One big advantage of the Harris coronation that can't be replicated is the element of surprise. The American system is so drawn-out and public that the opposition is always prepared, but this time the Republicans seem to have been caught completely flat-footed, especially with it coming days after the Vance nomination.
It's not something you could do more than once and they'll get their bearings and find good attacks before the election, but it was sure nice to watch them flail and panic when they realised it wouldn't be Biden and they weren't prepared.
The fact that their campaign did not have an entire file on Harris ready to go the moment she became the presumptive nominee, complete with ad scripts ready to film, websites ready to be turned on, etc, shows how little of the institutional memory of the old GOP they retain.
(For Republicans, field testing attacks mainly consists of Trump trying out new lines in his campaigns and sticking with the ones that energize his audience the most.)
I’m not sure if this is really a fair critique to level at Vance. The biggest memetic hit against him (viz., the couch thing) was literally a fabrication.
I honestly think the cat ladies thing is the Democrats trying to make fetch happen. *This* tongue in cheek statement about an opposing political party—which is totally consistent with the general Republican “family values, motherhood, and apple pie” vibe— is the worst you can come up with in your oppo research? When one of the most prominent mainstream Democratic bloggers (viz. Matt) himself wrote a book that’s in part about how America would benefit from being pronatalist? It’s a memetic Schelling point, I guess, but it’s not much of one.
I mean, consider that Vance’s running mate is the same guy who proudly announced his fondness for ‘grabbing women by the p***y’. I get that Democrats may think there’s only so much mileage they can get out of that considering the prominence of the statement, but it’s like complaining about a mild breeze compared to a hurricane.
I will certainly grant that polling may prove me wrong here—in which case this complaint should be ignored—but my present take is that if this is the best arrow in your quiver, your quiver sucks.
“This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.
“The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
Most opp research is just detailed google searches. Gum leather opp research (eg finding Ws old DUI conviction) is often times most effective if released right before people vote, there’s always plenty of time for that.
One thing that this whole situation has further convinced me of is that we'd all be much happier and better off with a shorter campaign season. I do think a large chunk of voters were basically like, "ugh, these two guys again for the next two years?" more or less immediately after the 2022 mid-terms.
When you work on a campaign and talk to voters, the number one thing that comes through to me is just sheer fatigue by the time the election rolls around. I've literally had people tell me, "Yeah, I am voting for your guy, but if I get one more call from you people I'm not voting at all". Maybe they were lying, and maybe not, but ether way, normal people just do NOT want to be thinking about electoral politics this often and for so long.
This is also a major reason people don't give money to campaigns. They don't want to be harassed interminably for more money and to be even more frequently told to be alarmed about the emergency about what the other side is doing.
It's almost oddly reassuring that the two parties have an identical structural problem here in the long primary and took a sort of pass on executive competence to quickly get ready for the general election. Suggests there are things beyond ideological polarization for explaining party decisions, which is good.
Remember when every single candidate raised their hand to give Medicare to illegal immigrants? I literally gasped when that happened. They are lucky they ran against DJT.
particularly because it was 2020, the threat of another Trump term was staring everyone in the face, and the candidates were fiercely competing with each other over left-wing policy schemes that had zero chance of occurring and didn't address the bull in the china shop.
I just feel like the agreement to avoid spending money would never happen. You'd get one group saying "all's fair in love and politics" and break the rules, then some other group would protest that "they did it first" and then you're done.
A national primary would be ideal (I've also seen proposals for four regional primaries spaced a month apart, which isn't as good but far better than the current system). The single best switch though would be *approval* voting. This allows you to signal that you're okay with a candidate without having to worry about wasting your vote. Plus it would highlight when someone's support is rabid but not strong across different factions (Bernie) thus sending out a warning about electability.
Another big worry with the superpac ban is that the political ecosystem depends on those organizations for jobs. So people might just says screw it, I’m not working without it, might as well just stay on ship
I can see this going either way. If there’s a real norm that working in a primary superpac means you never work in a general election campaign or pac, then careerism means people don’t do it as long as the latter are more important employers than the former - but it could suddenly undergo a phase transition where it switches the other way.
The SuperPAC limitation is challenging. They're by law independent organizations, so any party saying they'll "blacklist" SuperPAC employees runs right into illegal election funding coordination and possibly even antitrust issues.
It would do the Democratic party no good for a judge to rule that the SuperPACs on their side of the race that coordinated can't spend like the other side, or deal with an employment antitrust lawsuit from someone with a personal grudge who can't get a job, while the party candidates are also campaigning for broadly more antitrust enforcement.
If the “keep it cheap” norm broke, a national primary would quickly become a fundraising contest where candidates would whore themselves to PACs in order to build name recognition.
I also wonder if it cedes too much control to bad actors. If the RNC/Trump/Elon Musk wants to run anti-Hilary ads because they think Bernie is more beatable, they could dominate the airwaves.
I think the thing that has most soured me on primaries has been the explosion of number of candidates in 16 on the GOP and 20 on the left.
It’s anti-coherent trying to really sort 10 or more candidates who believe similar but not identical things and I mean the core of it usually comes just to a sort of who seems likable. And in this place there’s a kind of reason to appeal to the parties’ unrestrained ids.
Approval voting is probably OK, but the reason why it doesn't do that much in practice is that it's quite cognitively challenging across a large field. Quick, think of the 2020 Democratic candidates- what's your personal cutoff for who you'd approve of and who you wouldn't? There's over a dozen candidates, so it requires some thought as to who you'd approve and who you wouldn't, right? Then keep doing that at every stage of a state-by-state primary- now some of the candidates have dropped out after Iowa, who you'd approve then probably changes, right? Then after New Hampshire, now more have dropped out, who you'd approve probably changes again, no?
If you have a favorite candidate, then 'approving' anyone else reduces his/her odds of winning a bit. So AV degenerates into bullet voting, where technically you're allowed to approve multiple candidates, but in practice you only vote for 1
I've actually thought about this a lot, and I have totally the opposite philosophy. If my vote had mattered in 2020 (Biden was solidly ahead by the time he got to my state), my votes would've been Booker, Klobuchar, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Inslee, with a maybe on Gillibrand, Harris, Castro (all three were gone before NH but probably would've stayed in in such a paradigm). It gives my stamp to the moderates that I'd want to see duking it out, plus Warren whose ideas were formulated a lot better than Bernie's IMHO and Inslee who was never winning but whose focus on climate change was worth more attention.
But really, it's about how you approach it. If you're a Bernie or Bust voter, then only vote for Bernie. I would look at it this way: if you can't convince >40% of the Democratic primary electorate to agree that you're a viable candidate, should you really be the nominee?
But how many voters truly had the long tail of candidates in consideration? Seems fairly telling that Bennet is not in that list, in spite of him a part of the moderate crew. It's just entirely impractical for average voters to truly put that level of thought into their ballot, hence why approval degenerates to bullet voting.
My proposal would be for the states before super tuesday to do approval with a 60% threshold to eliminate any factional candidates and then switch to either the proposed solution above or ranked choice.
This is one reason I don’t like ranked-choice voting. The chaos of the voting process attracts a dozen also-rans (like primaries, they usually all belong to the same party) and it’s our duty as voters to either 1) figure out which ones are the serious candidates, and ignore the rest or 2) learn everything about every candidate’s position on everything.
Almost nobody has the patience to do #2, and even #1 is a lot to remember for the average voter.
I really like the idea of ranked choice voting in a national primary, particularly if limited to 1-2-3 ranking. It avoids the back-room dealing during the convention (and I think Matt underestimates how deeply voters would hate that), and it's a perfect example where knowing people's 2nd choice is useful. There will be candidates with small, passionate support (like Bernie) who may struggle to rise above their natural threshold, while someone who is everyone's second choice might generate less passion in a primary, but be even more electable.
As a side benefit, it would make life much more difficult for Trump-like candidates.
My bugbear for years has been that all of the attempts to come up with eligibility criteria for debates have skirted around the edges with stuff like funding and opinion polls rather than come straight out and say it: the democratic nomination is going to be won by a democratic politician. If you're not one of:
- a statewide office holder
- a current or former member of the cabinet
- a member of congressional leadership
(or you weren't elected to those on a Democratic ticket)
then you have no business on that stage. Even in 2020 that'd only have been 14 candidates, including the ones that dropped out before Iowa. That's still a big field, but a lot of the wasted time was on gadflies like Bloomberg, Steyer, Yang, and Williamson.
Maybe you can argue for some red-state friendly rule where you allow the highest elected democratic official from any state run, but honestly that's basically the Buttigieg rule, and despite my liking him he's really the problem here - the presidential primary is not a vehicle for boosting your profile.
