There Has To Be A Better Way To Pick Presidential Nominees… Right? 57:55

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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. Before we get to the third episode of The Primaries Project, we wanted to add some updates to our second episode. That episode took us from the messy 1968 nominating convention up through 2016, tracking how the candidates, parties, and voters navigated a new primary system.

Initially, parties lost control of the nominating process, then regained it, and then by the 2000s had begun to lose control again. Trump's ascendance in 2016 was the culmination of that loss of control.

Democrats hadn't settled on a 2020 nominee when we first aired the primaries project back in January of that year. But the coalescing of support around Biden heading into Super Tuesday marked a significant win for the party decides theory. After just one win in South Carolina, opposing candidates dropped out, endorsed Biden, and voters took the cue. From there, the contest was not even really competitive.

Now, we are just weeks away from the 2024 Iowa caucuses. Trump leads nationally by a significant clip, lesser in the early states, but still a clear lead. And he has more endorsements than any of the other candidates in the race. To talk about the development since early 2020 and what could happen in the coming months is Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari. You heard her throughout the second episode, helping us make sense of that system.

Julia, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Great to have you four years after we first made the primaries project. So here's my question about 2024 off the bat. Is the party currently deciding in the Republican primary, which is to say, are party elites marshalling resources to help one particular candidate win?

So this is a really interesting question because we're in such a weird situation. So like there's no way to answer this question without considering that this is a very rare occasion where a former president is running again. So on the one hand, you kind of have all of the pieces of kind of Trump

Right.

Trump's, I think, both kind of political prospects and also his sort of broader project. So it's it mostly looks like a situation in which the party is deciding whether

It certainly looks like a situation in which the voters are deciding. We could talk more if you want about the distinction between those things. But it's really, I think, quite notable that you still have some pretty significant people in significant places endorsing other candidates. So specifically the Iowa endorsements from leading Republicans, endorsements of Ron DeSantis, and maybe a little more peripherally, I think you're seeing a sort of non-Trump Republican coalition around Trump.

Nikki Haley, that's never going to speak to a significant percentage of the Republican primary electorate. But you are actually seeing in a way this sort of coalescing around Trump alternatives as well as coalescing around Trump, if that makes any sense.

So would you say that if Trump wins the 2024 Republican primary, that the party has decided and that it decided for Trump or that once again, the party wasn't really able to decide because it was fractured in different ways and all

ultimately Trump won. Again, it's almost, this is a tricky question, right? Because as you said, the party is so Trumpified that much of the party apparatus is in support of Trump and has endorsed in favor of Trump. You know, when we aired the primaries project, the first time we talked about how in 2016, Trump didn't receive a single congressional endorsement until he had already won several primaries months into the process. Whereas this time around, he had congressional endorsements right off the bat. So, I mean,

To ask the question again after that preamble, if Trump wins the 2024 primary, has the party decided? Yeah, this is a sort of deceptively simple question that's actually really tricky.

Let's walk through sort of the simple. The simple answer is yes. In a sense, the party has decided this is a Trumpified party and it's decided in the face of some alternatives, some that want to be sort of Trump light, Trump without January 6th, without the 2020 big lie. So this is sort of Nikki Haley, Mike Pence wing of the party. Some who want to be Trump plus, like DeSantis and Ramaswamy, and some who want to be anti-Trump.

like Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, that, you know, this Trumpified party has decided to go unsurprisingly with Trump and not what I think I might have predicted in 2020 or 2021, which is the party will sort of look like Trump's values, like his sort of stamp will be on the party, but perhaps someone else will pick up that mantle. The thing that I think is interesting about

And about a year ago, you kind of started to hear in conservative podcasts and places, like Trump's skeptical conservative voices saying, essentially saying,

They'd like to see somebody else, but they think the party voters are just a sort of juggernaut. They can't be stopped. And what we don't know about that is kind of how much and how true that sentiment is in the kind of deep pockets of power in the Republican Party. I'm thinking about this because I'm on the verge of finishing the Mitt Romney book by McKay Coppins. The Trump year segment of that book is filled with that sentiment.

idea that there are a number of elite Republicans that would like to push back against Trump, but they don't think they can because of the behavior of the party base. And we just we don't really know, I think, either how prevalent that is or how sincere that is because it's something that can't kind of be expressed publicly. So there's this weird kind of unobservable counterfactual to use really social science language that

There is a scenario which folks would have much rather endorse somebody else, but they simply felt like they couldn't. But their sincere preference would have been to do so. We just we can't know. So that's why I think it's a tricky question.

