The professional filter also helps exclude candidates who are downright dangerous. When parties lose or abandon that function, no other institution can dependably provide it.
When populism reigns unchecked, or when establishment figures assume that potential authoritarians can be controlled in office, the results are frequently catastrophic.
Those leaders and other authoritarians undermine democracy by changing the democratic rules and sidelining constitutional rivals who might challenge them.
The institutional party should have had the capacity to keep him and candidates like him off the party ballot. But by the time Trump came along, the party establishment was a paper tiger; in , the GOP seemed unable to refuse a platform to marginal candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain.
The door was ajar, and Trump pushed his way through it. The same door remains open so long as professional judgment is sidelined. It was not always thus; parties have blocked anti-democratic candidates in the past. In , Henry Ford, the legendary carmaker, considered running for president. Although Ford gained popularity, he did not stand a chance in either the Democratic or Republican party, because political professionals did not give him the time of day.
He did not even bother going through with a candidacy, knowing he would be stymied by party leaders. Or consider a more recent example: In , Democrats in Florida were desperate to prevent former Alabama Gov. George Wallace from winning the state, as he had done in , when six other candidates had split the anti-Wallace vote. The point is not that Wallace or LaRouche would have won the nomination had party leaders not intervened, or that the party intended to install Carter as the nominee it manifestly did not.
Rather, by intervening, the party protected the integrity of its brand and upheld its prerogative to set limits on who can run under its banner—a prerogative which is foundational to the very existence of a party as a meaningful political entity. Open doors are an invitation to extremists and opportunists, but just as worrisome is renegade behavior by ordinary politicians—not only in their campaigns, but also in office afterwards.
Officeholders respond to incentives. If tweeting belligerently, torpedoing compromises, and trashing democratic norms help them, then they will engage in those behaviors. If being team players, de-escalating conflict, and building effective coalitions help them, then they will engage in those behaviors.
In politics, both independence and accountability—both conflict and compromise—are important; the trick is to get the balance right, which requires using a mix of incentives. Today, however, voters in primaries lean toward combativeness and amateurism over compromise and professionalism. The presidential primary system selects for performance skills and performative behavior, more than for governing skills and constructive behavior.
In their efforts to screen out renegades and incompetents, would professionals also screen out new ideas and overlooked constituencies? It is always a risk. Many observers who are dismayed by the Trump phenomenon acknowledge that it gave voice to working-class whites and victims of globalization whom mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats had neglected.
But we decline to be forced into what we believe is a false choice between openness and competence. Down through American history, including the period when bosses had far more power than today, both parties have endured by taking on board popular grievances and insurgent movements, and they have proved nothing if not adaptable in their never-ending quest to form majority coalitions.
Though professionals are hardly perfect, when they do their jobs, they do not exclude new claims and claimants a self-defeating venture for a party that seeks to win ; but they do try to channel them, bring them into the party, and reconcile them with prior claimants and with the imperatives of governing.
A stronger GOP establishment in might have consolidated the candidate field to block Trump, but it also might have drawn on his energy and ideas in crafting its message and platform. Thanks to court decisions such as SpeechNow. Federal Election Commission, there is today no limit on the size of contributions to independent groups; the groups, in turn, are free to support and oppose candidates provided that they not coordinate their activities with the candidates and parties. Those perverse rules have perverse consequences.
Formerly compelled to seek funds from many establishment donors, candidates can now be bankrolled by quirky billionaires with pet agendas.
The infusion of funds from billionaire super PACs allows single-issue or fringe candidates to keep their ideas on the agenda, making it more difficult for the party to unify and prepare for the general election. To be sure, there is a new alternative to billionaire financiers. The internet and other advances in technology make attracting small donors as easy as sending an email and soliciting a couple of clicks.
Like many other analysts, we value the participatory enthusiasm of small donors; unlike many others, however, we acknowledge a troubling downside: In its current form, the small-donor revolution weakens the role of party gatekeepers and empowers fringe candidates. Academic research suggests that, far from being representative of the American electorate on a range of characteristics, small donors are as extreme and polarized as large donors, perhaps more so.
