How to fix presidential primaries

Some lessons from the 2024 good vibes non-primary

A number of smart people have recently suggested that while Joe Biden did the right thing in dropping out of the race, the really right thing would have been to disavow any intention of running for a second term back in early 2023 so that Democrats could have a proper primary campaign.

In a sense, I agree with that.

The choice of nominee is a big deal, and it seems like it should be decided through some kind of competitive process rather than super-rapid insider consolidation. That’s particularly true in this case, because the insiders clearly just consolidated around Kamala Harris to solve a coordination problem. Her job approval and favorability ratings were bad on the day she took over, and she’s not particularly well-regarded by any faction of the party. What true smoke-filled rooms fans wanted was something like a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket that would optimize for electability while still being extremely mainstream. There’s just no way to shove aside the incumbent vice president in a backroom deal, though. So we get Harris, who was clearly a stronger choice than the incumbent, and party unity. But in a way, that feels arbitrary and weird and not really like the selection of the best woman for the job.

At the same time, I think the people raising this criticism of Biden or the Democratic Party writ large are not thinking in detail about the reality of an open primary.

There are really big advantages to avoiding a situation in which Democrats spend 12 months and tens of millions of dollars making the factions hate each other. Most partisan races in the United States are not especially competitive, so the existence of rock 'em sock 'em primary brawls is an integral aspect of democracy and open electoral competition. But the parties do try to avoid those kinds of contests in the relatively small number of critical frontline races, because it’s a very costly way to select a nominee.

Every presidential race is competitive, though, and because there’s only one presidential election for the whole country (compared to five different statewide elected offices in Michigan), there are always multiple plausible contenders. Beyond that, running for president and losing can be good for your career (ask Pete Buttigieg) in a way that’s not true for most offices. So parties tend to saddle themselves with long, crowded primaries that involve donors, activists, media figures, and influencers wasting their time and energy making the party look bad.

It’s worth thinking about ways to dramatically improve on that and capture the virtues of the rapid Harris rollout without engaging in trolly wish-casting for the smoke-filled rooms of yore.

A 2024 Democratic primary would’ve been bad

Imagine if Joe Biden had come out after the 2022 midterms, congratulated Senate Democrats on their strong performance, said that he felt great and excited to serve for two more years, but that it didn’t make sense for him to ask the American people to count on him to serve for six more years, so he was going to focus on finishing the job of stabilizing the economy and winning the war in Ukraine.

From a vibes standpoint, everyone would be much happier with Biden than they were here on Earth Prime.

But then the questions begin. Does he endorse Harris? Almost certainly yes, because to do otherwise would raise questions about his own judgment. Biden is also close with a lot of African-American elected officials, who would probably endorse Harris and encourage him to do likewise.

The upshot is that Harris enters the open primary as a strong favorite. She leads in name recognition, she is viewed favorably by most Democrats, she has the endorsement of Biden and some other prominent Democrats — all the factors that got her the nomination would be working in her favor. Except with an open field, she’d almost certainly face a challenger on the left who’d call for a “climate emergency,” the reversal of Biden’s asylum crackdown, an arms embargo, and other left-wing positions. It’s doubtful that Harris would race all the way to the left on this stuff, but on issues like the fracking ban, where Real-World Harris has moved to the center, Alternate Harris would face more pressure to stay where she was. All the old leftist critiques of her time as a prosecutor would come back to front and center, so instead of portraying herself as a crimefighter, she’d have been back in the 2020 vise where she’s apologizing for her record. Various progressive interest groups that have flocked to her banner would have held out the primary contest as leverage, forcing her to either avoid saying or doing things that appeal to swing voters or else drive up her negatives with her own base using an overstated case against her.

The little mini-fight over potentially not renewing Lina Khan as FTC chair would play out across dozens and dozens of issues, with any possible choice made on any issue generating bad press and ill will. Harris would also have faced critics and skepticism on identity grounds, which would have been met with defensiveness and identity politics. After a year-long slog, a huge amount of money would have been spent on field offices and advertising in early primary states, and there would have been months of name-calling and ugly fights on social media and endless rehashing of every gaffe Harris has ever committed. Harris would almost certainly have emerged as the nominee anyway. Except Alternate Harris would be both much more hated on the left (because she would have spent months fighting with their champion) and also further left on the issues (because she would have ceded ground to the groups to retain support).

There’s a myth that Bernie Sanders voters “staying home” somehow cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election. That’s not true, and there’s no evidence for it. What is true is that the long primary campaign cost Clinton money that was therefore unavailable for general election ads, drove up her negatives (because she took a lot of shots on integrity from the left), and also caused her to position herself to Obama’s left on a number of issues, which was a poor fit for the public mood at the time.

In 2020, Democrats mostly got a better primary outcome in the sense that the field mostly attacked each other (remember the snake emojis) rather than Biden, who in turn didn’t adopt many unwise left-wing positions (but there was the deportation moratorium and no more drilling on public lands). But there was never a real opportunity to air what turned out to be the central problem with Biden, which is that he was just too old and we’d have been better off swapping in a broadly Biden-like figure who just wasn’t Joe Biden.

Democrats have a good system on paper

It’s interesting to me that on paper, Democrats actually have a system in place that seems like it should be good.