So what you're saying is that facially the party is deciding, but the party may be deciding with a gun to its head, which is the voters who would accept no other decision by the party. Right. Yeah, exactly. That's I think that's the or, you know, any number of kind of scenarios of alienating Trump or Trump supporters. But you see, and the reason that I think that's plausible is because of things on the record, like this Romney book, because of things like this sort of

racks in the endorsement coalition things like the fact that there are so many people running and that

There are people in that field who are, you know, seemingly the kind of people who would be rising stars in a post-Trump party. This makes me think of something that you mentioned actually in the second episode of the primaries project towards the end, which is that we're in an era where we have strong partisanship, but in fact, weak parties. Is this dynamic that you're describing emblematic of that?

Yeah, I think that it is. I mean, this theory has obviously undergone some refining since 2016, and I think it looks different in each party, but I think certainly in the Republican Party...

What I keep going back to sort of this sense that you see expressed, it's sort of like, well, if the voters want this, there's really nothing people at the top can do. And institutionally, that's sort of true. There are ways for delegates at the RNC to vote. There was a sort of kerfuffle in 2016 about the Colorado delegation voting its conscience. And there are ways in which which delegations can potentially vote.

go against what the primary voters said, but that's really out of step with our norms. And unlike the Democrats, they don't have a super delegate process and rather sort of unpledge delegates. There are actually some backstops in the Democratic Party that the Republicans simply don't have. They also have this winner-take-all system that makes it pretty easy for a candidate like Trump to win. I think there's a kind of institutional weakness. There's

A weakness of kind of a norm that a party would decide. There's a lot of attention to the kind of preferences of the primary voters and thinking about and looking at the primary election as kind of a now not a party process, but kind of analogous to a general election. And I think that really plays out in this sort of party weakness scenario.

So in a matter of weeks or maybe months, if it goes that long, we will have an answer to this question and we will be able to grapple with how much the party really decided to a greater degree. But we did have a big development since we recorded the primaries project the first time, which is that Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination. He lost Iowa. He lost New Hampshire. He lost Nevada. He had one significant win in South Carolina. And then suddenly,

A bunch of his rivals dropped out and endorsed him, leaving just Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as the competing candidates. After Super Tuesday, it became clear that the party and the voters, maybe more specifically, were going to take those cues and support Joe Biden. Is that a sort of prime example of the party deciding? Because

On one hand, there was clearly influence from the party establishment and how exactly folks dropped out and endorsed. But on the other hand, we went more than a year without many people in the party making it clear that Joe Biden was the person that they wanted. That only happened after the South Carolina primary, well into the actual process, and after what we call the invisible primary was already over.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the Democratic Party, every conversation with the Democratic Party has to start with two things. And one is that it's a more complicated coalition. I think that as hard as it is sometimes in the Republican coalition to draw this sort of

party versus voters distinction or kind of insider versus outsider distinction, whatever you want to call it, as difficult as that is to do for Republicans is even more difficult for Democrats because we have these kind of distinct power centers within the party. And I think what you kind of had

in 2020 was you have the kind of institutional power of African-Americans, Jim Clyburn, leaders like that. That's a really important part of the story of Biden's nomination. You also have a kind of growing progressive wing within the party.

And you have everybody unifying around the idea of electability. So I think that the unity that the party could find around their dislike of Trump kind of held the coalition together in an interesting way. And I think you're right that the selection of Biden was a sort of hybrid of different groups of elites. It was not just like elites versus voters, but it was sort of like jockeying across different types of factions. The other thing I think that's really notable is that I think that there's a bit more leverage

and the Democratic Party because people are sort of ideologically pro-government and they have things that they want to do. That process and the sort of bargaining and leverage in the Republican coalition is less there because it seems like what a lot of people want to do is they want to sort of message.

And they want to rely on a lot of symbolic politics. And that doesn't make for a great bargaining environment. But for Democrats, I mean, it's sort of clear you can see without being conspiratorial kind of what happened, which is Biden starts to pick up steam. I do think there was probably an anybody but Bernie dynamic around that. And then the other candidates drop out. And some of those candidates are now in the administration. Right. There are things that they wanted. There are policies they wanted to do and get done. And.

And they also could conceivably, I think, see a role in the administration as a stepping stone to the next stage in their career. And again, we don't exactly see that dynamic obtained in the Republican coalition.