>Does he endorse Harris? Almost certainly yes, because to do otherwise would raise questions about his own judgment.<
No doubt Matt's correct about this...except....is there a way to thread the needle? Faced with such a situation, could Joe Biden have endorsed Harris's ability to do the job of President of the United States while explicitly and formally remaining neutral with respect to the nomination? Something like: "I wouldn't have chosen Kamala Harris as running mate if I weren't 100% confident she would make an outstanding president. But because I don't think this office should put a thumb on the scales, and because I want the nomination process to be as fair and as open as possible, I will not be endorsing any candidate for president at this time. Let Democrats throughout this great land decide."
Obviously moot now. And so we'll never know. And maybe the above would in any event have been interpreted as an endorsement.
I think that only works if it becomes the norm/pattern. If you're the first person to do it, it sure reads like "I can't endorse the person I really want, so I'm going to make this wishy-washy statement".
Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with factual reporting. But the VP's stature, combined with the words of praise from Biden, would likely ensure she's nonetheless be in a strong position to secure the nomination (just less of a lock).
Also remember that Obama, who probably has way more clout amongst Dem voters, would have almost certainly stayed neutral until a candidate won the primary. That was his policy this year too but he eventually endorsed Harris once it became definitively clear that no on was going to challenge her.
I also think Pelosi would have stayed neutral, as she was in favor of a competitive contest when Biden dropped out
Agree with both of these. How about also stipulating that a candidate needs to get a certain number of house or senate members to nominate them to stand? Surely reasonable to insist that you can get (say) an eighth of the congressional caucus to nominate you, if you're running to lead the federal party
I like this or any sort of rules to make a barrier or step for entry. Another simple rule for both parties could be something like a rule saying you must have ALREADY won an election AS A DEMOCRAT (or Republican) in a district or state of X amount of people. This would have easily (1) eliminated Trump or any other person who thinks their first election should be for president and (2) prevent B. Sanders and the like from switching between party labels whenever it suits them. I can’t believe these rules weren’t in place.
It's an online trivia league that you need a referral to join.
During the 25 or so days of a competition, you get sent 6 questions, you have to answer them without cheating (looking on the internet or asking anyone else - pure honor system, though apparently they have given lifetime bans when they have discovered individuals cheating), and then you assign how many points each question is worth for that day's opponent. Over the course of the competition, whoever wins the most head-to-head matches wins the league.
In between the main competitions, there are one-day contests, where someone has submitted 12 questions on a theme. Today, one of the one-day contests involved identifying famous people that have lived in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
(For anyone reading this that wants to join, I just got an e-mail reminder that I can make referrals to join the waitlist.)
Republicans wouldn't want to adopt such a rule (even if it would have stopped Trump in 2016) because their brand for the past couple decades has leaned so heavily into the theory that prior political experience is actively disqualifying for running for public office. (That said, I have thought that it might be possible to get Republicans to adopt a rule that someone has to have been a registered Republican for at least 10 years before running for the GOP ticket for President, which also would have disqualified Trump in 2016.)
This is also roughly how the UK Labor Party works. You need the endorsement of a certain number of MPs to be a candidate for the party leadership. Candidates are then put to a vote of regular party members.
Yes, the media over-rotates on ‘who won’ - but maybe there’s still some benefit to having that…the drama of the scoreboard gets people interested in the process in the same way debates do…without necessarily proving anything about governing.
And don’t you want to give candidates a chance to evolve and grow into the job of being a campaigner & candidate (and vice versa)? Doesn’t a primary season demonstrate a candidate’s organizational leadership and messaging skills? A one shot primary would have given us Hillary in 2008 instead of Obama.
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter took some getting used to. George Bush demonstrated early primary strength that put him on the Reagan ticket in 1980. Hell, Jed Bartlet emerged after a surprising 3rd place showing in Texas, remember? Then we have examples of candidates who sound good in theory, but who don’t live up to their hype after they join the fray - Fred Thompson, Wesley Clark, dare I say Kamala Harris(?) - it was good the process winnowed them. With a national primary nobody ever drops out - and I’m not sure that’s good.
I like the idea of shortening the primary season into fewer voting days - but maybe more realistic would be diversifying the early primaries so that the first isn’t just New Hampshire, but NH, plus a rust belt state plus a southern state plus a western state. Then vote day two is a month later and includes two states from each region. And so on…
Had there been a national primary, Clinton almost certainly would have easily won the nomination in 2008. It's possible that Obama wouldn't have even run.
If I remember my history, I believe it was Matthew Santos’s surprise showing in New Hampshire that propelled him to eventual nomination. Jed Bartlet did well enough in South Carolina to survive until Illinois, which led to him becoming our President.
