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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. As I mentioned on Monday's podcast, we are off this week for the holidays, and I hope everyone is having a really nice time. And so we are re-airing the
the Primaries Project. On Monday, we aired the first episode. Today, you're going to hear the second episode of the Primaries Project, which is essentially an exploration of our modern primary system. This episode in particular that you're about to hear looks back at how the process changed from the 1968 nominating convention up through 2020 and the effects really it had on our politics.
I should also say, stay tuned for a special interview at the beginning of next week's episode, episode three, where we talk to somebody who contributed a lot to the Primaries Project when we first made it and do a little bit of an update of things that have happened over the past four years and how the 2024 primaries that we're about to head into may be affected as a result. And now here's episode two of the Primaries Project.
Good afternoon from Convention Hall, where in just about 26 hours, the Democrats will start the process of choosing a man to run this fall against President Nixon. In 1972, Democratic presidential contenders competed for the party's nomination under a brand new set of rules, which opened up the process to many more rank-and-file voters. George McGovern is tantalizingly close, but still short of his goal. There's a major last-minute change
basically anybody but McGovern movement to try and stop this guy. Miami Beach is full of rumors of pacts, deals, switches, pledges. The hotels are jammed with delegates. And it looks as though this may be one of the most complicated and possibly the most interesting political stories of the century. It was a very, very...
difficult convention. The 72 convention was a big mess. In the end, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who four years prior had helped to write the brand new nominating rules, was victorious. My nomination is all the more precious in that it's the gift
of the most open political process in all of our political history. The rules he and reformers had put into place post-1968 allowed more voter participation than ever before. This is a people's nomination, and next January, we will restore the government to the people of this country. And I believe that American politics will never be quite the same again.
McGovern was right that the new process changed American politics in profound ways. And good evening to you all as we begin our coverage of the 1972 election. But he would be wrong about taking power the following January. But Nixon has won the re-election to the presidency of the United States, and it's beginning to look as though the pollsters knew what they were talking about.
McGovern went on to lose in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history, winning only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Well, it hurts too much to laugh, but I'm too old to cry. McGovern had run as an unabashed liberal. He was against the war in Vietnam, in favor of a federal jobs guarantee, and aligned with the social movements led by African-Americans, women and students.
That helped him win the primary under the new nominating rules, but it didn't do much for him in the general. The view of the party establishment is that McGovern basically built a coalition of far-left groups and groups that were not
necessarily who the party needed to build a winning coalition at that time. And it appears that they were right. McGovern later remarked, I opened up the doors to the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out. Welcome to a new era of politics in America. In the 1970s, a candidate selection process this open to public input was unheard of.
Even today, in most democratic countries, parties are largely responsible for picking the candidates they want to run. In the last episode, we explored how this new system came to be. It was the result of contentious debate and a disastrous Democratic convention in 1968. In this episode, we're going to look at the consequences of that new system. At stake? How the two parties find the two people who will vie to lead the free world.
Despite McGovern's stinging loss in 1972, Democrats did not turn back from their reforms.
Here's Ben Goodman, who's written extensively about the primary system. So McGovern actually goes to the commission and says that the reforms didn't fail. He says, but we, quote, need not pretend that the reforms were written in stone. Everybody on the commission says, well, you know, we really are enfranchising more people, letting them into the party. They largely leave them intact. Even more states ditched caucuses in favor of primaries after 1972.
Here's Elaine Kamark, author of the book Primary Politics and a member of the Democratic National Committee. States really moved to primaries thinking it was just going to be the easiest way to comply with the new era.
It was easier for states to show the Democratic Party that they were fairly reflecting the public's preferences if they just let them vote. The old-fashioned caucus convention mode becomes almost obsolete by 1976. There have been some changes over the decades, but as far as the overarching system is concerned? There has been a lot of stability in the rules.
from basically 1976 on. To understand how this new system shapes our presidential candidates, we're going to look at elections from three periods. First, the 1970s, when the reforms were relatively new and the parties and candidates were still figuring them out. After that, we're going to look at the 80s and 90s, when the parties got a handle on the rules and used them to promote their preferred candidates.