So I think those are the things that sort of drove that, as you did see a bargaining process. But I think your point about Biden not being the clear elite favorite for a year is a really, really important one, and one that tends to get lost because Biden is such a plausible establishment figure. I don't know that he was an establishment favorite. I think people that have known Biden a long time knew the pitfalls that we're now seeing, right? He's not a stirring orator.

He is on the older side. You know, these things were not secrets in...

2019. They were not secrets in 1988, the first time he ran for president. So would you say that the party did or did not decide if you had to come down on one side in 2020? In 2020? I would say the party decided late. The party decided late. Fair enough. And the dynamic that you were just describing between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, are you essentially saying that the Democratic Party is stronger than the Republican Party? I think the Democratic Party has a sort of stronger...

organizational apparatus. Like they have rules that give them more power over their nomination process. They also, I wrote this at the time, they also have a harder job. They have a more complicated coalition to bring together. So I think we're now seeing the sort of fruits of

That primary and the sort of weird truncated nature of the 2020 primary where instead of kind of up to the convention battle between Biden and Sanders, we might have seen we saw like this weird pandemic debate with them bumping elbows on the stage, you know, and then everything was weird and everybody was kind of on something else.

And I think what you're now seeing is that these kind of deep differences in the party and fundamentally different orientations between the more centrist and establishment and more progressive wings of the party were not fully worked out.

in the course of 2020. But I do think this is probably the case that the Democratic Party is more sort of organizationally robust, less driven by media than the Republican. And the Democratic Party actually did make changes to its nominating process after 2020.

And that was primarily the order of states. So Iowa was dethroned as the first in the nation caucus state. What's going to happen this year is there will be by mail caucusing that will be revealed on Super Tuesday. Folks can show up in person on the 15th, January 15th, that is. But those results will also be shared on Super Tuesday.

And as part of those changes, South Carolina was meant to be the first state in the nation to vote. New Hampshire, based on its state constitution, saying that it has to go first, is not accepting that. They're still holding their primary first. But as a result, Biden will not be on the ballot. And the Democratic Party there is instead waging a write-in campaign. So some changes were made. Some of those were broadly accepted.

Iowa Democrats generally seem to get on board acknowledging how poorly the 2020 Iowa caucuses had gone. New Hampshire not getting on board, but still a right in campaign for Biden. And all of this probably doesn't matter very much because it's not a competitive primary, at least not at the time that we're recording this podcast.

What do those changes signify about the primary process today? How malleable it is? In the rest of this episode that folks are about to hear, we're going to talk about ways that other countries select candidates and ways that our process could be different. In the grand scheme of things, how meaningful is this change and why is the party doing it?

Yeah, I mean, I think it has the potential to be pretty meaningful. The New Hampshire and Iowa going first idea has a pretty long legacy at this point. You know, they weren't kind of useful at one point because they allowed, you know, outside candidates to meet a lot of people and really do retail politics. And so in that sense, they opened up the process.

What this sort of tells us about the process is that there is a constant tension among multiple things that doesn't really boil down to just like, is the party deciding or not? Doesn't just boil down to elites and voters. It boils down to, I think, the racial diversity in the party.

And what that implies, so on the one hand, there's been pushback for many years, and this is the drive behind South Carolina and Nevada being moved up, is that these are two states that are very white and not very representative of the Democratic Party's coalition. At the same time, now I think there's been some pushback that, you know, this is one more way, I saw at least one op-ed like this, you know, one more way the Democratic Party is leaving rural voters behind. So I think you're going to hear some of that.

you know, that's a coalition challenge for sure. But I think, you know, it's also reflective of the ways in which the Democratic Party has a lot of internal pressure to continue to open up its process. And that's, you know, it's related to these diversity issues, also related to kind of a sense of who can gain access to the primary. And this is, I think this is really challenging right now. I think

maybe specifically for Democrats, maybe for both parties, this is really tricky. Because on the one hand, you want to have a kind of prolonged primary process in which lots of people get to vote. So it's very hard, I think, to defend a system in which the first two states set the tone for the rest of the season. It's like, oh, Iowa and New Hampshire have gone and now it's done. And, you know, I think a lot of Americans can relate to voting in a primary that no longer matters.