"NH, plus a rust belt state plus a southern state plus a western state" -- this mirrors the Iowa / New Hampshire / Nevada / South Carolina "first four" that came into being a few cycles ago.
Yeah, I had hoped that these four could evolve into a coordinated same-day "Round 1" primary day (maybe add Michigan or something to it, so at least one large metro area is included). But NH seems dead set on preventing that from happening.
New Hampshire politicians will never allow "New Hampshire plus", so if you are going to propose devaluing New Hampshire, you probably have to destroy New Hampshire anyway and risk the general election hit.
Biden already gutted IA / NH in this year's rules. Those rules are the starting point for 2028.
It helped that Biden was the first Democratic president since LBJ to owe nothing, nothing at all, zip zero nada, to the Iowa Caucus and New HAmpshire FITN primary.
He gutted Iowa but New Hampshire totally gutted and fileted Biden in that fight. They still held their primary and the media still.went there and treated it as important, and Biden then chickened out of any attempt to truly punish them.
It would probably require lawsuits, court injunctions, and tons of hardball to prevent NH from holding a primary, with all the pundits talking about how it concedes a swing state in the general.
Isn't the simplest solution for the Democratic party to say that anyone on a ballot that doesn't follow the rules of the party cannot be a member of the party and will not be listed on any ballot as a Democrat thereafter?
They could do that. But they'd still have to sue New Hampshire.
NH's basic long term plan is this: if the parties ever crack down, they will contend they are just holding a straw poll and any state has the right to do that. And THEY can put anyone they want on their ballot no matter what parties say because taking a poll is just free speech.
And the media will still cover New Hampshire because the media loves New Hampshire (it's really cheap to go up there from Washington and retail politics is more interesting content-wise than stump speeches). Which means the "winner of the New Hampshire primary" will still be a thing in the discourse.
So you actually have to stop them from having the primary entirely, even as a "nonbinding straw poll". And that very likely requires litigation against the state and the willingness to call NH politicians' bluffs that it will hurt Dems in a swing state in the general election.
I don't think they would have to sue New Hampshire. They key is for the candidates to not go there and participate. Media will cover it some, but if none of the candidates are there, there is no retail politics and it will fade away because without that, its meaningless.
1. "the media still.went there and treated it as important" That's not how I remember it. The only people who treated it as important were the NH Dems who organized a last-minute campaign to get people to write in Bidens' name. Because they were about to be a national laughingstock if Dean Phillips or MAriane Williamson or RFK Jr "won" the NH primary.
2. "Biden chickened out of any attempt to truly punish them" Because they bent the knee, discarded the results of the noncompliant primaries and ran compliant delegate selection events.
3. NH can hold a primary. That doesn't obligate the Democratic NAtional Convention to seat those delegates, and it doesn't obligate anyone to care about the results. The NH FITN primary is, in all likelihood, going the way of the GOP Iowa Straw Poll, as the major candidates choose to downplay it rather than risk an unnecessary loss.
Yeah, surprised Matt didn't go into the coordination/legal challenges of getting all states to host a Democratic primary on the same day. All 50 state legislatures--Blue, Red, Purple, NH, Iowa etc--are going to agree to having a primary for the Dems on a given date chosen by the DNC chair?
So the actual answer is that the Democrats could fund it themselves and hold it, and bar anyone from seating any delegates any other way, and if the Dems did that most of the states (but not New Hampshire) would quickly come on board.
New Hampshire, though, is going to fight hard against any system that doesn't have them going first. You literally have to decide "we're going to invest a ton of money and time and effort into royally screwing New Hampshire over and we won't cave even though they are a general election swing state". It probably requires the Party to sue the state and literally seek to prevent them from holding any election that advertises itself as a Democratic Primary.
"So the actual answer is that the Democrats could fund it themselves"
Even ignoring New Hampshire, this is easier said then done. If you want voting to be done the traditional way, state-run elections typically cost the taxpayer around $1-10 per registered voter, per election, which would add up to hundreds of millions of dollars, scaled across the entire country. If the party were to bear that cost themselves, that would amount way too much spent spent on election administration that would be better spent actual campaigning.
You could probably run an election much cheaper if it were held online, without polling places/mail ballots/voting booths/etc. But, that has its own problems. How do you make sure that only registered voters can vote, and that nobody can vote more than once? It's not like every registered voter has a digital account with the Democratic party, and asking voters to create one would create difficulties in ensuring that each account actually represents a unique human individual who is actually eligible to vote, not to mention effectively excluding non-tech-savvy people from the voting process.