Last, we're going to look at the modern era, when for a variety of reasons, the parties have begun to lose their grip again. This is the decade of dissent, and welcome to the giant mystery that is the 1970s.
In the 1970s, the new nominating rules had a few immediate effects. For starters, they let many more people into the process. They also established the importance of the state-by-state calendar we have today. And perhaps most importantly, they did away with party leaders' ability to negotiate and compromise over who should lead the party.
In 1972 and 76, Republicans nominated incumbents, Nixon and then Ford. So while the new nominating laws that Democrats passed in state legislatures also affected Republicans, Democrats were primarily the ones navigating them. As you heard, 72 was a disaster for Democrats. But they had another go in 1976. I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford.
will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office. In the wake of Watergate and amid a recession, a lot of contenders jumped into the Democratic primary contest.
Until he became governor, he put in 12 hours a day in his shirt sleeves during harvest at his farm. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for president working in the hot August sun? There were a number of nationally known senators and governors vying for the nomination. And then there was Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who wasn't much of a national figure. Back in 1975, the saying was, Jimmy who?
Here's Hans Knoll, professor of government at Georgetown University. He says, oh, OK, no one knows who I am right now.
And in the past, I would have had to go around the country and shake hands and get everybody to pay attention to me, which is really going to be difficult. He'd have to get party power brokers to back him. But thanks to the changes after 1968, there was now another path to the nomination. If I go to Iowa and I win or do well, everyone's going to suddenly pay attention to me and know who I am. And then I can take it from there.
And so he starts to build an organization in Iowa long before anyone else does. By winning early in Iowa, which is the first caucus, he would create momentum going into New Hampshire. And from New Hampshire, he could create momentum going into other primaries. This is one of the first key consequences of the post-1968 system.
Winning in early states is huge. Now, in the old system, there was really no such thing as momentum because it wasn't a public system. The media used to wait until the national conventions to tune in to the specifics of delegate count.
But now, the media could let the public know who was up or down, state by state, from the very beginning of the process. And sure enough, by winning in Iowa, he got himself national attention. And he took that momentum throughout the primary season and won the nomination, to the surprise of many who had no idea who he was. And now I've come here, after seeing our great country, to accept your nomination.
Carter did the best of the pack in the primaries, although he only got a plurality of Democrats' vote, 39%. This year we've had 30 state primaries. More than ever before, making it possible to take our campaign directly to the people of America.
So what are the consequences of all this attention paid to the early contests? Here's Wayne Steger. I'm a professor of political science at DePaul University. I mean, there's no question that the early state voters are empowered relative to the voters in all other states, simply because they have the most choices available to them. According to an analysis from FiveThirtyEight's Jeffrey Skelly, Iowa is pretty representative of the demographic makeup of the Republican Party. But New Hampshire is not.
And neither of those two states come close to representing the demographic makeup of the Democratic Party, which is far more diverse. Probably no voters in any state pay more attention to the role that they have and actually spend time going to events, going to speeches.
attending rallies than do voters in those two small states. Some people argue that it's good that Iowa and New Hampshire go first because they're small states, so they emphasize retail politics over national prominence or money. That also, for better or for worse, makes those early states likelier to elevate dark horse candidates.
One popular theory in the 70s went... If you have a very narrow appeal, a very factional candidate, a personal appeal candidate, that candidate is the kind of person who's going to be able to survive the many, many contests that they have to do over the course of the primaries. Candidates plucked from obscurity may not represent a party consensus or have the relationships with lawmakers that make governing easier. For example, Carter won the general election in 1976. File projection.
James Earl Carter, the next president of the United States. But he had difficulty working with members of his own party, and he faced a primary challenge in 1980 from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. We're going to have a vision established by a president, goals established by a president, dreams established by a president. Kennedy for president. If you believe we can do better. Remember, though, it's not like the old system was perfect either.
And with George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo statactics in the streets of Chicago. I think, you know, the old system was deeply undemocratic, and I don't share the nostalgia that some political scientists have for the smoke-filled rooms.
That's Julia Azari, 538 contributor and political science professor at Marquette University. And to its credit, the new system did open the doors of the party to new participants. It's, I think, important to note that
Throughout this period, there was still a lot of talk within the Democratic Party about not just taking African-American votes for granted and not just taking the votes of organized women's interests for granted, but really allowing these demographics into the party. It also increased public interest in the political process. Democrats in Iowa got an enormous amount of excitement and attention because of Jimmy Carter's unexpected win there.
And the Republicans afterwards decided to put a presidential preference contest as part of their caucus convention system in Iowa.
And because they realized that what the new system did was it attracted a lot of attention from voters and you could build your party. You could get more volunteers. You could get more donors. Involving the broader public also allowed the parties to battle test their candidates with the people who would actually be voting in the fall. So you can weed out people who just aren't good politicians.
in a way that perhaps smoke-filled room would not necessarily do because they wouldn't always know what counts as being charismatic or whatever.
whatever. That's the sort of obvious advantage to this. Despite the two main changes we've discussed, who participated in the primaries and how much sway early states had, the most significant change of the post-1968 reforms was simply that party leaders no longer had the ability to negotiate over who should lead the parties. For the most part, political scientists agree that the loss of that negotiating aspect is a negative consequence of the post-1968 reforms.
The main change is to remove some of those mechanisms by which parties make a decision across different candidates that involves a lot of stakeholders. Instead, everything becomes this kind of informal chaos. McGovern in 72 and Carter in 76 did not represent a consensus within the party.
Neither got anywhere close to a majority of votes in the primary. There's a reason why we don't have people vote on everything that we put before Congress. And it's not just that people are dumb or that they don't understand everything or that they can't become educated about things, although it is true that there's a lot of information you need to process to make policy choices and a lot of information you need to process to choose who the best candidate is.
It's really that it's hard to make decisions where you work out compromises if you have a bunch of people who are voting. It's not fair to chalk up the factional candidates of the 70s entirely to the new system. The Democratic Party of the 70s was divided, much as it had been in '68.
But the wheeling and dealing of the old convention floors did have its purpose in trying to find a party consensus. I think it's really telling that almost no other democracy chooses its party candidates in this sort of way. Even the most internally democratic political parties in the rest of the world would at least limit things to people who are like dues-paying members or something like that.
And most places, they choose things at something like a convention. And it's not as if the new system is necessarily doing a great job of capturing a public consensus. It empowers a small set of voters in early states. Primary turnout across the country tends to be low, and the nominee is often already decided by the time many people vote. The 70s made it clear that there were both upsides and downsides to the new rules.
They also made it clear that the parties had given up a lot of control, and they wanted it back. Which brings us to the 1980s. And we're all set to welcome 1980. Seven, six, five, four, three seconds, two seconds, one second. It's midnight! Happy New Year! In 1980, the establishment kind of strikes back.
The Democratic Party moved to re-exert control over the nominating process, marking an end to the haphazard early days of reform. So after Jimmy Carter loses, there is this wide
sense among the party establishment that the establishment has just given up all control of the party nomination process. Carter fended off the challenge from Ted Kennedy, but lost the general to Ronald Reagan in an electoral college landslide. The people of the United States have made their choice. And of course, I accept that decision. But I have to admit, not with the same enthusiasm that I accepted the decision four years ago.
Democrats worried that the reforms had helped produce an ineffective president in Jimmy Carter. So the party put together another commission to review how it selects its candidates. It found that, quote, And that, quote,
deliberative judgment, coalition and compromise have too often been replaced by remote control campaigns, single-issue crusades and faceless government. The most notable result of that commission was the creation of superdelegates, elected officials or party activists who would be automatic delegates to the convention. So what they do is they take the number of unelected delegates from eight
to about 22% for the 1984 convention. There aren't any cases of superdelegates voting down the candidate who won the most delegates through the primaries. However, We see superdelegates become influential and influential in the sense that they're sort of
able to direct media attention and coverage not influential in the sense that they're making a decision. That's Caitlin Jewett, political science professor at Virginia Tech. The party also made it harder for lesser-known candidates to win delegates to the national convention. And so that is eliminating the dark horse candidates in that sense as well. The Republican Party took it a step further. They granted all of a state's delegates to the single candidate who won in that state.
