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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas. We're going to be off this week. And so we're re-airing The Primaries Project. Maybe you remember it. It's our three-part series investigating our modern primary system. It's going to be airing today, this coming Thursday, and also next Monday, New Year's Day. Happy New Year's as well. And we'll be returning to our regularly scheduled podcast programming later in the first week of the new year.
I'll say it's been an interesting year of the invisible primary, a concept that we'll talk about in this episode, with Donald Trump really holding a commanding lead despite some institutional pushback and some challengers fighting to gain ground on him. Now, with the Iowa caucuses just weeks away, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the fact that our primary process is really quite arbitrary.
and it may not even necessarily be the best way to decide on candidates in the first place. So with all of that in mind, and getting ready for the 2024 primaries, here is the first episode of The Primaries Project.
The Iowa State Fair. It's known for things like... We're serving corn dogs, so we have regular footlong, double bacon, sweet corn. Foods on sticks. Cattle competitions. I am clipping her udder, which means I'm going to take all the hair off of it and I'm going to be able to expose that mammary system for its full glory. And amusement rides. And here we go.
You know, like bumper cars, teacups, the Tilt-A-Whirl. I am a little old to be riding on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I don't see any other journalists on the ride, but you know. It's a place where you can play carnival games. With the people vying to be the leader of the free world.
Like Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii. It's a simple photo op, but it's also part of how we select our candidates to be president. How America winnows the world of presidential possibilities to basically two people. Welcome to the 2019 Des Moines Register political soapbox.
At as many as 2,500 events in the state of over 3 million people, folks like Rick Edwards will size up the candidates in preparation to be the first state in the nation to weigh in. We're here for a couple days and trying to see as many of them as we can. Are you in the middle of making up your mind? Yeah, I am. Of course, just like everybody else, it's who can beat Trump. And I want to hear some ideas that I think are mainstream enough. But let's make it all very Iowa nice. Got it?
And the candidates will play right to the crowd. Hello, Iowa! Hello, Iowa! Fair! You do not need that many Iowans to start a revolution. I have done the math. Do you know how many Californians each Iowan is worth? 1,000 Californians! That's right! This is how you start a revolution in Iowa!
Because all you need is 40,000 Iowans and then the vision sweeps the country. Like Andrew Yang said, it's here in Iowa where you can catch glimpses of America's political future.
and the voter persuasion it takes to get there. Well, you know what? He hit a lot of the important things to me. Nobody talks about what it's going to be like in 100 years. I believe Andrew Yang did hit that. Like the evolution of Rick Edwards, who told me a minute ago he wanted to hear mainstream ideas. I like his future thought. I'm really impressed. Would you consider caucusing for him? I would consider that, yeah. I'm considering that right now.
Presidential elections in America are essentially a choice between two candidates. But the system that gets us those two candidates has never been rigorously thought through. Modern presidential primaries are products of happenstance and reactionary decision-making, most notably in response to a single disastrous nominating convention in 1968.
In this series, we'll tell the story of how our system came to be and examine its influences on who competes for the presidency. We'll also ask how things could be different. In this episode, we'll focus on that first question. How exactly did our system come to be?
There's nothing in the United States Constitution that says how presidential candidates will be picked by parties. That's David Farber. Distinguished professor of history, University of Kansas. So for more than two centuries, the American people had been wrestling with how democratic the process should be in which candidates are selected to represent their parties. And it was really only in the early 20th century that the modern primary system began. This was a system ripe for change and reform.
We'll get to those reforms in a minute, but first let's clarify what system we're talking about: how we select candidates today. For regular observers of politics, our system may feel natural, but in the world of developed democracies, it's unique. No one else does it quite like the US. There can always be exceptions, and the precise rules change from one cycle to the next, but here's how the primary system generally works.
The primary cycle essentially begins the day after the last presidential election.
Once it becomes clear which party will control the White House, possible contenders in the opposing party begin to assess what a bid would look like. All right, it's mostly rumors for now about who will run for president in 2020. Today, a potential candidate from the Bay Area took his name out. They try to build up their national profiles by writing books, standing out in congressional hearings, being active on social media, making visits to early primary states, and doing interviews. You're probably not going to answer me, but I'm going to ask you anyway. You're right.