I just don't think a party-funded election, completely separate from the state-run election apparatus, is actually feasible.
My claim is that once the Democratic Party demonstrated seriousness on that, it wouldn't end up having to pay all the costs because states would realize they had no choice but to sign on. So it's something of a bluff actually.
Maybe, but I'm skeptical. I could see blue states getting on board, but I think states controlled by Republicans would be all too happy to call the bluff.
Yeah, I think Matt has previously written that moderate DC-outsiders make for very successful candidates: Carter, Reagan (not sure how moderate he was as candidate), Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump.
These seem like people who would have struggled with both A) a short primary, given their lower national profile at the start and B) consolidating power at a brokered convention, due to having less deep and long ties to the national party. You'd probably end up with more 3rd or 4th term senators.
This is why I'm really torn on this issue. A longer primary season does mean that the candidate that emerges needs to have more lasting power. A single-day primary makes it easier to consolidate around a known front-runner, and probably makes it easier for a well-funded dark horse, but it probably challenges middle tier politicians who may have the juice but need some time to demonstrate it.
At the same time, Matt's point about the way this hands the reins to the media horserace and the Groups is spot on and the consolidation around Harris (and the focus on electable VPs) has been refreshing. No competing whitepapers for left wing policies that will never pass! Thank goodness
Something that seems obvious to me but that I never see anyone else comment in is that we do general elections and primary elections in the wrong order. We go from specific (choose who represents the party) to general (choose which party wins the presidency) when most selection processes in day-to-day life go from general to specific. I expect that's always going to lead to weird results.
Consider Parliamentary democracies. In theory you are just voting for a party, and afterwards the party will choose who its leader will be. In practice, the party makes as part of its campaign platform, "This is who the leader will be," because people like to know that. The difference is that the party isn't committed to keeping that leader through their whole term in government. Look at the succession of PMs the British had before their most recent election. Sunak was selected by the party, not the voters.
I’ve been banging on the ‘Constitutional Convention 3.0’ drum for a while. I will add your great idea to the list of reforms to be reviewed when we convene…
Others include: nuking the Electoral College, the Senate, and possibly the whole concept of ‘states’ as well…plus Jonah Goldberg’s idea which is to simply make it a little bit easier to change the Constitution.
I'm sure everybody's got a ton of ideas about what they would do if they Quantum Lept into James Madison, I'm no different. This one's just something I've been mulling over since 2016 and I don't think I've ever seen anyone really give a case for or against it.
A constitutional convention raises the issue I warn students of when they ask for a re-grade: the grade might get better but it might get worse. Our system isn’t great but it could be a lot worse.
So we decide in say July that we will elect a “Republican”, then we have what, 10-12 Republicans on the November ballot? Are there any limits on who can be a Republican? Wouldn't both parties have huge numbers of “sleepers” registered in the opposite party, ready to deploy as candidates just in case their party loses the primary?
For starters, I'll just say that I'm not married to the first "solution" I came up with. I'm just a guy, I'm not going to JEDD Mason my way to a perfect solution on my own. But I do think there's an assumption here that's going underexamined, regardless of how you feel about my other ideas.
My first thought when I noticed this issue was that candidates would declare as usual and have to self-sort into "bundles." Someone can only join a bundle if the rest of the bundle agrees, so it's sort of an implicit approval system. Strictly speaking, they wouldn't have to map to parties, but I expect they often would and it doesn't really matter to me either way.
That’s similar to how proportional representation works, right? (At least in some systems.) You vote for the party, and the party decides who fills the seats they get allocated.
As a late-voting state resident, I always thought that the mid-voting states got the advantage of having useful data about electability (provided by the early-voting ones). If there were a national vote in 2008, I wonder if Obama would have had less of a shot? There could have been a lot of "sure, I'd like Obama, but I don't want to throw my vote away when Clinton is going to win." (Of course, with proportional voting it makes sense to vote for him anyway, but do people understand that?)
I was at the Iowa caucus in 2008 and I strongly believe that Obama only got the nomination specifically because it was a caucus and there hadn't been any primaries beforehand.
Caucuses are great for candidates like Obama because they are technically complex and highly public, so people tend to vote for people *that they would like to be seen* voting for, and it's pretty easy for well connected/high info participants to significantly influence the outcome because of the crazy caucus math. In our caucus a particularly clever local guy personally screwed Hillary Clinton out of two delegates by convincing some of his noncommittal neighbors to take pity on the Edwards and Richardson groups so that they wouldn't feel bad at the end of the night.