That winner-take-all system was traditionally thought of as advantaging early frontrunners and party favorites. Well, the first thrill tonight was to find myself for the first time in a long time in a movie on prime time. That's Ronald Reagan in 1980. I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.
But there's a strong argument that the party's exerting control over the nominating process didn't actually have much to do with superdelegates or rules changes at all. It had more to do with the party's simply understanding how the new system worked. And so Reagan and his supporters there in Iowa and everyone else who's running for the Republican nomination is in Iowa ready to campaign.
Everyone else has figured this out. By the 80s, Carter's strategy of winning early in Iowa wasn't a secret. Instead, what starts to happen is party leaders say, oh, well, you know, I want a particular kind of person to be the nominee. I know that person needs to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, so let's give that person resources and support. That description you just heard from Hans Knoll is a theory known as the party decides.
Noll and his colleagues developed the idea by looking back at endorsement data from the 80s and 90s. Their theory became a common way of understanding how the primaries worked. The main argument in the party decides is that much of this coordination happened informally. Party leaders kind of figure out how to not just let, to throw caution to the wind. Party elites gave up direct control in the 70s. But once they understood the new system, they could still exert indirect control.
Again, here's Hans Noll. Before, you curried favor, you got the right folks to like you, and then they will probably vote for you at the convention. Now, candidates go around, meet with those same folks, but what they're asking is not, will you support me at the convention? It's, I got to win some primaries. What can you do to help me win these primaries? Party leaders had control of enough resources that if they wanted someone to win...
they would be able to help that person across the finish line. Again, this informal system required unity and effort on behalf of the parties. It's conditional upon the unity of the party and the presence of a candidate with broad appeal. If you don't have both of those things, then the party insider's ability to really rally behind a candidate drops off dramatically. And in the 80s and 90s, the parties were more unified than in the 60s and 70s.
they'd become more cleanly sorted according to liberal and conservative ideologies. They make the argument that this is, you know, the deciding is happening through elite endorsements. Endorsements are both an indicator of who the party is working to nominate and an actual way of shaping public opinion. And sure enough, according to data from FiveThirtyEight and The Party Decides,
Every candidate from 1980 to 2000 who had a clear endorsement lead heading into Iowa went on to win his party's nomination. My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination. I accept your nomination for president. I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States. I cannot say it more clearly than in plain speaking.
I accept your nomination to lead our party once again to the presidency of the United States.
One of the best examples of coordination by both parties is the 2000 election. So the extreme cases of Party Insider were the 2000 nominations on both the Democratic and Republican side, where both Democrats and Republicans, Insiders, overwhelmingly endorsed and supported through fundraising networks, public endorsements, talking up the candidate in the media. The strategy and upper reaches of the Republican Party was simple until recently, demand and get unity behind George W. Bush.
and make his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate inevitable. For party elites to try to kill party competition very early on in the season and make it look like an accident...
You know, that is the real innovation. Al Gore won every nominating contest in the country and Bush won 44 of them. And so Gore and George W. Bush were nominated by that dynamic. So those are the epitome of the party decides. So tonight we vow to our nation we will seize this moment of American promise. We will use these good times for great goals.
For about two decades, the parties were able to pretty successfully re-exert control over the nominating process. So was this just a reversion back to the old system, pre-reforms? This is a really deep counterfactual, right? What would have happened if that had never occurred? While the parties did have a lot of influence, like they did before the reforms, the parties themselves were different.
For example, on the Democratic side, pre-reform. Labor unions used to have a huge influence because they could organize people to campaign and get involved in the party process and eventually become delegates or be the ones to select delegates. Democratic Party had been built on labor for such a long time that it was they were the ones who were doing the excluding in some respects. Opening up the primary process helped change the party apparatus itself.