On both counts. But here's what your answer is, though. Let me tell you why. They also reach out to donors, fellow politicians, and possible staff to see what kind of support there is for a run. Once the midterms are over, meaning two years before the general election, candidates start announcing their bids. I am officially running for
for president of the United States. The year or more of campaigning before states actually begin voting in the primaries has traditionally been called the invisible primary, although it's grown more visible as the media has increasingly covered its ins and outs. Iowa tonight, Democratic candidates are flocking to Iowa and the state fair with just six months until the first in the nation caucuses.
Frontrunner Joe Biden showing... It involves fundraising, stacking up endorsements, building a campaign infrastructure, lots of visits to early states, policy speeches, debates, and a race to gain support with the electorate and rise in the polls. By late summer and fall, candidates who have failed to launch begin dropping out. With this in mind, I will suspend my campaign immediately.
Voters finally weigh in at the beginning of the year of the general election. The order of the states changes every cycle, but it always begins with Iowa, followed by New Hampshire.
Then come Nevada and South Carolina, and in some kind of succession, everyone else. Most states have a primary, which is when voters go to the polls and cast a secret ballot, much like in the general election.
Some states, though, have a caucus, which is a party meeting where attendees can go and try to persuade their neighbors over the course of hours to support their preferred candidate. And I got to tell you, this race right now, it's neck and neck. It's all about turnip. Oftentimes, the winner of the primary becomes clear in the first month or so of voting, and the field at least winnows down to two or maybe three candidates.
Somehow, through all the campaigning, debates, fundraising and endorsements, the parties eventually consolidate on winners. We have breaking news in the race for the White House. Democratic primaries drawing to a close tonight with contests in six states. And Hillary Clinton has scored a decisive victory over Bernie Sanders in New Jersey, putting her well above the number of delegates she needs to make history. States continue to vote through June, even if the winner has already been decided.
Then the party convention is the coronation of whoever's already won the delegates needed to claim victory. Did you see the guy dressed as Abe Lincoln? And then there was the Kansas delegates had their their ruby slippers on. Those were great. And folks, that is how we narrow down the world of contenders to be president to two people. It is my high honor and distinct privilege.
to introduce to you the president-elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump. So why do we do things this way? Well, let's start at the beginning.
That's Elaine Kamark. I'm the author of Primary Politics, Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates. She's also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Democratic National Committee. For most of American history, really from the 1830s all the way through 1968, the nomination process was basically a semi-public process.
process or private process that took place within the political parties. That means the party establishment held the power. Back then, the parties generally used caucuses, which were meetings of party insiders who would select delegates to eventually go to the national convention.
The delegates were generally well-known people within the parties. They were not required to vote for any one candidate, and they were often chosen before candidates even entered the race. Some of the more egregious examples in the 50s and 60s were the Democratic Party had held some caucuses on trains, and they weren't announced until after the train had left the depot. That's Wayne Steger, political science professor at DePaul University.
Even after party reformers succeeded in implementing primaries in about a dozen states in the early 1900s, they didn't directly influence who the nominees would be. Most of the time in primaries, you had what were called favorite sons. So say a governor or a popular senator from the state, they would run in the primary.
for president, even though they didn't intend to run for president. Once one of those favorite sons won a state's delegates, he could use that power to wheel and deal on the convention floor. Eventually, he would assign those delegates to an actual candidate for president.
The other use for the primaries was for candidates to show party leaders they were electable. So the most famous story, of course, is Jack Kennedy in 1960 had to run in several primaries in order to prove to the party leadership that his Catholicism would not be a problem in the general election.
And he had to actually run in a couple primaries to prove that because the first place he thought he could prove that was Wisconsin. And while he won the Wisconsin primary in 1960, he won it by a huge turnout among Catholic voters.
So the party leadership said, "Uh-uh, no, Jack, we're still not convinced." And then, of course, he went on to run in West Virginia, which at that time had almost no Catholic voters, and he won a big victory there.
So-called smoke-filled rooms was how the Democrats selected their candidates. The Republican Party chose its candidates similarly. But the story of how the process changed is mostly a story about the Democratic Party. And that's because of what happened in 1968. In 1968, everything changed because the country was changing.