That said, even if small donors were a perfectly representative group, they would still provide a pathway around gatekeepers, and that is a mixed blessing. True, candidates who rely on small donors are less beholden to big donors and special interests, which may make them more independent-minded; also true, they are less beholden to their political peers, party leaders, and important constituencies, which may make them more reckless and demagogic.
Our point is not that small donations are necessarily bad or good. It is that small donations are safer and more constructive in a system which provides professional vetting than in a free-for-all. They are not substitutes; they are complements. The nominating process is both more broadly representative and more likely to produce successful governance when amateurs and professionals collaborate.
Then there are the media, whose power in influencing candidate choice has grown enormously since the McGovern-Fraser reforms. Writing as long ago as , Jeanne Kirkpatrick tartly observed:. Why should anyone care if the media have influence—and if the most extreme media voices have the most influence? Media elites face completely different incentives than political professionals when they evaluate candidates.
The media prefer the novel, the colorful, and the combative, qualities which drive compelling narratives. The problem, of course, is that those are not the same qualities which make for effective governing. Also, horserace coverage elevates the importance of early primary states, because it builds narratives around random swings in polling, unusual events, and candidate gaffes—all of which advantage candidates and consultants who are deft in the arts of spin, theatrics, and symbolic politics.
Unlike party professionals, media figures need not think ahead about what happens after the ballots are counted, because they are not accountable for governing. Social media, of course, provide candidates with pathways around traditional media elites. In , however, it goes without saying that social media provide no serious vetting for governing skill; if anything, they are even more addicted to outrage, conflict, and emotional narratives than are traditional media—but without the guardrails against fake news and trolling which traditional media at least try to provide.
No amount of media democratization can substitute for professional judgment. In fact, without professional judgment, media democratization is more of a curse than a blessing.
The point can be generalized: Whether we consider access to money, to media, or to the ballot, cutting political professionals out of the nominating process makes the system less representative, less accountable, less competent, and thus less democratic.
Of those proposals, the most relevant to the problems we identify is probably ranked choice voting. In principle, it provides deeper information about voter preferences and may select candidates who are more satisfactory to a majority of voters, because it allows voters to register their second- and third-choice preferences.
If no candidate receives a majority of votes on the first ballot, the last-place candidate is dropped. Her voters get to register their second choice on the subsequent instantaneous ballot. The process is repeated until a majority winner emerges. How ranked-choice voting would ultimately play out is hard to foresee. It might encourage coalition-building and help prevent the anointment of factional candidates. On the other hand, it makes voting more complex and cognitively demanding, and it might attract insurgent bids, no-hope candidates, and splinter parties seeking influence by running for second or third place.
Ranked-choice voting deserves to be tried, as do some other reform measures that focus on improving participation and equity. Our remit here is not to examine those proposals individually but to make a larger point about them as a class: Most process reforms are more likely to succeed as complements to professional input than as substitutes for it.
No mechanical changes in the electoral system can substitute for rational parties and professionals in evaluating and organizing the candidate field. With so many candidates, so much strategic uncertainty, and so much confusing information, primary voters cannot reliably evaluate or organize the field by themselves, even if they were inclined to try which they are not and even if the system were optimally designed which it is not. In primaries, where they are unable to use party labels to guide their choices, voters are especially prone to rely on momentary feelings, vague impressions, misleading rhetoric, fleeting events, and false information.
Often, they cast their vote in protest, deliberately favoring self-expression and disruption over concern about governing. Mind you, nothing is wrong with voters using their gut to pick candidates or their ballot to protest. It is up to professionals to nudge candidates to run for say a badly needed Senate seat rather than take a long shot at the presidency; it is up to professionals to consider how a candidate might fare among constituencies who are underrepresented in primaries but may be decisive in the general election and in governing after the election ; it is up to professionals to see that no one party faction can overwhelm and exclude others; it is up to professionals to deter renegade and antidemocratic behavior.
Mixed systems ensure that the full spectrum of democratic values gets attention. They ensure a better balance between the democratic input of participation and democratic outputs of representation and governing. That is true regardless of the voting process and financing system used. Although it is too late to make changes for , both major parties should begin designing reforms that encourage more peer review. How might they do so? Consider some possibilities—not necessarily as conclusive answers, but as examples.