But the longer the process is and the more it costs, the harder it is for people to get in. And the more candidates like Joe Biden, the former vice president, have a name recognition advantage. You really see that with Sanders running again in 2020, with Trump as someone who's been a household name for 30 years. That name recognition advantage comes with moves that would sort of on the surface seem like they're opening up the process. So I think this is a really, really big challenge right now for Democrats is this

pressure to make moves that look open but may have unintended consequences. In the remainder of this episode, folks are going to hear about some bigger ideas for changing the process, one of which is the exact opposite of making the process appear more open, which is...

resurrecting the nominating convention, the party nominating convention that sort of went awry and was ended after 1968 anyway. And in fact, Hans Knoll, who we talked to in the second episode, recently made this argument in a New York Times op-ed saying, amongst many different reasons, that these party nominating conventions allow parties to act with more agility and respond to politics in

real time. And I think he's talking about both Trump and Biden, but sort of goes into specifics on Biden in that it would appear it's too late for voters to nominate somebody else. But there are sincere worries about his electability in 2024.

a nominating convention would create the space for a party to replace him. And of course, LBJ is an example of somebody who decided to not run again. His announcement came well into the primary process, but because of party conventions, they could still find a nominee to run in 1968. What do you make of that idea besides that seems implausible voters would accept it?

Yeah, I mean, I think that basically the delegate process has dropped out of kind of people's understanding of presidential primaries, which is interesting because in those original McGovern-Fraser reforms that were really responding in a lot of ways to some of these kind of diversity and openness problems, those were very much rooted in this kind of delegate representation vision. And the original vision of those is that not only will delegates be selected by binding

primaries, but they will be a more diverse group of people. Some of those rules have remained, but it would be this idea that there will be younger delegates, there will be delegates of color, there will be women. And so the people making this choice in the convention will be much more representative of the nation and the party.

Although that, I think, is superficially now true of the delegates that will go to the DNC, I don't think anybody really thinks about delegates as people who can represent them. And I've been thinking a lot about this. I've been sort of following...

Hans's work on this and the response to it, I've certainly tried to advocate for this also, and it hasn't been very popular or got over very well. You know, people are really distrustful of the concept of representation. And that's a very bad place to be democratically, not to be like the broken political science record of democratic doom.

If you're like me and you sort of grew up in the 80s and 90s, there was very much this sense of the proper representation relationship is that the people are kind of in direct communion with the president. And I use a religious term, you know, advisedly because it does take on this sort of deep significance that that would be the representation relationship and that any kind of, you know, intermediary is fundamentally undemocratic.

And that is really dangerous because that is sort of the root of demagoguery, right? That's what you actually want is not a presidential candidate who can rile people. You want a presidential candidate who can bring together a lot of different groups of people. And that is something that the incredibly flawed and screwed up and exclusive convention system of back in the day did pretty well.

It brought together different groups of people across the coalition to maybe say, look, I don't necessarily want to have a beer with this person. They don't represent me in this sort of deep spiritual way. But this person is broadly acceptable to a lot of different interests and factions within the party. And the idea that we can't really think that way anymore, I think, is a real problem for representative democracy. And it doesn't just belong there.

in this primaries discussion, but it belongs more broadly under this umbrella of institutional trust. All right. Well, with that, we're going to hear how other countries go about this process and some ideas for, you know, some maybe more muted and some more out there ideas for how we could change our own system. But for now, Julia, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Galen. It was great to be back.

Great to have you. And listeners, here's the rest of the Primaries Project.

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Adams, be it John or Sam. Henry, Patrick Henry.

President of the convention, George Washington, the floor is yours. That's Timothy Betts, a YouTuber and high school history teacher in New York, taking us back to the summer of 1787 during a more than three-month-long debate known today as the Constitutional Convention. The time has come to review and sign our Constitution. The founders argued over how the United States would be governed.

They disagreed over matters of representation, including how enslaved people would be counted, how many representatives each state would get, and some delegates refused to sign without a Bill of Rights. What's needed that isn't here? Well, they requested specific protections on individual freedoms of speech, religion, assembly. Save them in the notes and we might add a Bill of Rights later.

Even with all this drawn-out debate and the addition of a Bill of Rights, there were many things the Framers left out entirely. For example, parties. When the founders wrote the Constitution, they didn't believe in parties.

That's Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. In fact, the founders... They didn't believe in popular politics and widespread voting. And of course, since the framers didn't believe in formalizing parties, they had no reason to design a system for parties to choose candidates to run in general elections, commonly known as primaries. Many constitutions have that.

an article about the operation of politics. But of course, the United States doesn't. Without a primary system laid out in the Constitution, parties have been left to design whatever process they want. And they have. Hello, Iowa! Hello, Iowa! A state f— And since the process isn't in the Constitution, that means the parties themselves could also change it pretty easily. That is, if they thought it needed improving.