And now, if you're an environmentalist or if you're interested in civil rights types issues or LGBT issues, those organizations can mobilize and support candidates of their own. A similar thing definitely happens to the Republican side. And this is really the story of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party. And they select Reagan. And then they are still around as things continue. By the time you get to 2000, the movement conservative types are now actually in power throughout the
Republican Party. So would Reagan or Clinton have been nominated under the old system? It's hard to say exactly because the parties themselves are different. It's fair to say, though, that they did represent a consensus within their parties. They were no McGoverns or Carters. Things changed, though, as the 2000s progressed. We'll get to that in a minute.
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Two, one, happy 2000s!
You know, I talked to a lot of Democrats in the last year and a half running around this country. And the most interesting thing that I've found about Democrats is that they're almost as angry at the Democratic Party as they are at the Republican Party. In 2004, Howard Dean had a lot of support and a lot of resources and was doing his own thing. And the party would have perhaps liked to not have him be the nominee. He's saying nasty things about Democratic leaders. We're going to take back the Democratic Party first.
He's calling Democrats cockroaches and saying he's the real thing and the party has left what it stood for. And he's being really hostile. A lot of Democrats don't like that. And yet they're not sure what to do because he seems to be getting a lot of support. A couple things happened in the 2000s that started to form cracks in the party decides model. In the 2000s, everything goes online and you have in a way this sort of
insane transparency revolution where nothing is invisible. Thanks to the internet and amped up cable news coverage, the so-called invisible primary becomes a lot more visible. Everybody is...
making videos and whatever two years out from the primary, so you really can't have anything behind closed doors. And we start seeing that candidates are saying, oh, I can raise a bunch of money independently and I can make my own appeals. And then voters are like, oh, I actually like this other person who's different, who's maybe not who the party is selecting. In the old days, if a candidate you liked appeared out of nowhere, you had to actually sit down and write a check and find an address and mail it to them.
And these days, the very night of a good debate or a primary win, guess what? People just go to their computer and they just push a button and make the contributions. Independent campaign contributions from outside the party infrastructure grew. Fundraising rules make it easier for individual candidates to create their own network.
to raise resources and so forth. So Howard Dean's ability to raise money off the internet is part of that story, but in particular, the sort of explosion of independent expenditures that's happened since then has been really influential in making it so that individual candidates don't need the support of the party in order to do well in the primaries.
What the internet has done is introduce into the process an element of this being a reality TV show as opposed to the serious business of who can actually govern. So we see in the modern era a lot of people who, frankly, in the old system would have never been considered for president. You see a lot of people getting into this race on the sort of why not.
theory. This decoupling of campaigns from the parties might seem like a more democratic way of doing things. It gives power to the people over party elites. But as was the case with the Democratic nominees of the 70s, it's more complicated than that. The question would be to ask ourselves, the candidates that are selected through primaries and then elected to U.S. Congress or U.S. presidency or to other posts,
Are they accountable to the people? Who are these people? That's Gideon Rahat. He researches candidate selection methods as a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Primaries are complex, have low turnout, and a lot of voters aren't highly focused on policy. So becoming independent from the party doesn't necessarily mean candidates are more representative of the broader public. The candidates that are selected through primaries, they are accountable to specific people who can bring them either money or voters.
So this is one of the problems with this primary system that you don't, you're not really know who the people are. So you have to use money, you have to use the media. This system also encourages voters to connect with individual campaigns over the party. You have to be out there, to be prominent, to be different from the members of your party in ways that would make you prominent.
So this would mean that you would be less of a team player and more an individual player. Is there anyone on stage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party? In a system where the party has more control over the process, the party's own goals of promoting its platform, winning elections, and ultimately governing are more of a priority than any one individual politician's brand.
Which gets at the whole reason parties exist. They represent, I think, the sum of the ideologies, the sum of the wisdom of many people that were there for many years. It seems like there's an idea, I vote for the person, not the party, and that's self-evidently better. And that seems strange to me.
Which is better, one particular person with all possible flaws or a collection of people who are defined largely on the fact that they agree on some important policy issues and they're going to work as a team to try to make those things happen? Making a more direct appeal to primary voters and the media instead of the party apparatus also means that candidates emphasize things that often have nothing to do with governing. This didn't necessarily start in the 2000s, but it's exacerbated.
