the framers planned for in some way. When developing the Electoral College, they explicitly said that federal office holders couldn’t serve as electors. But with the party nominating system, members of Congress were able to totally subvert that and still end up with the power. 

But this wasn’t even necessarily a big concern at the time. And this system lasted for several decades. Overtime, this became more corrupt and members of Congress realized that since they were bestowing power they could get in on it. Members found that they could use this influence to land themselves appointments in the Cabinet or to direct patronage. 

But ultimately, it may have been the growing popularity of the Presidency that doomed this system. 

People began wanting more of a say in who could actually become president. And state leaders started wanting more say in where the power was developing. This prompted the parties to move away from a federal-only convention and start opening up to more of the public. 

This wasn’t a snap change but this essentially led to the parties allowing state-level political leaders to become delegates at their conventions. And since the engaged with people from all over the country, these weren’t just held in DC. Rather, party leaders would meet in different cities on a quadrennial basis to nominate candidates for President and Vice President. This still wasn’t open to the public but was much more democratic than the congressional system. 

And look, I’m glad we don’t still have this system but the politicking that took place at these conventions must have a show. For a political junkie like me, those must have been the most fast-paced, quick-witted, and strategic politics around. At least towards the beginning. Overtime, the system became entirely corrupted with the rise of power brokers. 

These were powerful elites and they influenced conventions through various means. Some were able to just straight pay certain candidates not to run so that their preferred candidate would be nominated. BUt more nuanced than this were the party bosses. 

The bosses controlled powerful machines primarily within the bounds of certain states or cities. To explain these, let’s imagine you were a party boss in New York City. *New York Music* You have tens of thousands of voters at your fingertips because they rely on your influence for their jobs, or you’re paying them off, or they just legitimately believe that you have their best interests at heart. 

Every member of your party knows that without your machine turning out to vote in the general election, the nominee would stand no chance in winning the state. So you go to the convention and make deals with candidates for President. If they want to win your state, they need to give into your demands. That might be a fancy appointment. It may be a repeal of a certain law. It might be certain projects being built in your city. Whatever it is, your machine will only turn out for the candidate that offers you what you’ve asked for. Ultimately, you’d end up having your state's delegates voting for the candidates that could buy your support. This was corruption in politics at the highest level. And when the public found out, they began pressuring for real change. 

But of course, this is American politics and change didn’t just abruptly come. 

Here’s Dr. Andersen again:

[Reform] 

And this advisory system led to what Dr. Andersen described as “without a doubt the most exciting presidential election in US History.”. And as with most exciting events in this era, Theodore Roosevelt put himself right in the middle of it. 

In the General in 1912, you have Roosevelt, the former 2 term President who decided not to run for a 3rd term in 1908 VS Howard Taft, the sitting President from Roosevelts own party and his hand-picked successor VS Woodrow Wilson, who would ultimately become President. 

But we’re just going to look at the Republican Primary of Roosevelt versus Taft. After stepping down from office, Roosevelt went on a long African safari where he killed over 500 animals because of course he did, he was Theodore Roosevelt. When he returned, he completely disapproved of how his successor was running the country. So he decided he would take back his spot as the leader of the Republican party. 

But something new happened this year. 13 state held non-binding primary elections to give Republican voters a say in who they’d like to see nominated for President. Of these, Roosevelt ran hard in 9 states. And because, again, he was Theodore Roosevelt, he won all 9. But when the convention came around, this didn’t matter. The delegates had already pledged their support to Taft and Taft easily won the nomination again. 

Now as you can imagine, this didn;t sit well with the voters. They had been clear on who they wanted and were denied by elites. But this didn’t just end the debate. Everyday voters playing such an active role in the nominating process would have been a complete change to the system and not everyone was sure that was what they wanted. 

[Merits]

And look, that argument is in large part undemocratic. I think when someone like myself who believes in universal voting rights hears that, it can make me want to push back. But I can see the reasoning that people are using and understand how this debate continued for quite some time. And it took something major before the debate was resolved. In fact, it took riots in the street for change to arrive. 