Over the last two episodes, we talked about how accidental our primary system is, and how flawed. In this episode, we're wondering if other places do it better. And, come to think of it, what does better even mean?

Well, this is a very good question. Gideon Rahat, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The most common way is to argue that the most democratic system is the most participatory system. Our system is very participatory.

We believe that we have a democratic process, right? We're a democracy, so we should have a say. And we don't really get too deep into the weeds about how that democracy works. As long as people are voting, then that's democracy. Hans Knoll, the political scientist who helped develop the party decides theory. Most people, quite understandably, don't spend all of their time thinking about the implications of different democratic institutions. They just want to see democracy happening and

primaries are a great way to see democracy happening. Noll's point is that a democracy isn't well-functioning just because people are voting. As we heard in the last episode, although we have a very open system in the United States, it doesn't necessarily lead to a public consensus or good governance. The design of the system is key. I would say that democracy is about checks and balances, about the involvement of different

institutions with different level of inclusiveness. And this is also part of the American way of thinking about democracy. This is the way that your founding fathers has established your very complicated regime. And Rahat has laid out a rubric to help judge how democratic a candidate selection system is. According to Rahat, there are four key components.

The first is inclusiveness, or how open the process is to the general public. The second is competition. How hard do politicians have to work to be nominated or re-nominated? The third is responsiveness. Has the system chosen politicians who govern according to the will of the people? And the fourth and final is representativeness.

has the system resulted in a governing body that reflects the population of a country? To understand what all this means in action, we're going to explore how different countries around the world nominate their candidates.

Let's begin our world tour in Norway. In Norway, party leaders choose which candidates will run. That's Rune Karlsson, a professor at the University of Oslo.

The voters have no say, they just have to vote for the list that the party has decided upon. So that makes it quite exclusive. That gets at Rahat's first component for judging how democratic a candidate selection system is. Who takes part? Probably the most important one is the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the selectorate. The selectorate is the group of people that chooses a party's leaders.

For example, in the US, it's the people who vote in primaries and caucuses. The electorate is the people who choose between those candidates in the general election. And... In some parties, the electorate is very, very, very exclusive. It's the party leader that selects the candidates for parliament, okay?

In Norway, the selectorate is about as exclusive as it gets. In the U.S., it's very inclusive. And all of this affects how candidates behave. The more inclusive the selectorate is, the more individualistic player the candidate would be. And the more exclusive the selectorate be, the more he or she would be partisan players. So the candidates in Norway do not run personality-driven campaigns.

They do not focus that much on themselves. They say that the most important thing for my campaign is to get focused on the party. In the U.S., campaigns are more candidate-centric, and intra-party conflict can get messy and personal. And minutes later, it was game on. Julian Castro in the middle of a health care discussion taking a veiled swipe at Joe Biden, going there on the question of Biden's age. Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?

In Norway, on the other hand, there's no incentives for candidates to campaign against each other. It's important to note, though, that countries like Norway have many parties. So while there's little fighting within parties, if voters or politicians don't like the direction of one party, they have numerous other options to choose from. In the U.S., if you don't like the direction of one party, for the most part, you only have one other option.

Norway is an extreme example, but there are also candidate selection systems that are more exclusive than the U.S., while not being quite as exclusive as Norway. Election counts are at full tilt, sorting, counting, adjudicating on votes. In the Republic of Ireland... The final decision is taken by a vote of the party members. That's Theresa Reedy, a political scientist at University College Cork.

In Norway, it's the party leaders who are selecting the candidates. While in Ireland, it's generally open to all party members. But party membership requires paying fees, attending meetings and working for the party. In other words, these people are clearly invested in the party's goals. Party membership is actually quite low in Ireland. It's one of the lowest in Europe. In fact, only about 3% of the country belongs to a party. So about 100%.

145,000 people in a country of almost 5 million. And what does this mean for the people who are nominated? It means party selectors, the members of political parties, play a really crucial role in shaping the choices that the rest of the electorate are faced with when they go in and get their ballot paper. So they really do a pre-screening process.

Almost every democracy on the planet has a more exclusive candidate selection system than the U.S. But there's one country that may be even more open. Argentina has a national primary system. It's an acronym, PASO.

which stands for Primarias Abiertas, Simultáneas y Obligatorias. That's Peter Ciavellas. I am the chair of the Politics and International Affairs Department at Wake Forest University and the associate director of the Latin American Latino Studies program here. Argentina's PASO system means... Obligatory, open, simultaneous primaries, which is to say that every single party in Argentina has to do primaries for every single level of office

And every Argentine has to vote in those primaries. So this is an extreme form of democratization as the Argentines pose it.