Idk whether “people” were thinking creatively or not, but there’s no way a scattered group of stakeholders could agree on an innovative new system in a short time - that’s the “coordination problem” part.
Your idea sounds like a great system, though, just like Whitney Shapiro sounds like a great ticket - there wasjust no realistic way to get there
This was (roughly) my dream, too, and I wanted to see it all happen at the convention. Structure it like a reality TV competition, and it would have been Must See material, and been a tremendous launching pad for the rest of the campaign.
I love the idea of the 1 hour interview - set it up like a thesis defense.
In the same vein - debates have gotten a bad rap - but instead of talking heads who are mere traffic cop moderators, how about we get real time fact checkers on the panel? Or god forbid - some subject matter experts on the issues of the day, and people who are intimately familiar with the candidates’ voting record. Make the moderators more adversarial and part of the discussion - where they actually hold candidates’ feet to the fire for being evasive or unrealistic or have facts wrong. We could even *score* them! Pull the Ted Cruz tactic of ignoring the question in favor of a rant and you get your mic turned off.
Each podium has three digital panels on the front. Any participant can ask the judges for a fact check on anything another participant says. If the judges rule “false”, one of your panels gets a bright red “X”. If “true” you get a green thumbs up. Three red Xs and you have to leave the stage.
This reminds me of how weak the media is in covering candidates. In the past, I would look forward to the Washington Post’s “guide” to the candidates and found out that the candidates themselves would craft short blurbs on issues that were never challenged or explored by the Post. Or only sporadically and spread out over months of coverage, making it very difficult to understand where candidates stood or had voted on important issues. It’s still hard to find anything like this, and “debates” - as you pointed out - are almost useless.
These reforms make sense to me, but don’t address the central problem with the primary system — the primary electorate is unrepresentative of the general electorate, so candidates are forced to take extreme, unpopular positions that hurt them later on. (And that lead to a more extreme, polarized polity in general.)
I think, in practice, even if no candidate had a majority at the convention, the pressure would be enormous to award the nomination to whichever candidate has the most pledged delegates, which effectively turns the primary process into a plurality, rather than a majority system.
People like to confuse Congressional primaries (where the turnout averages like 10% of the general electorate) with Presidential primaries (where the turnout averages like 50-60% of the general electorate). But they're two separate things. The primary electorate for the presidency is not really that small or unrepresentative. I say this as, like, the number one critic of primaries on this site
In the general election a Democrat gets about half of the vote. So the primary has about 25% of the electorate, selected primarily from the left half of the general election Democratic voters. And winning half of those voters is sufficient to win the primary.
If somehow the primary voters were selected uniformly at random from the general election voters, that would mitigate the issue quite a bit. But they’re not.
And even so, it would be easy to win a primary with just the left half of the party, even if the primary voters were uniformly selected from party voters.
I do not agree that Joe Biden was the ideal candidate for the 'left half of the party', so you'd have to explain how he won then. I also think the onus is on you to prove that presidential primary voters are more left-wing than the general election voters- you basically just stated this as fact, but offered no evidence for the claim
I think a lot of people voted for Biden in the primary simply because they saw the polls, figured that Biden was going to win anyway, and voted for him as a vote against a protracted primary process (which Biden would likely win anyway) that might help Trump.
At least, that's why I voted for him, and I'm probably not the only one.
I don't have specific breakdowns by ideology of participants in general elections and primary elections. But swing voters both have a tendency to be less interested in politics (and thus quite a bit less likely to vote in lower-turnout elections, including presidential primaries) and sometimes vote in the opposite party primary. And in some states, you can't vote in the primary unless you are officially registered with the party, which creates another layer of selection for ideology.
In any case, I don't think it's a reasonable null hypothesis to assume that people whose ideology is closer to the paradigm of the party are no more likely to vote in a primary than people whose ideology is closer to the median of the electorate. I think the onus is on someone who claims that primary voters *are* representative of the general election voters to give at least *some* evidence for that fact.
If primaries were structured by polling organizations trying hard to correct for various kinds of response bias, then we could expect primary electorates to be fairly representative of the general election electorate. But they aren't, so we should expect there to be bias towards people who feel stronger attachment to the parties, which is very likely going to correlate with being on the non-centrist side of the party.