*Riot sounds*

To understand how this happened, its important to review what was going on in 1968. Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States but had only been elevated to the position following the assassination of John F Kennedy who many hoped would usher in a new era of peace and American leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. had been leading the civil rights movement through its most coordinated and successful period yet but was shot and killed on April 4th in Memphis. The US was in the midst of the Vietnam War where young men were being drafted and sent thousands of miles away to fight in a war that many at home didn’t support in the first place. All of this resulted in regular rots and social unrest as division in America seemed potent. 

And the Democratic party was reflective of this. You had more conservative Democrats who supported Johnson and the war in Vietnam. 

And then you had groups of anti-war Democrats who supported the domestic change that Johnson was making to some degree but wanted to see things progress much quicker across America. 

These divisions and the state of the country chipped away at Johnson’s support. US Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced that he would be running against Johnson in the primary as an anti-war candidate. And on March 16th, Robert Kennedy made a big announcement:

[Kennedy Announcement]

Just two weeks later, President Johnson addressed the nation through a televised speech:

[Johnson Announcement]

Johnson felt that with significant social unrest and the Vietnam War ongoing, he shouldn’t be devoting time to politics. Following this shocking announcement, Huber Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice President, entered the race as the establishment favorite. 

Now remember that primaries still didn’t do much. But they had worked their way into some states for the Democratic party. 

Bobby Kennedy became the clear front runner in the race. This was proven when on June 4th, he defeated McCarthy in California, 46% to 42%. He gave a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. 

[Kennedy Victory Speech]

But on his way out through the kitchen he was shot and was pronounced dead later that night. 

Following this assassination, Eugene McCarthy won the Illinois Primary which gave him the majority of states that held primaries. But heading into the convention which was being held that year in Chicago, the party elites were poised to nominate Humphrey even though he hadn’t won a single primary contest. 

This caused people from across the US to show up outside of the convention center in protest. 

[1968 DNC]

People were livid. This caused mass protests and the police became convinced that a riot like ones that had broken out elsewhere in the country that year would take place. 

By most accounts today, the police started aggressively beating nonviolent protests first. Then this turned into an all out battle. Protestors were beaten with clubs and thrown into police vans. Tear gas was thrown into crowds and protestors assaulted police back by throwing things like rocks. An all out riot was now in place right outside of the convention and all of the national media had a front row seat. This was broadcasted out to Americans and shocked the world. 

This turmoil and the Democrat’s subsequent loss to Nixon in the general election demonstrated a need for change. 

[Birth of Modern System]

Today this has been adopted by both Democrats and Republicans. Each state sets up their own mechanisms to elect delegates to their national conventions who then actually vote for the nominees. This was a democratization of a process that took place over a very long time as people pushed for more control over who could be president. 

But what actually happens at these conventions today? And is this complex, drawn out system the best way we could do things? 

We’ll explore this and more right after the break. 

Current Primary System and Why Not

Welcome back to Why and Why Not! 

Before the break, we took a look at how the presidential nomination systems have developed overtime. But where are we today? 

Well in both the Republican and Democratic primaries, voters in each state are truly voting for delegates to their party’s national convention. But not every state has the same importance for each parties’ chances of winning the White House and so there is a weighting system to determine the number of delegates that each state has. To explain this, let’s look at the Democratic Party. 

The turnout for Democrats in some states matters more than others due to the winner-take-all Electoral College system we have. For instance, Republicans always win Alabama and no Electoral College votes are ultimately provided to the Democrat. As such, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for their voters to have the same weight as, say, Pennsylvania Democrats whose turnout could ultimately decide the General Election. 

So the Democrats have set a weighting system for the number of delegates that each state gets which factors in the state’s population and the state’s past Democratic votes for President. And the Republicans have a similar system. 

But for both parties, the nomination process ends when the delegates gather at their national conventions and cast votes for the candidates that they are bound to. If a candidate has won enough states to have a majority of delegates at the convention, then they’ve clinched it early and they walk into the convention as the Presumptive Nominee. 

But this isn’t always the case. It could be that no candidate has a majority of delegates walking into the convention. This is referred to as a contested convention and it is some serious political theater. 

[Brokered Convention]

Now this hasn’t happened in nearly a hundred years but it does illustrate that winning delegates is the name of the game. However, a state’s importance in the primary process isn’t just tied to the number of delegates it has to offer. 

