When More Democracy Is Less: The Paradox Of Primaries
America's long, strange, failed experiment with primary elections.
If it seems like the US is trapped in a perpetual election season, it’s not you. In America, you have to run for office just to be able to run for office — then you have to run for office. They’re called primary elections, or primaries, and it’s how political parties select their nominees. Candidates for a particular office must first face off in a primary election against other candidates of their own party. The winner becomes their party’s nominee, and immediately pivots into their general election campaign against the other party’s nominee. The US is one of the only countries to do this, but it hasn’t always been this way.
In theory, primaries are intended to inject more democracy into the political system. They give voters the opportunity not merely to vote for which candidate they prefer in a general election, but to help choose the candidates to begin with. And yet, nobody is happy with the outcome this system produces. As the November elections loom onto the horizon, the electorate looks on in disbelieving stupefaction at how, with all this “democracy”, we could possibly arrive at such resoundingly unsatisfying choices. When we examine the pros and cons of the primary system, we encounter a paradox: a process that is more democratic on-paper can often lead to less democratic results.
Primary elections in the US go back to the mid-19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that they actually determined anything. The year that changed everything was 1968. Robert F. Kennedy was sweeping the nation as a Democratic candidate for president and generating rockstar levels of enthusiasm. But as the Brennan Center’s Walter Shapiro put it, “Only nine states held presidential primaries in 1968 — and six of them were meaningless beauty contests [...]. Even more devastating for democracy was that one-quarter of all delegates to the 1968 Democratic Convention were selected [for Hubert Humphrey] in 1967.” It is popularly misremembered that Bobby Kennedy did not become the nominee simply because he was assassinated, but the party bosses had chosen their man a year before any votes were cast. Even had Kennedy lived, he would still have lost. Humphrey didn’t win a single primary, and yet he became the nominee.
That’s how it used to work. The party officials got together in their proverbial (and literal) smoke-filled rooms and chose who they believed to be the best and most electable representative of their party’s agenda, and that’s who became the nominee. Occasionally, there were surprises on the convention floor. Sometimes, many rounds of deadlocked voting among delegates between party front-runners resulted in compromise candidates, as with Woodrow Wilson in 1912. In other cases, exceptionally skillful dealmaking secured the nomination out from under the feet of the party’s pick, as Abraham Lincoln pulled off in 1860. Either way, the voting public had no say. But 1968 was the breaking point. To quote Shapiro once more, “Any system this undemocratic was doomed amid the turbulent passions surrounding the Vietnam War. The reign of party bosses died somewhere between the tear-stained anguish of Kennedy’s assassination and the tear-gassed anguish of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.” During the 1970s, the Dems reformed their nominating process and ushered in the modern era of primaries, and the Republicans followed suit.1
Given the flaws of the party boss system of nomination, primary elections seem like an obvious democratic upgrade. By decoupling candidate selection from a small group of officials and opening it up to the voters, primaries give the public a greater say, and sometimes that results in a better candidate. Without meaningful primaries, Barack Obama, for example, would never have won the 2008 Democratic nomination away from the party-anointed Hillary Clinton. Primaries also allow for a variety of new voices and fresh ideas that would never ordinarily be heard. No party boss would have allowed Andrew Yang within a mile of a presidential debate stage in the 2020 cycle, but primaries gave him a seat at the table. Yang used the opportunity to popularize universal basic income from a policy most Americans hadn’t heard of to one that 55 percent of polled respondents supported in August 2020. Surely, this is democracy in action, right?
The problem is that democracy is only as effective as voter participation. While 60-some percent of the electorate turn out for presidential general elections, and about half vote in the midterms (both up in recent years), primary voter participation remains dismal. About 80 percent of eligible voters neglect to cast ballots in primaries. One report had participation in the 2020 primaries at 10 percent — nearly seven times lower than the general election turnout. These are the 10 percent most political and often ideological people in society. 29 states have at least some restrictions on who can vote in primaries, with voters who are unaffiliated, registered independents, or registered with another party ineligible to vote in certain elections. Given that 43 percent of voters identify as independent, it’s clear that political moderates are as underrepresented in primary elections as hyper-partisans are overrepresented.
The upkeep of democracy is a responsibility and duty shared by all citizens, of course. The sad truth, however, is that most citizens have abandoned their posts. The role of the party bosses was never turned over to “the people.” It was turned over to the most partisan slice of the Democratic and Republican bases, along with the donor class and the media. Political kingmaking is no longer done at party headquarters, but neither does it occur at the ballot box. It happens at fundraising galas and in newsrooms. The most political sliver of the electorate are also the biggest news junkies, and the press, intoxicated with the power once held by cigar-chewing fat cats, have used their influence to shape and curate the primary process. They dealt a fatal blow to Ed Muskie in 1972 for allegedly crying, sunk Joe Biden’s 1987 candidacy over his use of unattributed quotations during speeches, and torpedoed Howard Dean in 2004 over an awkward scream during a rally.
Primaries also create a new political battlefront: the primary challenge. Not only must politicians run in twice as many campaigns, but they must be constantly vigilant for threats both from the opposition party as well as hardline upstarts on their own team seeking to outflank them on the extremes. If a Republican is too far to the right, they risk alienating independents and losing to their Democratic opponent. If they are too moderate, they risk a primary upset from a far-right challenger.
