WASHINGTON POST
Matthew Dallek is an assistant professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management,
It’s true that both parties’ nominating systems are covered in warts. State caucuses tend to be held at night in winter, require at least an hour of voters’ time and result in low-turnout elections dominated by hard-core activists. Individual states on the Republican side have autonomy to apportion delegates as they see fit (take Colorado, which Cruz won through a seemingly undemocratic statewide GOP convention), while Democrats have a convoluted allocation process, leading to outcomes like the one in Wyoming, where Clinton lost the caucuses by nearly 12 percentage points yet took the same number of pledged delegates as Sanders. Iowa and New Hampshire vote months before Texas, New York and California do, giving two lily-white states disproportionate power to winnow the nominating field. And theoretically, unpledged delegates in both parties could tip the scales in favor of a candidate who lost the popular primary vote, enabling elites to thwart the electorate’s will.
But the current system — a potpourri of caucuses, primaries, state conventions, superdelegates and pledged delegates gives everyone a stake and deprives anyone of too much power, balancing competing democratic goals and legitimate party interests.
Before 1972, party leaders had nearly unrivaled sway in determining the nominees; a relatively small handful of mostly white men ultimately decided who would be on the November ballot. In 1948, Republican nominee Thomas Dewey received a meager 11.58 percent of the primary vote yet carried the GOP’s banner that fall. In 1960, the Democratic Party held only 16 primaries, and John F. Kennedy had to persuade state party leaders to back him at the nominating convention in order to secure the nod.
That began to change in 1970. Democrats, responding to the chaos of their 1968 convention, enacted the reforms of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, making primary and caucus elections the main method by which the nominees were chosen. Republicans soon followed suit. The changes worked: In 1968, 17 states held Democratic primaries, and 16 had Republican ones. By 2000, 40 states were contested in Democratic primaries and 43 in Republican ones (the rest held caucuses). During the epic 2008 Obama-Clinton face-off, Democratic voters alone cast 35 million primary votes, a vast increase over the 13 million cast in both parties’ primaries during the 1968 contest.
The new nominating process has empowered lower-income voters, young people, African Americans, Latinos and others who historically were prohibited from participating fully in American democracy. Although Al Gore won the popular vote yet lost in the electoral college in the 2000 general election, since 1972 neither Republicans nor Democrats have nominated a candidate who took anything but first in their primaries’ popular vote.
The process in both parties isn’t “rigged,” but it’s not purely about the popular vote, either....Set aside the hyperventilating from the Sanders and Trump camps. The indisputable fact is that Sanders, despite his recent string of victories, has won a mere 42 percent of the Democratic primary popular vote, because his biggest triumphs have tended to be in low-turnout caucus states. Clinton’s popular margin over Sanders is massive: She has won 9.4 million votes to his 7 million. If the people’s will is supposed to be paramount, then Clinton is hands-down the front-runner. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine anybody winning the Democratic nomination without at least being competitive among African American voters, a key party constituency among which Sanders has routinely lost (by 38 points in Ohio, 59 points in Florida and 64 points in North Carolina). The talk that superdelegates will overturn the people’s will at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia is a red herring. Clinton is likely to win both the popular vote and the contest for pledged delegates, making her the democratically (and fairly) elected nominee of her party.
Trump’s path has been similarly fair-minded, even if he seems not to notice. The “system” that the GOP has established is simple: To win the nomination, a candidate must amass 1,237 delegates, a majority. The party has decreed that a mere plurality isn’t enough to become the standard-bearer; Trump has won about 37 percent of the vote in the primary race thus far. The rules are in place to balance competing party interests (voters, grass-roots activists, local and state officials, members of Congress, national party leaders)....The GOP’s rules also pay considerable deference to states and localities, a bedrock principle of conservatism, which means that each state has different procedures for selecting delegates.
Yes, just because this system is an improvement over the past doesn’t mean it couldn’t bear further reform. But any changes should at least start with the acknowledgement that, for both parties, there’s no such thing as a purely democratic process. We already have the electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, two senators apiece from sparsely populated states, the filibuster and House rules giving the majority almost complete control over the legislative agenda. Faced with a vast array of competing forces, both parties chose rules that recognize the interests of voters, activists, elected officials, states, cities and towns. The rules are not arbitrarily elitist; they’re purposeful, balancing the different demands in a racially diverse democracy of more than 300 million people spread across 50 states.
If Sanders can overtake Clinton’s lead in the popular vote and pledged delegates, then he will most likely win the backing of more superdelegates and become the Democratic nominee. If he can’t, then he has a responsibility to respect the voters’ will and the party’s democratic-minded nominating system. If Trump can prevail with a majority of delegates, he, too, will be the duly elected nominee. If he falls short, he will have lost in a democratic contest, imperfect though it may be.
WASHINGTON POST, Fareed Zakaria
Political parties do have mechanisms to “keep people out.” But far from being a trick, they are the crux of what makes parties valuable in a democracy.
Clinton Rossiter begins his classic book “Parties and Politics in America” with this declaration: “No America without democracy, no democracy without politics, no politics without parties.” In a large and diverse country, to get things done, people need devices to navigate the political system, organize themselves, channel particular interests and ideologies, and negotiate with others who have differing interests and views. Political parties have traditionally played this role in the United States. And they have often played it as a counterweight to the momentary passions of the public.
At the heart of the American political party is the selection of its presidential candidate. This process used to be controlled by party elites — mayors, governors, legislators. In the early 20th century, an additional mechanism was added to test a candidate’s viability on the campaign trail: primaries. Still, between 1912 and 1968, the man who won a party’s presidential primaries became the nominee less than half the time. Dwight Eisenhower was chosen not by primary voters but in a complex, contested convention.
1968 was the year things changed. The radicalism that swept the Democratic Party also cast aside its rules for selecting nominees, favoring direct primaries over all else. The Republicans copied the Democrats, and soon the parties ended up with the system we have today. To choose their candidates for the November election, the parties simply hold prior elections. In this regard, the United States is almost unique among advanced democracies. Mostly everywhere else, political parties have not turned the nominating process into a plebiscite.
The result of these changes has been to hollow out political parties, turning them into empty vessels for the most successful political entrepreneur of the moment. In describing these trends in a book on democracy in 2003, I wrote that without strong parties, all you needed to run for president was name recognition and a fundraising machine. I predicted that the partyless system would be good for “political dynasties, celebrity officials and billionaire politicians.” The front-runners in both parties in 2016 fit this description.
What is the harm of this new open system? We can see it now. A party without internal strength and capacity cannot shape the political agenda. Instead, it simply reflects and amplifies the noisiest popular passions. The old system steered toward moderation because it was run mostly by local and state officials who had won general elections and then had to govern. Today, delegates are chosen by primary voters, a much smaller, narrower and more extreme slice of the country. It is ironic that the old smoke-filled rooms were in some sense more representative of the general voter than the open primaries of today.
The old parties drew their strength from neighborhood organizations, churches, unions and local business groups. The new parties are really just Rolodexes of Washington professionals — activists, ideologues, fundraisers and pollsters. These professionals are more extreme and less practical, and seek to turn large, diverse parties into ideological battleships. Rossiter’s declaration on democracy has a last phrase: “no parties without compromise and moderation.”
Primaries are not the only “democratizing” reforms that have crippled political parties in the United States. In Congress, party leaders used to be able to forge an agenda and get their members to vote for it. This hierarchical system began to break down after reforms of the Watergate era, which opened up the system, expanding the number of subcommittees and moving to internal party elections and open votes. The result has been chaos, dysfunction and paralysis.