I think that the current primary system is particularly favorable to presidential candidates who make a kind of symbolic appeal to the way that their partisans see themselves or see the national identity. Even going as far back as Bill Clinton, where we're actually in an era in 1992 when the country is much less polarized. But Clinton is an extremely...
cultural figure. He's a baby boomer. He's playing the saxophone on late night TV. And so he is kind of exemplifying a particular cultural identity that had already become an important
part of the Democratic Party. And then by the time you get around to Barack Obama, that becomes hugely important. So what does this mean for American governments? It's much harder to govern a nation according to those principles and lead a party and coordinate with Congress. You know, being president requires making decisions that are made in the context of
existing policy, existing foreign policy commitments, domestic policy realities and stakeholders that aren't always in line with those symbolic principles. To be clear, when parties had more control of the process, they did not necessarily choose great candidates who would go on to be great presidents. The old system also had the ability to produce bad nominees.
But for better or worse, the new system allows candidates to operate separately from the goals of the parties. It opens up space for the kinds of candidates who may not have built up
relationships in the party over multiple decades, but instead are very charismatic, good on TV, good on the stump. Speaking of what your drummer said, he said if this music thing doesn't work out, you can always run for president. In 2004, of course, Vermont Governor Howard Dean did not go on to win the Democratic nomination. Democrats.
They're kind of sitting on their hands until they can figure out who it is who could perhaps beat him. They wait until Kerry does well in the Iowa caucuses before they sort of throw in their support behind Kerry. So you could imagine that 2004 could have played out in a more Republican 2016 kind of way if Dean had done better in Iowa. Dean's experience foreshadowed what was to come. With new campaign funding mechanisms, the
the internet and media environment, and less unified parties, the party decides model of the 80s and 90s wasn't as stable as it may have seemed. Those of us, when we wrote this book saying it's easy for party insiders to influence the outcome, and I think we overstated how easy it was, it was always the case that what they were doing was tenuous and tricky. Like you're trying to manipulate and influence a system that
You don't have a direct lever on. 2008 is another example where the cracks in the party decides model are apparent, but don't shatter it. On the Democratic side, although Obama had some party support, Clinton was the clear party favorite going into Iowa. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.
On the Republican side in 2008, according to endorsements, there was no clear party favorite going into Iowa. In 2012, there was, and Mitt Romney's nomination went largely according to party leadership plan. Mr. Chairman.
Likewise, in 2016, the Democratic primary followed the party decides model. Although the forces that helped Howard Dean buck the party also helped Bernie Sanders do much better than he might have otherwise done.
And of course, on the Republican side, the model completely fell apart. The world's upside down. The political world is upside down. And you have Donald Trump, who is sort of this mad hatter of American politics. I think Trump is obviously an interesting case in many ways. I think Trump happened in large part because...
of the large number of Republican candidates running in 2016 and that the party didn't decide, that party elites were unable to come together and coalesce around a candidate to help propel a different candidate forward and that let Trump emerge victorious. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.
He was very unpopular with lots of people in the Republican Party, but he was very, very popular with the people who did like him. And so they supported him. Trump was primarily polling in the 30s, in the months leading up to and during the early primaries. And so he always had this core that was going to be there, whereas the other candidates that are running, people didn't know about them. They weren't sure who to support. And so their support could fluctuate from contest to contest. But the one constant through all that was Trump.
Trump is an example of how in the current era of politics, under the current nominating rule, a candidate does not need to have any ties to party leaders or represent a consensus within a party in order to become that party's nominee. In 2016, when Trump wins the Republican nomination, that, you know, as Paul Ryan said, we need a standard bearer. That bears our standards. And when asked if he would support the apparent nominee, Paul Ryan said...
Well, to be perfectly candid with you, Jake, I'm just not ready to do that at this point. I'm not there right now. And I hope to, though. It's hard to remember now, but essentially the entire Republican establishment opposed Trump's nomination. He didn't receive a single congressional endorsement until late February of 2016, eight months into his candidacy and after winning multiple primaries. The 2012 nominee rejected him.