The sum total of these dynamics produces a series of incentives that makes for reliably poor candidates and leaders. It pressures politicians to pander, over-promise, and speak out of both sides of their mouths even more than they would otherwise. It selects for extremism over moderation, and then forces nominees to rapidly run back to the center for general elections, conveying the very real impression of disingenuousness and fueling cynicism and disillusionment. At every turn, the primary process pushes politics closer toward reality entertainment. It selects for extroversion over introversion, performance over competence, and showmanship over statesmanship. There’s a reason why no bald men have won a major party nomination in the primary era, despite the fact that a third of men are bald (not balding — bald) by age 40 to 55. More materially, primaries increase partisanship and decrease bipartisanship.
Consider the presidents who could never win their party’s nomination in a modern primary. Ulysses S. Grant was a quiet introvert. Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking and did it as seldom as possible. John Adams was bald. James Madison was five foot four. Franklin Roosevelt had polio. Consider also the nominees party bosses rejected that voters clamored over, like Estes Kefauver in 1952, a womanizing alcoholic. Primaries gave us Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Without primaries, Biden would almost certainly have retired from politics by now, and Donald Trump’s 2015 escalator ride in the atrium of Trump Tower would never have happened. The system before primaries was deeply flawed, but it gave us James Madison, who, more than any other single individual, authored the idea of America. With primaries, our choices are a man who wants to tear down everything Madison wrote, and a man who can’t remember who James Madison was.
This is the paradox of primaries. They present the potential for more democracy, but that potential goes unrealized by a lazy and apathetic electorate and thus falls into the hands of extremists and special interests who make no attempt to choose on behalf of the public interest. Say what you will about the party bosses of yesteryear — they were arrogant, elitist, self-serving, and corrupt. But they did sincerely want to win, and the candidates they anointed were chosen based on who could best appeal to the masses. Primary voters, on the other hand, routinely choose weaker candidates who appeal to their ideological purity over stronger candidates they find too moderate. In the absence of broad voter participation, We the People outsource the nominee selection process to others. And it’s not clear that the electoral fringes, the donor class, and media kingmakers are a better proxy than party bosses. But we need not choose between the two.
Two reforms can drastically improve the nominating system. Abolishing party primaries altogether and implementing ranked-choice voting (RCV) nationwide. Ranked-choice voting is a system where voters can rank their preferred candidates in order. If no candidate secures an outright majority in the first tally, the bottom candidates are eliminated, and those voters’ second choices are activated. This process continues, round after round, until a candidate wins a majority. This allows voters to simultaneously vote for the candidate they feel most aligns with their views while also having several backup selections to ensure that they aren’t throwing their vote away on a long shot. So far, Maine and Alaska have implemented ranked-choice voting statewide, with growing interest in other states. By getting rid of primaries and allowing RCV, the parties can go back to choosing nominees at their conventions. By the same token, anyone who wants to run independently can do so in the general election with an actual chance to win, since the electorate would no longer have to worry about wasted votes. It would free the public from the mind-numbing bombardment of a permanent election season while also freeing elected leaders to spend less time campaigning and more time doing their jobs.
Trust in democratic institutions, and even in democracy itself, is reaching dangerously low levels. Only 28 percent of US adults are satisfied with the way democracy is working. When asked if they agreed with the statement, “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government”, 31 percent of people aged 18 to 29 agreed, and 28 percent weren’t sure. Among voters aged 30 to 44, 19 percent agreed and 34 percent weren’t sure. Put another way, less than half of people aged 18 to 44 disagreed with the statement “democracy isn’t viable and we should explore alternatives.” These numbers are alarming, but they are just the latest in a long line of increasingly alarming numbers that have been gradually building over the past decade or so. If trust drops low enough, we will reach a tipping point, and the system — which is, as all systems are, fundamentally built on trust and public confidence — will collapse like a house of cards.
The good news is, unlike so many needed reforms in other areas, doing away with primaries is in the self-interest of every sitting politician. This isn’t asking the foxes to institute new henhouse protections. Without party primaries, politicians will no longer need to spend half their time fundraising or campaigning while sleeping with one eye open to watch for flanking primary challengers. We’ve run the primary experiment. It’s been more than 50 years, and none of us are happy with the results. We went from Adams versus Jefferson to Bush versus Kerry; from Eisenhower vs Stevenson to Biden versus Trump. There are 330 million Americans. This isn’t the best we have to offer. We can do better.
See also: “Strategies to Increase Voter Turnout”
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Vestiges of the old ways remained, particularly among the Democrats, in the form of “superdelegates”, a unique kind of delegate untethered to electoral results — and very much tethered to the Party leash-holders. In the 2016 primaries, despite earning 43 percent of the popular vote and 39 percent of the pledged delegates, Bernie Sanders received a paltry seven percent of the superdelegates to Hillary Clinton’s 93 percent. Even had the superdelegate distribution mirrored the vote totals, however, Sanders would still have lost — Clinton won almost four million more votes. But the superdelegates were just the cherry on top of a laundry list of DNC shenanigans on behalf of Clinton in the first social media election cycle. Just as in ‘68, the Dems faced pressure to reform the process, and in response denuded the superdelegate system in 2018.