70% of 2020 Dem general election voters in New Hampshire, also voted in the primary. The numbers are 59% for Massachusetts, 60% for Oklahoma. I don't feel like going through and adding up more states. (BTW, contrary to common belief very few states have truly closed primaries these days. Most states are *somewhere* on the spectrum of openness, it's just a question of how open).
Obviously, 60-70% of the electorate is 'closer to the median' and cannot be more leftwing than the average. I am using these 2 pages as a data source:
I don't understand what you're saying. How is it obvious that 60% is "closer to the median" and cannot be more leftwing than average?
It is obvious that in a set of 60% of the population, at least some individuals are right of the median. That is not what I mean to deny.
What I mean to say is that it is not that 60% of the Democratic voters who were left of the median Democratic voter voted in the primary and 60% of the Democratic voters who were right of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary. It is more likely 70-80% of the Democratic voters who were left of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary and 40-50% of the Democratic voters who were right of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary.
Unless there is some reason to believe that marginal Democratic voters from the general election are equally enthusiastic about participating in the primary as core Democratic voters from the general, it seems that the default should be to assume that the median voter in the primary is left of the median Democratic voter in the general election. There is a real empirical question about whether it's only a little bit left, or quite a bit farther left. If it's really 60% of the general election electorate who participates in the primary, then it definitely can't be more extreme than the 70th percentile of the general election voters, but it could easily be the 55th or 60th percentile.
By looking at actual vote totals from the elections, not a Washington Post opinion piece. For example about 37 million votes were cast in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary (1), and Biden received about 81 million votes in the general. (2) That's 45.6% of the general election voters who took part in the primary. Actual rates in the early states, Super Tuesday states etc. approach 60% or even a bit higher. I feel like that's sufficiently representative. Feel free to go through the Wiki page on the 2020 primary for yourself
Sure, but the WaPo stat is still correct — in 2024, about 22 million people voted in the Republican primary, and 17 million voted in the Democratic one. I would call these numbers small, and (although I don’t have direct evidence of this) the samples are presumably unrepresentative.
2024 was a weird outlier. The Dems didn't have a real primary because they had an incumbent, for one thing. The Republicans hardly had a primary because they're in a personality cult with 1 guy. I don't think you can generalize presidential primaries from 2024. I really don't think you can make generalizations about primaries when you have an incumbent President. I'm sure Dem primary turnout was low in 2012 and Republican turnout was low in 2020, etc.
Also "electibility" was by far the most important issue for Democratic primary voters in 2020. Now, are primary voters better equipped to answer this than party insiders? Probably not, but they do have an incentive to nominate winning candidates.
One national primary might increase voter participation because people would feel like their votes counted and mattered, rather than the current situation where the primary in many high-population states primary is "over" by the time they vote. Additionally, this really would be an "every vote counts" situation. Even if you live in a "red" state, your primary vote counts the same for the nominee as the vote from someone in a battleground state. That too should increase participation.
1. Smaller and mid-sized states would be apocalyptic about a national primary removing their ability to help select the President. A national primary would be heavily tilted towards the larger states, which is maybe fine, but Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Arkansas and Maine and Oklahoma would team up and fight to the death to prevent it. So probably not realistic
2. I'm not sure about Matt's idea of 'make it cheap'. A national primary would be the opposite, it'd require huge amounts of money to cover multiple large media markets. I think it'd end up being the opposite, it'd be much more expensive
"Smaller and mid-sized states would be apocalyptic about a national primary removing their ability to help select the President."
The current system doesn't really increase the influence of small/mid-sized states. It increases the influence of early states. Small/mid-sized states which vote late in the cycle have essentially no influence under the current system.
An obvious way to improve would be to insist you need the support of 20 House Dems before they let you on the primary ballot. That would mean you have to show you have significant party support and aren't an oddball hated by your colleagues.
You might want to look at how Jeremy Corbyn got on the Labour party ballot in 2015 before committing to this.
His faction was a handful of MPs short of being able to nominate, and a few supporters of the next-most-left candidate (Andy Burnham) agreed to nominate Corbyn because that would make Burnham look more moderate and make the more centrist candidates (Cooper and Kendall) look more right-wing by comparison.
No-one expect him to win: two previous candidates from his faction (MacDonald in 2007 and Abbott in 2010) had come last in leadership elections. They expected him to get 15-20% of the vote and the demonstration of the weakness of the left to make it easier for the winner to consolidate the party. They were also concerned that not letting him on the ballot would create a "Corbyn woulda won" narrative on the left.
