If the restoration of nominating conventions leads to parties selecting candidates who aren’t despised by a majority of voters, it will strengthen democracy.
I completely share Michael’s sentiment about where it appears the upcoming presidential election is headed. Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden should be president — of anything, let alone of the United States of America.
Neither Democrats’ nor Republicans’ actions make sense compared with what they claim to believe, and the results could be disastrous for the country. In addition to the ongoing challenges the country faces, which are significant, it’s impossible to know what new challenges might appear between now and January 2029, when the term of whoever wins in 2024 will conclude. I don’t want Donald Trump or Joe Biden to be the one who has to face them, and most Americans agree with me.
So, as Michael asks, “How can the United States claim to be a functioning democracy when it now regularly produces elections where the candidates are so loathed by such large numbers of the population?” Answer: In the 1970s, political parties decided that they were democratic organizations themselves, rather than hierarchical ones that participate in democracy.
I’ve written it before, as have Charlie and others: Primary elections are terrible. They permit small, highly unrepresentative minorities of the electorate to decide for the entire electorate what the choices are. Perhaps counterintuitively, the solution is to let even smaller, unrepresentative minorities of the electorate make those choices.
We already have the infrastructure in place to make it happen. Make nominating conventions matter again. State parties send delegates to meet and decide on a candidate. Those delegates are selected to represent the Republican voters in that state by party leaders who have the long-term interests of the party in mind. Some of them are yahoos, some of them are sober, but at the nominating convention, they all have to meet together, face-to-face, over a period of a few days and form a majority to select a candidate.
That process may be unrepresentative, but so are primary elections. And rather than being a drawn-out process of arbitrarily ordered statewide elections and caucuses with varying rules over a period of months, all the attention will be on the convention for just a few days, where the decision is made at once. It will no longer be advantageous to spend an absurd amount of time and money campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states that tell us little about the nation at large.
Instead, candidates will have better incentives to explain why they are best suited to win the general election and further the longer-term interests of the party. Large-scale primary campaigning would decrease, since the audience that matters is the delegates at the convention, not all television viewers, radio listeners, and internet users. Parties could save their resources for large-scale campaigning in the general election rather than wasting them on intra-party fights.
Two other nice side effects would result from the elimination of primaries. The campaign season would be shorter because there would no longer be much advantage to blanketing the airwaves or holding big rallies a year ahead of the convention. And it would reduce the size of the consultant-industrial complex, which would no longer have 50 primary elections to work on.
One of the problems inherent to old-time nominating conventions that led to the creation of the primary-election mess was a lack of transparency. But that no longer obtains, as everyone would be able to see exactly what transpires in real time. Any underhanded plots to steal a nomination would be instantly reported on social media and would therefore be unlikely to succeed.
Successful nominating conventions aren’t only ancient political history. The Republican Party of Virginia turned around its record of failure and dysfunction in large part because it nominated Glenn Youngkin for governor at a nominating convention in 2021 rather than holding a primary election. Primary polling showed state senator Amanda Chase — who appeared at the rally before the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and would have been a Doug Mastriano–like candidate in a general election — leading with around 30 percent of the vote, which would have let her win a primary election despite a supermajority of the party opposing her. The Virginia GOP opted for a convention instead, which Youngkin won, and he defeated Terry McAuliffe in the general election with Republicans taking control of the lower house of the state legislature as well. In office, Youngkin has consistently maintained an approval rating above 50 percent and is far better liked by Virginians than either Biden or Trump.
The internal processes of political parties should not be democratic exercises. Democracy is for the general election. To nominate a candidate on behalf of a political party, you should have to demonstrate more commitment to the party as an organization than simply being a registered voter. And if the restoration of proper nominating conventions leads to parties selecting candidates who aren’t despised by a majority of the electorate, as the incentives suggest would happen, it will strengthen democracy by increasing overall satisfaction with the candidates that voters get to choose between on Election Day.