If you set out to confuse an entire nation by designing an uber-complicated system of picking your national leaders, you could hardly do better than the current US presidential primary process.
The simplest way to pick presidential candidates would be a one-day national primary, where voters indicate their preferred presidential nominee from among candidates in the party they are aligned to. The opposite of that is how the US does it.
Our national presidential election – effectively an aggregation of 50 state elections thanks to the bizarre antiquity called the Electoral College (more on that later) – is preceded by a candidate selection process that’s as convoluted as it is interminable. Consider this: Texas senator Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential candidacy 586 days before the November 8 general election. And when Connecticut senator Chris Dodd ran in 2008, he relocated his family to Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines, three months before the Democratic presidential caucus, going so far as to enrol his daughter in a local kindergarten. In comparison, the French national election, a two-round process, is staged over a fortnight.
The state primaries decide how many delegates go forward to vote for each candidate at their party’s national convention, where the presidential nominee is chosen. But it was not always this way, nor this crazy. For most of our pre-21st century history, presidential nominees were chosen by party leaders in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. There were some primary elections, but they were often won by local “favourite sons” – party leaders and/or elected officials who then controlled all the delegates to their party’s subsequent national conventions.
In 1960, a young Catholic senator named John F Kennedy wanted to be the Democratic nominee, but party leaders were concerned US voters thought his first allegiance would be to the Vatican – the only previous Catholic nominee lost in a landslide in 1928. So Kennedy ran in a number of primaries and proved he could win a national election, which he did in November.
But 1968 is when things really changed. Arguably the most turbulent year of the century, 1968 saw civil rights and anti-war protests and the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King in April and Democratic frontrunner Robert F Kennedy in June – incumbent President Lyndon B Johnson had withdrawn from the race after nearly being beaten in the March New Hampshire primary by anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy. The Democratic convention in Chicago was marked by chaos inside the hall and violence in the streets, and a post-mortem commission urged opening the primary process to wider participation, especially from minorities and women. By 1976, the number of states holding primaries had gone from 16 to 30.
Out of the gates early
The national media, which used to wait until the conventions to focus on the race for delegates, started focusing on the early primaries, which magnified their importance. In 1976, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer, spent months travelling in Iowa and finished a surprising second, which launched his journey to the presidency.
But after Carter was beaten badly in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, Democratic leaders tried to wrest back control of the process by creating what are known as “superdelegates” – members of the party elite and elected officials who were free to support any candidate they chose and to announce their preference at any time. (Other delegates, awarded proportionally according to primary vote totals, were pledged to their candidate for at least the convention’s first ballot.)
The number of superdelegates has varied from 15-20% of the total, but that means 30-40% of what a candidate needed to secure the nomination, so they were incredibly influential. Their influence was curtailed after a 2016 controversy, when they helped tip the scales toward Hillary Clinton in a close race with Bernie Sanders. Starting in 2020, they were not allowed to vote in the first convention ballot.
But as long as there are major political parties, those who lead them will seek to gain as much control over the nominating process as possible. Ironically, party leaders’ goal of ensuring that the few determine outcomes for the many is exactly what happens in both the nominating process and general election. Because the nominating process is so front-loaded, and candidates who do well early are flooded with campaign contributions and free media attention, voters in states with later primaries have little to say about who gets nominated.
Until 2020, California, the most populous state in the nation, held its primary in June, by which time the nominee had effectively been chosen. Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the whitest, least urban states in the US, still exert significant influence over the process in a nation that’s increasingly less white and more urban. Only 14% of Iowa’s 752,000 registered Republicans took part in the 2024 caucus on January 15, and while New Hampshire had a much stronger turnout on January 23, still only 180,000 registered Republicans voted in the open primary. That meant the votes of approximately 8% of America’s 38.8 million registered Republicans effectively chose Donald Trump as the party’s nominee.
The general election, with its winner-takes-all Electoral College system, offers even fewer voters the power to pick the president. Each state is allocated electors based on population, but the candidate who gets the most votes – no matter how slim the margin or how below a majority the total – gets all the electors. This has meant that twice in the 21st century, candidates who got fewer total votes nationally but won the requisite 270 electoral votes became president: George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. That year, a combined 80,000 voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, out of a nationwide total of 136,750,000 – one-half of 1% – made the difference in Trump’s Electoral College win, despite him losing the popular vote by almost three million. And Green Party candidate Jill Stein earned more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory. So if, as many argue, most if not all of her votes would have gone to Clinton, her presence on those three ballots gave the world President Donald Trump.
The nation’s founding fathers didn’t believe in political parties or widespread voting rights, so they didn’t include much in the US Constitution about the process, which left the parties to make them up as they went along, and the result is a system that is accidental and flawed.
We believe in the concept of one person, one vote, but three realities make this belief seriously fallacious. The first is partisan redrawing of US House of Representative districts, which parties in power use to gain overrepresentation in Congress. For example, in North Carolina in 2014, Republicans won 55% of the total votes cast, but because of the maps the Republican state house members had drawn, the party won 10 of 13 seats. The second is the presidential primary process (see evidence above). The third is the Electoral College, which has twice in this young century caused the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency.