But at the same time, it has disadvantages. And those disadvantages can be similar to some of the ones we see in the United States. There certainly is the kind of personalism, factionalism, populism from the bottom to the top of the Argentine political system that we've talked about as a more generalized problem of primary systems in the world. And of course, the more inclusive the electorate. When it comes to a very large population,

And that brings us to the next component for judging a candidate selection system, which is competition.

Competition is key because without it, you don't really have a democracy. There's no decision to make. I don't think people realize how significant candidate selection is. It's significant because many times the selector is really the elector. Meaning if the general election is not competitive, who the candidate is is the only decision that matters.

That's not often the case in presidential elections in the U.S., but it is often the case in congressional elections. Like, if you think of the United States, you know, in a good election, 10% of our seats are actually competitive.

That means that the bodies choosing the candidates, they're really choosing the representatives. It may seem like open primaries would be the most competitive system since anyone can run and the public gets to vote. But that's not necessarily the case. Primaries give advantage to incumbents.

to people who have a lot of money, and incumbents usually have a lot of money. Convincing the public to vote for you in a primary can be very expensive, putting a premium on name recognition and ability to fundraise.

That can decrease the world of possible contenders and decrease competition. Actually, many times there would be more competition in more exclusive electorates. It's hard for political scientists to measure how competitive a candidate selection system truly is.

But one way to do it is by looking at how often non-incumbents win. In a study of Israeli parties, Rahat found that closed systems are actually more competitive than primaries.

When party leaders make up the electorate, both more non-incumbents win and more candidates are able to compete. The next dimension of Rahat's rubric is responsiveness, which gets at what politicians do once they're in office. So in terms of responsiveness, we ask the question, OK, so the candidate was selected and then elected.

And we, of course, assume that he or she, they want to be re-selected and re-elected again. So who are their masters? To whom are they responsive?

To who are they accountable? In the U.S., the primary electorate represents a very small and often skewed segment of the American public. So politicians are accountable to that group of people. But they're not only responsive to those voters. They're also responsive to their donors and the media.

In more closed systems, politicians are first and foremost responsive to their party's goals.

Again, reedy on the Irish system. Individual members of parliament very rarely actually go against or vote against their parties. And parties tend to take discipline fairly seriously and very often will suspend or even expel

members of parliament for voting against the party. There isn't a strong incentive to pander to outside interests because it's a small group of party members that will determine whether you get nominated or re-nominated.

In thinking about responsiveness, it's important to keep in mind that campaign finance laws are a major component in determining how parties prioritize policies. In Ireland, Party finance is so restricted that it's not really useful to think about parties as responding to the preferences of donors. Parties are guided by their popularity. So in the Irish context, a candidate's nomination prospects are in the hands of the party.

And the party's responsiveness to moneyed interests is limited through strict campaign finance laws. So very often the parties will seek to enhance their popularity with the floating voter, with the largest percentage of the electorate that they possibly can. At last, we've reached the final stage of Rahat's four-point rubric, representativeness. This one is pretty straightforward.

Does the system select people who are representative of the larger population's demographics? Take gender, for example. When the parties are involved, there is more representation, at least in terms of gender. Can I be a prime minister and a mother? Absolutely. I don't have much to say, I just say thank you again. The ladies not for turning.

In the U.S., even with open primaries, the selectorate does not necessarily choose people who are like them.

Here's Jonathan Hopkin, a professor of comparative politics at the London School of Economics. If we look at who's in Congress, who gets elected president, they're generally men, generally white, generally wealthy, right? So I think there's much more of a kind of premium on personal wealth and fitting into a very mainstream establishment kind of image in the U.S. There are interest groups in both parties that are focused on trying to diversify their candidates in terms of gender and, to a lesser extent, race.

Here's Representative Elise Stefanik. I think we need to encourage nontraditional candidates to run for office, which is why I focus specifically on recruiting women, on recruiting Hispanic candidates, on recruiting African-Americans. In democracies where parties are more hands-on in choosing candidates, they can ensure diversity in a way American parties can't.

Good evening. For weeks we've watched the politicians slugging it out together. Tonight at last we hear the voters' verdict as they tell us who's won. Britain is one example of this hands-on approach. In 1997, Tony Blair of the Labour Party wanted to have many more women in the British Parliament. So what he did is that in districts in which he didn't have any incumbents,

they ran all-women shortlists, meaning that four or six women candidates competed for the candidacy of the Labour Party in the electoral district. That is, they didn't allow men to compete, only women. And in this way, they made sure that women would be elected.

selected and then elected. In Europe, I think there's much more likelihood that you can make a political career if you're a woman, if you're not from a wealthy background, if you have no particular financial resources of your own. In the same study of Israeli parties we mentioned earlier, Rahat also found that exclusive systems result in more women being nominated than inclusive ones.

