How Did We Choose Our President? – a Look at America's Weird Primary and Caucus System
By P.J. O'Rourke
While some voters in the 2016 presidential election were satisfied with one or the other of the major party candidates who were picked to run, few of us were satisfied with the way they were picked.
America's political primary and caucus system, at its best, seems strange and confusing. At its worst, it seems opaque, conflicted, exclusionary, and unfair.
It's interesting to look at how we acquired this peculiar method of selecting the only two people who will have a real chance to be president.
The Democratic and Republican parties may think they are integral parts of the U.S. government. But in fact, they're private organizations with no more Constitutional standing than motorcycle gangs.
Maybe some day in the future, we'll select our two major presidential candidates with fists, chains, and knives in the parking lots of biker bars. In which case, expect either Leadhead Eddie of the Bandidos or Gypsy Joker member Bob the Beef to occupy the Oval Office.
For the time being, however, we've got a dumber way of picking who'll run for president. This involves "primaries" and "caucuses." Both Democrats and Republicans have them in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
(Although until 1961, people who lived in D.C. were considered to be overexposed to the debilitating effects of political radiation and therefore not competent to vote.)
Democrats and Republicans also have primaries and caucuses in American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas to make sure that residents of U.S. territories who don't get to vote in presidential elections have a say in who they don't get to vote for.
The primaries and caucuses have different rules depending on your location. It's like a baseball game where if you're on first base, you're supposed to dunk the ball through the net… if you're on second base, you're supposed to knock the puck past the goalie… and if you're on third base, you're supposed to kick a field goal.
Primaries are make-believe voting. You have an election, but instead of electing a candidate, you elect a candidate for election.
Caucuses are coffee klatches for people who need to find a bingo game.
State and territorial primaries and caucuses take place at different times. Each is scheduled to be either so early that who you vote for doesn't matter or so late that it doesn't matter who you vote for.
Who's in charge of this process? Nobody. Because that's who's in charge of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The Democratic and Republican national organizations aren't in charge because they're run by the Democratic and Republican Party state organizations who aren't in charge because they're run by the Democratic and Republican Party county organizations.
There are 3,143 counties in the United States. The Republican Party County Chairman is a retired Dairy Queen franchisee in doubleknit slacks with a white vinyl belt and matching shoes, and the Democratic Party County Chairman is a woman who owns 19 cats.
The reason American political parties have no constitutional standing is that the framers of the Constitution hoped America would have no political parties.
In Federalist Paper No. 9, Alexander Hamilton declares "domestic faction" to be "the cause of incurable disorder and imbecility in the government."
In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison inveighs against "the violence of faction," calls it a "dangerous vice," and warns that "the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties."
However, even in 1788, most Americans weren't listening to Hamilton and Madison, and neither were Hamilton and Madison.
Alexander Hamilton would go on to form the Federalist Party. And James Madison would co-found the Democratic-Republican Party with Thomas Jefferson, who had also claimed to oppose political parties.
In a 1789 letter to his friend and fellow Declaration of Independence signer Francis Hopkinson, Jefferson wrote: "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
George Washington detested political parties and didn't belong to one. But by the end of his second term, a recognizably modern "two-party system" had taken hold.
This caused George – by solemn Father-of-His-Country standards – to burst a seam. In his 1796 Farewell Address, the first president said:
Let me now... warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.... The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension... is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual...
So, if we were guided by the thoughts of wise men – or of men while they were temporarily being wise – America shouldn't have any political parties. And we'd be spared discussion of primaries, caucuses, and other ridiculous methods by which Democrats and Republicans choose their electoral candidates such as rummaging through the partisan trash to pick superdelegates and delegates-at-large.
America shouldn't have any political parties, and funnily enough, America doesn't. At least, we don't have any "political parties" in a way that most people in most of the world would understand.
Thirty-five years ago, I was in the Soviet Union where I became friendly with a reporter from Pravda. Friendly enough that I admitted my admiration for Ronald Reagan.
One night the Pravda reporter and I were in a Moscow bar talking about Reagan and Brezhnev. The reporter said, "You are Republican?" I said yes. The reporter leaned in close, lowered his voice, and asked, "Are you Party Member?"
In America, you don't join a political party. It tries to join you.
You don't pay "dues" unless you want to. I suppose you could be a card-carrying Republican or Democrat, if you got the card printed yourself. There's no such thing as "party discipline," as Bernie Sanders showed. And as Donald Trump proved, you can't get kicked out of an American political party no matter what you say.
No major American political party has ever had a real ideology. The parties usually don't even have more than one or two ideas.
In America, we've got two vague political tendencies. One tendency is to favor a larger, more powerful government to make things better. The other tendency is to favor a smaller, more limited government to make things less worse.
Recently, we've seen a lot of partisan political rancor. But at other times, it can be hard to tell American political parties apart.
I once had a Marxist British journalist friend. Back in the '70s, he remarked, "You Americans have a one-party system, and just like Americans, you have two of them."
The fact that usually a major American political party claims to be conservative, while usually its opposite number claims to be otherwise, does not necessarily make distinction easier.
For example, in the early days of the republic, the supposedly conservative Federalists were for a great big federal government and an international alliance with Britain. The supposedly liberal Democratic-Republicans had a platform that sounded like George Wallace's – States Rights and Fortress America.
Our political parties were despised to begin with and were given, by law, the role in government that they deserve, which is none.
The parties themselves are a mulligan stew of political leftovers. No wonder the process by which they select their presidential candidates is a disgusting muddle.
Things didn't used to be better. Until the 1830s, a presidential candidate was customarily selected by a political party's congressional delegation.
We can imagine the insider deals hatched in the era's smoke- (or rather, snuff-) filled rooms. The Senate was not directly elected, and the general franchise was severely limited. Voters had about as much say in choosing the presidential nominee as you have in choosing your airline seat when using frequent flyer miles to travel on a holiday weekend.
Nominating conventions were thought to be a more democratic alternative. The first presidential nominating convention was held in 1831 by the Anti-Masonic Party. They were adamantly opposed to Shriners in miniature cars driving around in circus parades. Or something.
And that pretty much set the tone for wisdom and intelligence at national political party conventions for the next 70 years.
State and local party bosses quickly took control of the conventions. To wield political influence, you no longer had to be a crooked elected official, just being crooked would do.
Of course, there's nothing that can't be made worse by reform. Reformers of the Progressive Era took aim at the conventions, seeking to replace them with some type of referendum – a preliminary vote (a "primary") or a public committee meeting (a "caucus") – where ordinary citizens would select convention delegates.
In 1901, the first state law to create a presidential primary was enacted in, of all places, Florida, which was, then as now... how else to put it?... Florida.
The practice of holding primaries or caucuses spread to everyplace like a flutter of hanging chads shaken loose from a Palm Beach County tampered ballot.
In 2016, congressional delegations were as ineffectual in the nomination process as they were in Congress. The conventions were simply bad TV commercials, the kind that don't send you to the phone to buy the product, they send you to the phone to call the Better Business Bureau.
And the electorate, as a whole, might as well have been monkeys throwing darts at front pages of the National Enquirer and FBI "Wanted" posters.
Only a little more than a quarter of eligible voters cast ballots in Democratic or Republican primaries and caucuses. More than half of the Republicans and nearly half of the Democrats supported candidates other than the two we got.
According to figures from the New York Times, just 14% of the people who are entitled to vote gave us Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke