There Has To Be A Better Way To Pick Presidential Nominees ... Right? 34:22

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Welcome to the third and final installment of The Primaries Project, a series about how we nominate presidential candidates. Last week, we looked at the real-world consequences of our primary system. And the week before that, we examined how it came to be. If you haven't heard either of those episodes yet, you may want to check them out first. This week, we're looking at how the system could be different. Here we go. Roll call. Jefferson? Hancock?

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! Iowa State failed! 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?

Gideon Rahat, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 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. Knoll'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 selectorate 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...

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

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 reselected and reelected again. So who are their masters? To whom are they responsive?

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.

Another darling of the tech world is Pete Buttigieg. We found donations to his campaign from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Pinterest CEO Ben... 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?"

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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

to screen the candidates, and then I will allow wider audiences, like party members or even party supporters, to select from the shortlist that the 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.

That's Barbara Norander, professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. 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 says

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 calendars 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

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 who you trust. We don't know exactly how the Democrats' nominating process will play out.

But what we do know is that it doesn't have to be this way. 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? 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.