Instead of diminishing the role of superdelegates by preventing them from voting on the first ballot or reducing their numbers, the party should augment their influence. The purpose of superdelegates has never been to overturn the choice of voters in primaries. True, in principle they might act as a last barrier to a manifestly unacceptable candidate, like George Wallace or Henry Ford—but even that is unlikely, if a candidate has won a decisive victory in the primaries.
Rather, their real importance and the reason Bernie Sanders and his followers crusaded against them is their indirect influence on the upstream end of the process. No public monies are paid to political parties for the conduct of primary elections. The government runs and controls primary elections, and maintains complete control over taxpayer funds expended for that purpose. Indeed, in determining that U.
Five arguments against closed primaries are that they disenfranchise voters not affiliated with a major party, that primaries should be open to all registered voters because they are publicly funded, that closed primaries could produce more ideologically extreme nominees, that primary elections often decide races in some locations, and that instances of sabotage in non-closed primaries are rare.
In a piece for The Orlando Sentinel , columnist Beth Kassab argued that closed primaries disenfranchise voters and that open or hybrid primaries would be an effective remedy to this issue:. Think about that. More than a quarter of the state's voters are left out. They will be forced to sit on the sidelines — completely disenfranchised — during one of the most contentious primaries in recent history.
The group Open Primaries Education Fund referred to publicly funded closed primaries as "taxation without representation. Primaries are funded by the public. But the parties — private organizations — decide who can and cannot vote. Open Primaries Education Fund filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state of New Mexico in November alleging that the state should not fund closed primaries.
Its complaint included the following:. By qualifying as a major political party, the party receives the substantial benefit of inclusion in the statutorily required, state-run and state-funded primary elections, a benefit that minor political parties and independent voters are deprived of. Only major political parties may participate in the state-funded primary election. A minor political party, in contrast, must spend its own funds to nominate its candidates according to internal procedures.
Independents may not run for nomination or vote in the primary election. The election code thus establishes a closed, exclusionary system in which the major political parties are relieved of the financial burden of choosing their own representatives, thereby receiving an improper benefit of the expenditure of public money.
Dave Denslow, retired University of Florida economics professor, argued in The Gainesville Sun that open primaries could lead to more moderate nominees. Open primaries intuitively offer a major advantage. Presumably people who bother to vote in primary elections are more extreme ideologically than those who vote only in general elections.
In closed primaries, it was thought, candidates have to tailor their platforms to those more extreme voters, resulting in greater polarization.
Most party leaders favor closed primaries, which give them more control and favor candidates who reflect their relatively non-centrist views. Open primaries could help reduce political polarization. The evidence favoring the view that open primaries encourage moderation is at best mixed, however, with some studies finding it does and others that it does not.
In state elections, it turns out, voters in primary elections are neither more nor less ideologically motivated than those in general elections, or at least any difference is small. Legislators chosen through open primaries are neither much more nor much less polarized that those chosen through closed systems. At the local level, not here but generally, there appears to be no convincing evidence about whether open primaries reduce polarization.
Lacking information, we can still hope open primaries would give us more pragmatic candidates. State Rep. The bill, which died in committee, would have allowed independent and non-affiliated voters to cast ballots in party primaries. Reed argued that many races are decided in primary elections, such as those in which only one major party has candidates running.
Mark Z. Because of this, we resorted to making phone calls to Republican and Democratic officials in each state. Sometimes these calls helped us clarify discrepancies, and other times they led to more confusion. For example, we made two calls to the Republican Party in Colorado and got two different answers regarding how their delegates would be allocated at the GOP Convention. But in a follow-up call, a different official told us that unpledged delegates are not bound to any candidate in any official or legally-binding way.
Colorado is unique in that all 37 of its delegates are technically unpledged , so having a clear and consistent answer to this question seems important. Compared to past electoral cycles, the media has paid quite a bit of attention to the party rules during this primary season. An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Receive a list of headlines from the latest edition of The New Mexican in your inbox every morning.
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