Ideas to fix the primary process range from a one-day national primary to a revolving, compressed calendar to have the states take turns at the front of the line. Trump, who has effectively taken over the Republican Party, once shoved the Prime Minister of Montenegro in order to be up front, so don’t hold your breath waiting for him to encourage primary parity.
The parties tinker with their primary rules every four years, but it’s always around the edges, avoiding any significant change. So if they won’t do it, the only solution is a constitutional amendment, which is the world’s most unlikely retrofit. As a result, our current process has us headed for a November rematch that two-thirds of Americans say they don’t want: Biden vs Trump.
It appears the old bromide about democracy, attributed to everyone from French philosopher Joseph de Maistre to Thomas Jefferson to George Bernard Shaw, has it right: People get the government they deserve.
A Primer on Primaries & Delegates
In the nine months prior to the general election, a handful of different kinds of primaries – and their weird caucus cousins – will be held. Here’s a look into the various varieties:
Some primaries are open, meaning voters registered with any party, or no party, can cast their ballots – but only in one of the two main-party primaries. New Hampshire, for example, allows unaffiliated voters to choose which party primary to vote in, while those registered with one party can change their registration and “cross over”. About a dozen states hold open primaries.
Some are closed, meaning that only citizens registered with the relevant major party can vote. In Kentucky, for example, this leaves the state’s unaffiliated voters – 30% of the total – with no say in picking major-party candidates. Approximately 15 states hold closed primaries.
Some are semi-closed, meaning that state law allows the parties to decide whether to allow unaffiliated or registered independent voters to cast ballots in its presidential primary. Some semi-closed primaries allow crossover voting, meaning that one can change one’s party affiliation. That’s one of the rubs – that parties in the same states can conduct different types of primaries. Some states allow voters to change their party affiliation up until the day of the primary, others have earlier deadlines for changing affiliation. Eight states hold semi-closed primaries. Some are semi-open, which generally does not allow unaffiliated voters in, but often voters can check a non-binding party box to allow them to participate.
And then there are caucuses, which are different animals altogether. The most famous caucus is in Iowa, but four other states also use this formerly dominant format to allow voters to express their presidential nominating preference. In caucuses, registered voters within a party gather in a public meeting to argue for their chosen candidate. Initial votes are often public, either by raising hands or gathering in groups. If candidates don’t meet a pre-determined threshold of support, their supporters must choose a different candidate.
But the complications don’t end there. The Democratic Party mandates that delegates – those individuals whose vote at the party convention determines the presidential nominee – be awarded in proportion to the primary vote totals. The Republican Party allows states to decide how to dole out delegates, and most have chosen a winner-takes-all method, where whoever gets the most votes gets all the state’s convention delegates. In a few states, the winning candidate must exceed a threshold, usually 50% of the vote, to win all the delegates, otherwise delegates are awarded proportionally.
The winner-takes-all approach is designed to winnow the field of candidates, which sometimes runs into double digits, as quickly and early as possible. Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t particularly great predictors of who will win their party’s nomination – collectively they’re right about half the time – but because the run up to both is so long, they have historically enabled relative unknowns, like Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton, who finished second in New Hampshire in 1992, to gain visibility and traction on the national stage.
And despite their ranking among the 10 least racially diverse states in the nation, they are quite good at picking presidents, as, until Bill Clinton came along in 1992, no candidate won the presidency without winning either contest. Except sometimes they’re not, as in 2020, when Joe Biden, who first ran for president in 1988, finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, but thanks to a key endorsement from powerful African-American congressman James Clyburn, won the South Carolina primary, which launched him on the road to the White House.
Often, it’s Super Tuesday – a date in late February or early March when more than a dozen states hold their primaries or caucuses and about a third of the delegates needed to be nominated are awarded – that produces clear frontrunners for both parties. And those parties want clear frontrunners as early as possible, for as soon as one emerges, they can stop squabbling among themselves, start bashing the opposition party, and raise the billions of dollars needed to run a viable general election campaign.
Perhaps the most perfect example of today’s disjointed nominating process is what happened in Nevada in early February. Until this year, Nevada – one of a handful of swing states that will decide the general election – had caucuses for both parties. Problems with the Democratic caucus in 2020 caused the governor to mandate primaries for both parties going forward, but the state Republican Party – three of whose top leaders are under criminal indictment for filing false elector documents supporting Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 general election – didn’t want the loss of control that a primary would bring, so they’re holding a caucus anyway. Trump is the only major candidate competing in the caucus, and his challenger, Nikki Haley, is the only major candidate competing in the primary – for which the state is mailing out ballots to all registered voters in addition to offering early and election day in-person voting. But the caucus winner gets the real prize: all of the state’s 26 delegates to the Republican national convention.