In 1968, when Democratic activists began the process of changing how we nominate candidates in America, they were focused primarily on how inclusive our primary system is. But that's just one dimension of a well-functioning democracy. And when you judge our system by things like responsiveness, competition, or representativeness, it doesn't get great marks.

So at the end of each interview we did for this project, we asked the experts we spoke with if you could create a candidate selection system in the United States from scratch. What would it look like? We're going to share their answers with you right after this break.

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Grammarly. Easier said, done. As I mentioned before the break, we asked experts to tell us, if you could build a candidate selection system from scratch, what would it look like? Let's begin with Gideon Rahat, who prefers a multi-step process. I came to the conclusion that the most democratic system would actually be a system that would allow different electorates to take part in candidate selection. That is,

I would allow the small body of the party to screen the candidates, and then I will allow wider audiences like party members or even party supporters to select from the shortlist that party has screened. That's somewhat similar to the system that Elaine Kamark, the author of the book Primary Politics, proposed. It would be a hybrid between the party leaders and the voters.

In the perfect system, I would have the caucuses, the Democratic caucus or the Republican caucus in the Congress, all deliver votes of confidence.

in the presidential candidates. Party leaders would ultimately endorse three candidates. You know, I would just have them have three choices and say, yeah, Senator so-and-so and Governor so-and-so and former Defense Secretary so-and-so, they all have the temperament and the background to be President of the United States. But those votes of confidence wouldn't be binding.

I would then let the voters go ahead and vote in primaries and elect delegates to the conventions, but they would have been forewarned.

That some people, their peers think could be good presidents and other people, their peers think could not be. The idea of a middle ground between an open and closed system was popular among the academics we talked to. Actually, the superdelegates are, I think, a good voice in the party and to restrict their presence.

Voice more probably is not the best decision. That's Barbara Norander, professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Superdelegates can give sort of the expert opinion, and that goes along with the popular opinion that you get through the primary. So giving both kind of elements some influence is important. Another proposal for trying to achieve balance was something along the lines of

Going back to the old pre-1968 system, here's Hans Knoll. I would try to create a party convention where instead of the delegates at that convention being instructed by voters how they're supposed to vote, instead say let's create a representative democracy where you get a diverse set of people who represent all the different factions within the party and then let them negotiate and choose a party leader. FiveThirtyEight contributor and Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari

is also on board with relying more heavily on a convention process. But she stressed it would only work if voters became more involved with their parties. It would sort of involve a total revolution of political society in some way. In order for a convention to work like a representative democracy, convention delegates would

would have to know what issues voters care about and be accountable to those voters. I think one of the nuts we haven't cracked is like how to get people interested in party politics when there's no whiskey at the polls. The machine era had a lot of selective benefits for people to be involved in party politics. If you can get a job, you could get, you know, if you needed some kind of material assistance, you could get that. Without getting more people involved in the parties,

it's possible that only the most extreme views in the party would be represented at this hypothetical convention. The goal of a convention would be to find a consensus within a party. We actually put out a call to listeners of this very podcast to share their thoughts for remaking the primary system. And they had a different idea about how to find a consensus. I think ranked choice voting from top to bottom should be mandatory. I think it would be good to go for ranked choice voting.

method instead. The best decision-making process is a ranked voting system. This way, the most number of people are happy and the compromise is never the lowest common denominator. We heard from a lot of ranked choice voting fans. And for those who aren't familiar, ranked choice voting is where you rank your preferences. If no candidate has a majority of first choice votes, the one with the least gets booted and

and those candidates' votes go to the voters' second choice. That continues until someone has a majority. Okay, back to the experts. Caitlin Jewett, political science professor at Virginia Tech, also saw a convention system as appealing, but with a big asterisk. I view that system as actually quite reasonable, but I don't think it would ever fly with the American people. ♪

I think we are now in an era where the American people expect to have a direct say in who becomes the presidential nominees.