His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill. An early favorite, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, dropped out of the race to make room for... A positive, conservative alternative to the current frontrunner. This is fundamentally important to the future of the party.
and more importantly, to the future of our country. In the month before the election, after the Access Hollywood video came out, dozens of party members said they could not support his candidacy. It's for precisely that reason, Mr. Trump, that I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside.
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Even though the party didn't want him, Trump represented a core group within the Republican Party, which in our system is enough to win the nomination. Trump was definitely outside the party establishment. But, you know, if we look at exit polls, if we look at American National Election Study survey data from 2016, what you see is that Trump was the only candidate who had plurality appeal votes.
across the very conservative, the somewhat conservative, and the more moderate wings of the party. But being a plurality winner in a field of 16 candidates doesn't necessarily say that much about a candidate's popularity.
In a 2019 Atlantic article, authors Jonathan Rauch and Ray LaRagia noted that any pool with three or more candidates could result in a plurality winner who is positively unwanted by the majority. And that, quote, when the number of candidates reaches double digits, elections can enter a world that we think of as Arrow's Nightmare.
The process, while observing the formalities of voting, is not particularly representative of anything." In addition, it's hard to imagine that Trump's number one goal has been to further the Republican platform. The biggest negative impact is that there is no longer any place in the system where there is peer review.
In other words, where a potential president is evaluated by people who know politics and government. To be clear, many Americans don't want the parties to play any role in choosing their nominees. Here's some audio from outside the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Hell no, DNC! We won't vote for you!
But good or bad, there are consequences that come with taking the party out of the equation. When Jack Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he had to sit down with Governor Lawrence, who was the powerful governor of Pennsylvania who controlled the Pennsylvania Democratic delegation. And he had to talk politics and government with Governor Lawrence.
Now, imagine if there had been a Governor Lawrence in the Republican Party in 2016 and Donald Trump had gone in to sit down for his heart-to-heart talk and told him that he wanted to build a wall on the southern border and that he was going to make Mexico pay for it. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.
In the old system, Trump's worldview and prescriptions would have to be incorporated into the party over time and be reviewed by other people invested in the party's goals and future.
In our current system, unless the parties are highly unified and coordinated, that collaboration isn't there. We saw it for Republicans in 2016, and we're seeing it for Democrats now, which is that when there's a lot of different candidates and a lot of different people trying to make a claim to really to, in a lot of ways, similar ideological territory, we don't have a really great way of figuring out how to adjudicate that.
Smokefield Room has chosen some very, very bad presidents. But it's worth noting that Lincoln and FDR both were not sort of chosen on the first ballot at the conventions. They were the product of negotiation to get us through the greatest presidents. A lot of this comes down to how important you think parties are and what their purpose is. Today, we have strong partisanship. People feel that they belong to a particular team.
But the parties themselves, the organizations meant to promote actual policies, those are weak. One critical puzzle of this whole thing for me that seems to be the case across both parties is that as parties have become more open and more small-D democratic, supposedly, they haven't really picked up a lot of public support.
You know, even their adherents have some reservations about them. They haven't really rehabilitated their images. After the 1968 convention, the Democratic Party took the country down the path of opening up our primary system. Over the following decades, the system that we have today took shape. And so did its consequences. A democracy isn't well-functioning simply because people vote.
The quality of a democratic system also depends on its design. How does the voting process seek to find a consensus across the many interests in a party or nation? Listeners, now you know how our primary system does that. So is it the best it could be? And how could we do it differently? That's what we'll discuss in the final episode of this series. Coming up on the final installment of The Primaries Project. ♪
We believe that we have a democratic process, right? And we don't really get too deep into the weeds about how that democracy works. Election counts are at full tilt. Sorting, counting, adjudicating. I think we need to encourage non-traditional candidates to run for office, which is why I focus specifically on recruiting women. Can I be a prime minister and a mother? Absolutely.
The best decision making process is a ranked voting system. It would sort of involve a total revolution of political society in some way. I would say that I would probably lean towards a national primary day. This is really unusual in the world and kind of, frankly, a little bit crazy. 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.
If you want to learn more about how our primary system works, head over to the FiveThirtyEight YouTube channel. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at FiveThirtyEight.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. In particular, tell your friends about the primaries project. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.