There were assassinations. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States was assassinated in Memphis tonight. War protests and insurgent movements within the Democratic Party. How many men must die to justify some 23,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, North and South, who died to prove some questionable
You might have heard of the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, but the months leading up to that convention were just as significant, if not more. The Democratic Party was extremely divided by early 1968. A substantial number of Democrats had begun to lose faith, both in their president, Lyndon Johnson, and most especially in his policies in the war in Vietnam.
Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was the first to enter the race as an anti-war challenger to the incumbent president. After Eugene McCarthy made a decent showing against the president in the first national primary in New Hampshire, he won about 42% of the vote. Johnson did win, but narrowly. At that point, Robert Kennedy stepped forward. What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred, but is love.
and wisdom and compassion toward one another. That's from RFK's speech after Martin Luther King's assassination. Of course, March 31st, 1968, Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation by deciding he would not run for reelection. So suddenly, the center did not hold. So you had these anti-war activists following Kennedy, McCarthy, and there was no actual establishment candidate for a couple of weeks.
Finally, Hubert Humphrey, the vice president of the United States, with Johnson's blessing, began to fill that central place. Hubert Humphrey, however, did not run in any of the presidential primaries. He already had insider support, so he could get delegates without running in the primaries.
Kennedy and McCarthy didn't have insider support, so they needed to try to win delegates. And Kennedy began to emerge as the likely winner of those few primaries. What all of these primaries have indicated, it was the people in the Democratic Party and the people in the United States want a change. And that change can come about only if those who are delegates in Chicago...
recognize the importance of what has happened here in the state of California, what has happened in South Dakota. We want to deal with our own problems within our own country, and we want peace in Vietnam. That was the last speech he would ever give. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who won the California primary last night, had just completed making his victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
when he was shot. Robert Kennedy's assassination, which happened following a primary that he had won, also sort of intensified the situation and heightened distrust. That's Caitlin Jewett. I'm an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech. The party was...
had the potential of being ripped apart by the events of 1968 and so that it needed to do something to change the process so that it didn't become so divisive that the Democratic Party couldn't really survive. Before we get to Chicago, let's stop in Hartford. We'll start our trip in the north central part of Connecticut, in the capital city of Hartford.
The changes to the Democrats' nominating process trace back to the Connecticut State Convention in late June of 1968, weeks after RFK's assassination. It all starts there, and that is literally the birth of this big reform movement.
That's Ben Goodman. He's written extensively about the primary system. You know, what a group of activists in Connecticut came together and did not only changed the way that we elect presidents, but changed how our national parties work and changed how our presidents govern and run the national parties when they're in office. By the time of the Connecticut convention, McCarthy was the remaining major anti-war candidate.
McCarthy supporters are finding, as they're really excited for their candidate, that it's really difficult to elect delegates both at the state party convention but then on to the national convention. McCarthyites were able to get enough support such that a quarter of the state's convention delegates backed McCarthy. And therefore: We took the point of view that the entitle was to a quarter of the delegates.
that we're going to go to the national convention. That's Jeffrey Cowan, who was a McCarthy supporter at the state convention and Yale Law student at the time.
But the chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party was only offering the McCarthyites nine of the 44 delegates to the national convention, fewer than a quarter. The chairman, John Bailey, tries to get a compromise together and offers another set amount of delegates to the McCarthyites, but they are in no mood to compromise their insurgents. They've had it with the establishment, and they say they're going to do something else. Right, we walked out.
and walked over to this gym. And I think looking at, it looks like about 500 people went to this new counter convention that we held. - There, the McCarthyites nominated more delegates to the convention, but they went even further than that. - We thought if we could create a commission that would set forth some rules, it could create a argument that could be made in front of the rules committee as to why
our delegates should be seated. And so Cowan and his fellow activists reached out to prominent McCarthy supporters around the country.
They set up a commission and wrote a report arguing that delegates should be selected in proportion to their popular support. And then they get the governor of Iowa, Harold Hughes, who is a McCarthy supporter, to chair the commission, along with Minnesota Congressman John Frazier. So they get this together and then they head into the national convention ready to change the rules. And it just so happens that one of the McCarthy delegates from Connecticut
who helped set up the commission, was also on the Rules Committee at the National Convention in Chicago. There, the McCarthyites would have the opportunity to present their report and argue for party-wide reforms.