Just look at Iowa. Because we don’t have a national primary day, the Iowa caucuses are the first primary contest in the nation. And this has crowned the state as the land of presidential opportunity. 

You start hearing about Iowa’s role years before any campaigns for president have been announced. And the reason that this small, rural state is so important is simply because it’s first. And it’s been that way ever since the primary process really democratized. 

[Jimmy Carter]

So, understanding how the game is played, candidates show up to make their cases to voters while posing with a butter sculpture of a cow or choking down a deep fried pop tart. And I think it's worth pointing out that the Iowa caucuses don’t work like a standard election at all. 

For Republicans, it’s basically a series of straw polls at over 1600 caucus rooms held in gyms, churches, community centers, and places like that. Everyone shows up at these locations at the same time and votes. The winner of this straw poll wins the precinct and the party calculates a number of delegates to award. 

For the Democrats, it's way more complicated. They gather in caucus rooms just like Republicans but supporters of a particular candidate vote by gathering in physical locations in the room designated for their candidate. In most locations, candidates must receive at least 15% of the people in the room to remain viable. 

If there are any candidates that don’t gain this level of support, they become unviable and their supporters can either move to other candidates’ parts of the room, move to an undecided section, or just sit out. 

Once there are only viables left, the precinct workers tally everyone up and award delegates statewide based on the number of supporters that each candidate got. 

As you can imagine, it is much more difficult to work this into people’s schedules and it's much more time consuming than just voting on a ballot. Many point to this as a reason for the low voter turnout in caucuses. 

The fact that the state isn’t reflective of America’s demographics makes many question whether it should still be first. Skeptics of the current system propose that states more reflective of each party or the country at large should go first. Others argue that a different state should go first each cycle so that the candidates pay special attention to those states while they might otherwise completely skip them. I mean, when do you think was the last time that every presidential candidate was focused on, say, Mississippi? 

But still others push back on that. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire where the first ballot primary is held take very seriously their role as the nation’s first presidential contests and do a lot of screening out of candidates that may not be able to ever gain traction on a national stage. 

And whether it's a different state like Illinois that goes first or if it were to rotate each cycle, you can  be certain that there would be a list of reasons why any given state isn’t right. Iowa and New Hampshire going first at very least provides stability to the system. 

But it is bizarre that we do these elections piecemeal anyway. With all the debate over who should go first, why not just do a national primary day and get it all over with at once? 

Here’s Dr. Andersen’s thoughts on that:

[National Primary]

And that makes a lot of sense. Whatever inequities may be created by a state having such an oversized role in the process it at least opens the Presidency up to people who rely on face-to-face politics. 

Other reform proposals center around getting rid of the whole delegate system and the circus of conventions altogether. But frankly, I couldn’t find rebuttals to very real potential issues with doing that. Parties wouldn’t be able to weigh votes so a nominee could end up playing better in states that the party is very likely to lose in the Electoral College. 

Imagine if a Republican candidate was very popular among Republicans in solid-blue California but disliked by Republicans in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia. That would put the party in a bad place heading into the general election. 

And it’s unclear what we’d do if no candidate wins a majority of national votes in the primary. I suppose you could name whoever won the most votes the winner, but we have to really think about what that would mean. 

If there were 4 viable candidates and 3 won 24% of the vote while one candidate one 28% of the vote, the party would nominate someone who 72% of the electorate voted against. That plurality system would violate majority rule and probably wouldn’t leave the primary voters thrilled about their nominee. 

But this system is refined all the time. Individual states and national parties make changes all the time. And time to time we make really massive changes to fine tune the process. 

So what do you think? Should Iowa and New Hampshire continue to go first or should we switch that up? Should we still have big televised conventions at all? I want to hear from you. This is a weird, largey uncodified part of our politics and a place where activists can really make change if they see fit. 

That’s it for this episode of Why and Why Not. A special thanks to Dr. Andersen for agreeing to let me pick his brain on this topic. If you enjoyed this episode or have some feedback, please leave a review and comment in your podcast app. If you’d like to stay up-to-date on new episodes or find additional content related to these conversations, please consider giving us a follow on Instagram at whyandwhynotpod. 

Until next time I’m Brad Fallon and thanks for listening!