The key thing is that in the post-1968 reforms that moved the party to relying overwhelmingly on primaries to determine the composition of the Democratic National Convention, the primaries are set up to be proportional. Proportionality has a few good attributes. The main one is that in proportional systems, all the different actors are incentivized to stay mostly positive. What you are trying to do is maximize your own share of the vote, not minimize someone else’s, so it doesn’t pay to expend a lot of effort on tearing someone else down. The secondary virtue is that in a proportional system you normally don’t expect anyone to win a majority. In countries with proportional elections for parliament, public opinion and voting behavior is a really big deal. But post-election strategic bargaining among elites is also a big deal.

And that’s good, because compromise and bargaining are integral aspects of politics, but not really something that can be done by the broad electorate.

Democrats then wisely decreed that the convention, though mostly composed of delegates elected in proportional primaries, would be rounded out by elected officials (“superdelegates”) who are unpledged and automatically credentialed. That way, when the bargaining starts, people with expertise and skin in the game can play a role.

The problem with the system is it’s never come close to working that way. Instead, every extended primary we’ve ever had has been a two-person race. That’s meant tons of negativity and ill will. It also means that the role of superdelegates came to be seen as potentially overturning the results of the popular will. Democrats tweaked the rules in the most recent cycle to say that superdelegates get to vote if and only if no candidate has a majority on the first ballot. That’s a smart change. The role of the superdelegates is to facilitate bargaining. If someone just wins, there’s no need.

What’s weird is that this bargaining scenario has never arisen.

Despite the formally proportional nature of the primaries, the press treats the early states as if they are plurality-winner contests in which it’s important to ask “who won Iowa?” And then there is a kind of collective social and cultural hallucination around the early primaries, such that if a candidate doesn’t do well enough, they come under intense pressure to drop out.

The case for a national primary

The obvious answer here is to end the practice of state-by-state primaries and hold a single national vote.

The staggered primary arose by accident and undermined the other virtues of the system. Back in the day, when most states did not select their delegates at a primary, they nonetheless had primary elections for state offices. Those primaries were held on different days because there was no reason for uniformity. Then, some states started allocating delegates to the national convention on the normal primary days. Primaries for convention delegates got a bit more popular over time, and people got used to the staggered schedule. Then, after 1968, it became conventional wisdom that everyone should use primaries. So we ended up with a national staggered primary.

And it’s been troublesome ever since, because the staggered schedule interacts with informal winnowing norms to greatly exaggerate the importance of the early states.

Worse, though, because the winnowing norms themselves are a little arbitrary and unclear, it hands a lot of power over the nominating process to the media. The solution to many of our problems is to just do a simple national proportional primary. If someone turns in a dominating performance, she’ll lock up a majority of the delegates and that’s the end. If the field is fractured, then it will go to the convention and people will need to bargain. If you look at where the polling was before voting started in the 2020 primary, you’d expect a national vote to create a situation where Biden, Sanders, and Warren all enter the convention with large blocs of delegates, and then there’s a bunch of smaller players.

Maybe all the non-Bernie, non-Warren candidates get together and tell Biden they will support him, but he needs to make a one-term pledge and select a VP they are comfortable running in 2028. Or maybe Biden and Bernie strike some kind of deal. Or maybe (as used to sometimes happen in the old days of smoke-filled rooms) the convention would deadlock and some dark horse would rise to the fore.

The important part is that the public campaigning would be mostly positive, with each contender focused on maximizing his vote-share rather than tearing down an opponent. The nasty part would happen faster, more quietly, and with less public scrutiny as the delegates try to work something out. Because you have actual bargaining at this point rather than public posturing, someone like Bernie — who has a lot of support but clearly not a majority — has an incentive to decide what he actually cares about and wants to prioritize. And people who say they care about electability can actually look at the different choices in an analytic way rather than bandwagoning in an arbitrary way.

Make it cheap

A better voting procedure would go a long way to improving primaries. But the other great thing about the 2024 non-primary is that nobody spent tens of millions of dollars on it.

The solution here is simple: Because it’s a question of internal party procedure, Democrats can just adopt stricter spending limits than the Supreme Court will allow for general elections. Candidates should have to abide by strict limits on fundraising and spending to qualify for the primary. The main institutional actors in the Democratic Party — labor unions, environmental groups, etc. — should agree that they will consider endorsing candidates but won’t spend money on the race. The party probably can’t write a rule that formally prohibits the “independent” SuperPAC schtick, but they should be able to heavily discourage it by saying any candidate who gets that kind of backing will be excluded from debates, given bad ballot placement, etc. Beyond the formal rules, though, the idea would be to create a kind of informal norm that if you work for a primary SuperPAC as an operative, you’ll never work in this town again. Donating to something like that should be heavily stigmatized.

The idea behind the early primary states was that lesser-known politicians could compete there on the basis of retail politics rather than big-money fundraising.

Retail politics is kind of dead these days. But we’re seeing with the Kamala Harris VP auditions that you certainly can perform extensively for a national audience of political junkies without spending much money. Candidates could go on television, make memes about themselves on social media, give interviews to writers, appear on podcasts, and otherwise make the case for themselves without spending a ton of money. We’d vote. We’d have a few weeks between the vote and the convention. And then we’d emerge relatively quickly and painlessly with a ticket people can feel excited about.