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Two months after the Connecticut Convention, in August, all the tumult of 1968 came to a head at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
There were anti-war protests in the streets, and the police responded with violence. Members of the Youth International Party, Yippies they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills. Mayor Richard Daley vowed to keep it peaceful, even if it took force to keep the peace. Inside the convention, there was a similar kind of rancor. There were at least 1,000 delegates.
who believed that the Democratic Party had to repudiate the war in Vietnam. But they were outnumbered by those who were loyal to President Johnson and his successor, Hubert Humphrey. Chicago, Illinois, the convention of the Democratic Party nominating tonight its candidate for the presidency. So while outside got most of the news where there were police bloodying the heads of demonstrators, there was tremendous bitterness and anger within the hall itself.
Famously, people got up on the podium of the Democratic Party platform and they called out the violence in the streets of Chicago. And they said that in some ways what was happening in the streets of Chicago mirrored what was happening in Vietnam. Famously, a senator from Connecticut talked about Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago. With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.
That's Senator Abraham Ribicoff from Connecticut. As you heard from his speech, he was backing yet another anti-war candidate, George McGovern.
McGovern didn't enter the race until early August of 1968, and he split the anti-war votes at the convention with McCarthy. 1968 Democratic Convention was filled with scenes, I think, that just both mesmerized the American people and in many ways appalled them. There's incredible images of reporters being pummeled and pushed around within the convention.
Dan Rather famously punched in the stomach. And those reporters were broadcasting to a TV audience the size of which is unheard of today apart from the Super Bowl.
Believe it or not, in those days, many, many millions of people watched. I think it was somewhere in the vicinity of 75, 80 million people. At points during the week, the number actually reached an estimated 90 million, which was almost half of the American public in 1968. Those tens of millions of Americans... Watched on television as the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, mouthed some...
quite straightforward, vulgar epitaphs towards the stage where those comments were being made. What did he say? We don't know for sure. It wasn't picked up by any audio, but lip readers said he said something to the effect of, you Jewish cocksucker, go home where you belong, something to that effect. Even with all this turmoil, it was still pretty much guaranteed that the establishment candidate, Hubert Humphrey, would win the nomination.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey is the nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States. He went over by some five and a half votes over the 1,311 and a half he needed. And the crowd, the Humphrey supporters at least, are going wild there. But it wasn't a total loss for the Democrats' anti-war faction and those looking to reform the system.
What these activists, and again, starts in Connecticut, starts with kind of this core group, but with kind of McCarthy supporters here now in Chicago, they pushed three reform commissions out of the '68 convention. Humphrey may have won the nomination, but the reformers won in their own quieter way. What was happening in the Rules Committee and happening on the convention floor is one of the most
consequential moments in American politics in the last century. National conventions aren't just where presidential nominees are chosen. They're also where parties meet to adopt a platform and make any changes to the rules of the party. And the McCarthy supporters, led by the Connecticut delegation, were focused on changing those rules.
The Rules Committee comes to the floor with a majority report. And again, at the national conventions, these things kind of just pass, people not paying too close attention. But the McCarthy supporters very quickly are able to get the minority report onto the floor. A minority report is something like the dissenting opinion from a court. Except in this case, the delegates still get to vote on whether they want to implement it.
And most delegates don't really know what's going on. And they only hear the first part or understand the first part of the resolution. Amid the confusion, the governor of Missouri, Warren Hearns, cast his state's 78 votes in favor of the minority report. Ironically, Missouri's own delegation had not been selected in a particularly Democratic manner. It's debated whether Hearns himself was lobbied by McCarthy supporters or whether he was just truly confused.
Either way, those votes proved decisive. And it passes. There's a quote from a McCarthy operative named Eli Siegel who said, quote, "The Democratic Party reform movement was born out of confusion thanks to the support of a governor who had presided over one of the most undemocratic systems of delegates election in the country. What poetic justice."
What ultimately came out of the 1968 Democratic National Convention was a mandate to study and implement a number of major changes to how the party selects its nominees.
