Is Our Primary System Working?

January 31, 2024

A data journalist and political commentator join the governors to discuss the presidential primary process and potential reforms.

In the 1970s, the two major political parties enacted a series of reforms that aimed to make the presidential primary process – which varies by state, and by party – more democratic and transparent. How have these changes impacted candidates – and voters? And is our primary system achieving those democracy and transparency goals? In this episode, our hosts, former Tennessee Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, and their guests, discuss the modern presidential primary system – how it works, how it has changed politics, and if it ultimately reflects the will of the people. 

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“A democracy isn’t a democracy just because people are casting votes”

Galen Druke, host and producer of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, opened the conversation by discussing how the “disastrous” 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago sparked a series of reforms that created the modern presidential primary system. “There was violence outside the convention hall…inside there was pandemonium, and there were arguments from activists largely who were opposed to the war in Vietnam that the nominating process for the Democratic presidential nominee was unfair, it didn’t fairly include the various voices across the Democratic party.”

While the resulting reforms were designed to make the process more democratic and transparent, whether we have moved forward or backward as a result is “complicated,” Druke told the governors.

“A democracy isn’t a democracy just because people are casting votes. You have to think about what does the electorate look like? How many people are participating in the process? Is it actually getting the policy outcomes that are most favored by the electorate? Are the nominees representing the party platform?” he explained. “We’re pretty much the only democracy in the world that does it the way that we do our primary system now.”

Druke, who produced a series on the primaries, “The Primaries Project,” for the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, also explained the differences between a caucus and a primary, open versus closed primaries, and how often crossover voting occurs during his conversation with the governors.

“The angriest people pick the angriest candidates they can get away with”

Jonah Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Dispatch, kicked off his conversation with Governors Bredesen and Haslam by sharing his take on the primary system. “I think the primaries were well-intentioned. I think the primaries tried to fix a real problem, the lack of transparency, the smoke-filled rooms, all that sort of thing, he said. “But they’re a classic example of the unintended consequences of well-intentioned reform.”

One of those consequences, Goldberg said, stems from outsourcing picking presidential candidates to “tiny slices of the electorate.”

“Basically, the angriest people pick the angriest candidates they can get away with, and it makes for an unrepresentative system,” he explained. “We have a country now where both parties, certainly at the presidential level, but also at the state and local level, the party system has been hijacked, not by the people, but by the most committed, most angry people who have a different incentive structure than picking candidates who can win general elections.”

Noting that “one of the biggest problems in our politics today is that the parties are too weak, and weak parties create strong partisanship,” Goldberg outlined several ideas that could make the parties healthier.

“There are all sorts of rules that a party as a private organization can impose on people that want to borrow the credibility of their brand name,” he said. “Giving grownups in the party the ability to screen for candidates, have harder rules about how you get to become a candidate, maybe have better rules about how the parties can help support candidates they believe would be more competitive in a general election… you have to have some ability to sort of say, we’re not going to let whack jobs and demagogues use our brand.”

“No one complains that they got vanilla”

When asked about possible reforms, both guests pointed to the potential merits of ranked choice voting.

Druke explained how the model generally works: voters rank the candidates in the order of their preference, and if no one gets a majority after the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and their second-place votes are reallocated. The process repeats itself until a candidate gets a majority. “It sort of does that wheeling and dealing for you, and you land on somebody who has majority support,” he said.

Goldberg used an analogy about the popularity of vanilla ice cream to describe what the effect of this model would be. “It shaves off the most extreme candidates in a way that lets the most acceptable candidates to the most people rise to the top…so those kinds of candidates who have strong and intense but narrow and deep followings, they tend to fall by the wayside,” he said. “The analogy I often use is there’s a reason why the most popular flavor of ice cream in America is vanilla. It’s almost nobody’s number one choice, it’s nobody’s favorite flavor, but it’s the least objectionable to the most people, which is why you serve it at weddings. No one complains that they got vanilla, a lot of people complain about some sort of boutique rocky road kind of flavor.”