But I very much recognize that the parties are private organizations and can do this however they want and don't need to solicit the opinions of the American people. Short of a radical change, Jewett supported getting rid of the current sequential calendar. I would say that I would probably lean towards eliminating caucuses and establishing primaries in all states and probably lean towards a national primary day.

so that all states are voting at once, so that there isn't unequal representation or influence across states. Azari also wanted to get rid of the calendar, but wasn't quite for a national primary. The calendar's bothered me for a long time. I think probably the most practical solution is this sort of regional rotating primary, where regions vote together and you switch off who goes first or something along those lines.

Or if the regions don't vote together, you have groups of states that cross different regions. We did hear another argument for a national primary, though, from Kenneth Baer, a former Obama administration official and political analyst. I think the national primary could be a reform that could really get us out of this

this sense of that there's individual states that could have more of a say than others. He said it seemed like a reform that could plausibly happen in America, unlike perhaps some of the others. In the current context of where we are right now, I think this is a reform, not a radical upheaval, and a reform that potentially could lead to more participation into the system and maybe rejuvenate some

interest in health in our democracy. Wayne Steger, a political science professor from DePaul University, doesn't think national primaries are the way to go. Yeah, it would be more democratic, but what you're going to do with a national primary like that and at a potential runoff is you're going to advantage the candidates who are nationally known right off the front and who can raise money. And so lesser known candidates aren't going to have much of a chance, even in that system.

And lastly, Peter Ciavellas from Wake Forest University suggested a starting point is to standardize our system nationally. If I had to design the system from the bottom up, the first thing I would do is establish something

that does not exist in the United States, but that exists in almost every other democracy that I've seen in the world, which is some sort of federal electoral commission. We technically have a federal election commission, but it doesn't set election law nationally like it does in other countries. We do that 50 times in the United States, right?

at each state level. So my colleagues in Latin America will call me and say, "Hey Peter, I'm doing a project on primaries. Can you send me the primaries law?" I'm like, "Well, get ready for 50 files because we got 50 different laws." This is really unusual in the world and kind of frankly a little bit crazy.

Over the coming months, the process we've been discussing in this series is going to play out before our eyes. The voices of a small number of unrepresentative voters will be empowered. Entire states may be ignored.

Mitt Romney walked away with more than half of the Super Tuesday delegates. He says it's time for his opponents to stand down. Cash and personality will likely upstage governing know-how. And at the end of it all, there may not be any clear consensus at all. And vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket.

We're at a moment in American history when dissatisfaction with the political process is rampant, and ideas about how to change the system, particularly from the left, abound. A well-designed nominating process isn't a silver bullet, but it's a key component of a functioning democracy. And as you heard at the beginning of this episode, how America chooses its candidates isn't in the Constitution. If the parties wanted to change it, they could just do it.

So why don't they? That the system as it works now, it would be very hard

to change it because people are thinking that white participation is necessarily more democratic. I think they've been cowed. K-Mark is referring to the parties. I think they've been cowed by their activists and I think there's been a sort of absence of courage on the part of the parties. It can be hard to get used to the idea that there's more to democracy than just voting. You need to have really a very...

How would I say? There should be a crisis, a real crisis, in order to promote a reform of this system. Rahat says it would take a dramatic event to get the parties to decide to change. And Kamark says that moment may be approaching. Remember, change happens in party politics mostly as a result of failure. So we now have a...

president who could fail dramatically in 2020 and take down a lot of senators and governors and state houses with him. A big if. If that's the case, then I suspect that the reborn Republican Party, because there will be a rebirth of the party, will take a long look at how it got itself a Donald Trump.

and may decide to start the reform process. And as with the Democrats in 1968, when they kind of fell apart, okay, when one party starts a reform process, it inevitably has consequences for the other party. Whether that moment is in 2020 or years from now, there will almost certainly again come a time when the parties conclude that something has gone wrong.

that they aren't choosing the best candidates they could, that it's time to change the system. But as we've learned over the course of this series, a new system doesn't necessarily mean a better system. To get that, the parties need to be thoughtful. Who are they listening to? And why? And how are they aggregating all those voices? After all, no less is at stake than who will vie to lead the free world.

The Primaries Project was reported by me, Galen Druk, and produced by Jake Arlo. Jake Arlo also did the engineering and scoring. Our editor was Chadwick Matlin, and Maya Swidler did the fact-checking. Tony Chow was our technical director.

A special thanks to Timothy Betts for letting us use his Constitutional Convention video. And thanks to you, listeners, for listening to The Primaries Project. If you enjoyed it, tell your friends to check it out as well. Also, if you want to learn more about how our primaries system works, head over to the FiveThirtyEight YouTube channel.

You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store. Or again, tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.