One of them was to focus on participation without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin. Another called for the examination of the unit rule, which was a rule that gave the majority of a state's delegation the ability to cast the votes of the entire delegation. And then the third is the biggest one, which says all feasible efforts have been made to assure that the delegates are selected through an open and fair process. In other words, no more caucus meetings on trains. In
Instead, the delegate selection process would have to be open to all party members. But what happened next, of course, is... I'm sure you know that I have already called Mr. Nixon. Nixon defeated Humphrey by a very narrow margin, and the Democratic Party realized it had a very polarized electorate and a very polarized political establishment on its hands.
And almost immediately when the new head of the Democratic National Committee took charge, one of the first things he did in 1969 was say, we have to change the rules.
In the wake of losing the 1968 election, the Democratic Party put together the McGovern-Fraser Commission, charged with deciphering the resolutions passed at the '68 convention and turning them into specific rules for the state parties to follow. There was some debate over what exactly the resolutions meant, but they ultimately settled on dramatic changes to how the party would select candidates. Here's Elaine Kamark. Here was the rule.
Delegates from 1972 on were supposed to fairly reflect the division of presidential preferences that was expressed either at the precinct caucus level or in the primary. And that was just one of the changes to the process. The McGovern-Fraser Commission laid out numerous new rules the states had to comply with.
A primary was easier to sort of fulfill those requirements than it was to hold a caucus that met those requirements. And so many states simply adopted a primary. And where that leads is from 16 primary contests in 1968 to 30 by 1976. So you very quickly, and this becomes apparent in the 1972 contest...
You're very quickly going from, you know, the smoke-filled rooms that we always hear about choosing the Democratic nominee to competitive state-by-state contests like we know today. The reforms that came out of the McGovern-Fraser Commission were almost shockingly effective. No one intended this to happen, but what happened from that commission
was that the party leadership took a backseat in the nomination process and primaries became more and more important. And so what you have is by the 1972 convention, almost 99% of all delegates had been elected through a transparent process. The percentage of minorities had substantially increased.
and every state had adopted new party rules. And while these sweeping reforms started with the Democratic Party, Republicans were swept up along with them because the reforms were passed into state law. The rules would continue to change over the coming decades, but the post-1968 reforms are the most significant to this day.
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Because of what happened in 1968, the Democratic Party establishment went a long way in removing itself from the process and letting in rank-and-file voters. I'm here today because I really want to get to know some of the candidates more. I have a handful that are very high on my list that I'm interested in, but I don't know a whole lot of specifics about them. Rank-and-file voters like Carrie Forrestal
who used her downtime from selling ice cream at the Iowa State Fair to listen to candidate speeches. What are you looking for when you watch the- Right. I look for someone who is not divisive. I look for someone who has a wholesome image, yet can
can be strong and kind at the same time. While Iowa still uses a caucus as opposed to a primary, caucuses are open to anyone who identifies as a Democrat. I'm registered as a Democrat so that I can participate in the caucus process. I tend to vote independently. I'm a socially liberal, fiscally conservative voter. Iowa's particular status as the first state to weigh in is the product of happenstance,
Since it has a lengthy delegate selection process, it went first in 1972, the first election under the new system. It wasn't clear then that going first would give the state's voters an outsized say. Something we'll get to more next week.
But once that became apparent, Iowa lobbied to keep its position. They like the attention, that the voters like the attention and the elected officials like the attention. As a result, elected officials in both parties have fought very, very hard to retain their first in the nation status and have largely been successful in doing so.
I think Iowans take this role very seriously and I feel like it's part of my responsibility as an Iowan to get to know these candidates more and make a wise, intelligent decision knowing that it influences the entire country. The post-1968 reforms opened up the process in a profound, small-d, democratic way.
That also means it gave people like Kerry, people loosely associated with the party, the power to choose nominees based on things like a wholesome image. The consequences of the reforms would continue to play out in both positive and negative ways for the parties for years to come.
And given that this system is largely the product of reactionary decisions and happenstance, it's worth thinking through exactly what those consequences are. Because after all, this is a big part of how we pick the leader of the free world. In the next episode, we'll explore those consequences. I think it's really telling that almost no other democracy chooses its
party candidates in this sort of way. In 1980, the establishment kind of strikes back. The strategy and upper reaches of the Republican Party was simple until recently. Demand and get unity behind George W. Bush. We're going to take back the Democratic Party first. What the internet has done is introduce into the process an element of this being a reality TV show. Party elites were unable to come together and talk
coalesce around a candidate. I am your voice. 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.