Corbyn did win, and the vast majority of Labour MPs were opposed to him and this created all sorts of problem, including an attempted coup to replace him a year later (he gradually consolidated, in part by replacing MPs with new ones from his faction).
This actually cuts against your point. This shows the value of the rule - its not the rule's fault that the MPs didn't apply it properly. And indeed the rule had kept MacDonald off the ballot in 2007. They weren't concerned about a "Corbyn woulda won" narrative, they just didn't think it was possible, because they hadn't factored in the changes to the voting system (Labour had previously had a complicated electoral college with different sub-divisions for elected officials, party members, and affiliate members...this had been scrapped in favour of one person, one vote ballot where members, affiliates and registered supporters could all vote on equal terms). And it was less Burnham lending votes (although there was a bit of that) and more Corbyn having a load of favours to call in.
I’m not sure that I want gladhandling as a precondition of participation. Bloomberg was a comically terrible primary candidate, but I don’t see anything wrong with his having run, nor do I think that making him kiss the ring of some arbitrary subset of House members — any of whom could almost certainly be replaced by a rock with a D next to its name because that’s how most elections but especially the House work — would be other than distasteful.
Also as SwainPDX observes, this precludes dark horse outperformers like Mayor Pete from the high profile stage.
This already happens. We just call it the "invisible primary." We can debate it's effectiveness. Trump broke through, despite party elites hating him, but primary voters usually do rely somewhat on what various groups and personalities who they trust say.
But its those House Members that determine whether the nominee would be able to get anything done as President. If you can't rally an eighth of your own congressional party behind your candidacy, then you're not going to be able to manage majorities in either house behind a clear programme
I think the House’s support for a programme looks extremely different than their support for an individual candidate. People you don’t personally like can still sponsor policies that you — or, more realistically, the Speaker of the House — endorse.
I thought this was actually one of the things that Mayor Pete has been particularly good at. Though maybe it’s more in the current cycle than before his first run.
I would guess--without knowing--that it's much more of a first run thing. What I have in mind is the bootstrapping problem: why would a Congressman take a call from, much less lend an endorsement to, the mayor of South Bend, IN?
(I won't count Joe Biden, because many of those endorsements came too late to matter.)
Kamala Harris: 17
Michael Bloomberg: 15
Elizabeth Warren: 14
Cory Booker: 10
Bernie Sanders: 10
Pete Buttigieg: 7
Amy Klobuchar: 6
Beto O'Rourke: 5
Julian Castro: 2
John Delaney: 2
Michael Bennett: 1
Steve Bullock: 1
Kirstin Gillibrand: 1
Jay Inslee: 1
Eric Swalwell: 1
Michael Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg are the only people who got Congressional endorsements without either being a member of Congress or a current or former governor. They way over-performed the governors (Bullock and Inslee, as well as people like Deval Patrick who got none).
Somehow it makes sense to me that Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O'Rourke did relatively well on congressional endorsements, and Bernie Sanders did relatively worse than one might have expected (just a few of the obvious suspects and his co-senator from Vermont).
(I think it's funny that Tulsi Gabbard had no sitting congresspeople endorse her, but she did get an endorsement from two former congresspeople - Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul!)
I don't like it, the more people who aren't responsible to voters, the greater the risk that they will concern themselves more with their personal political opinions rather than their view of the public and electability.
An idea that started wandering around my head in the 48 hours between Biden's withdrawal and Harris clinching a majority of delegate pledges is using last convention's delegates as an initial qualifier.
To qualify for the first round of the 2028 race, you need 50? 100? delegates from the 2024 race to sponsor your candidacy.
>If the field is fractured, then it will go to the convention and people will need to bargain.<
Bargain? But that's not democracy!
/s
I jest, of course, but a lot of voters have bought into the notion that party nominations should be as pristinely democratic as general elections. It's a badly misguided framework, but one that's pretty widespread. It's a measure of Kamala Harris's political skill (and the widespread loathing for Donald Trump) that we've heard barely a peep along these lines from Democrats in the wake of her seemingly effortless nomination stitch-up.
Relatedly, I've long wondered if Democrats should just get rid of super delegates altogether (GOP doesn't have them, do they?). I understand their function in a competitive convention, but I've long questioned whether their existence merits the bad optics. I've heard countless times from blinkered hard leftists about how "super delegates stole" the nomination from Bernie in 2016. Sigh.
Anyway, Matt's national primary idea has my full support. It would be a huge improvement.
Both parties probably do want to have major political figures in their party who are not committed to a specific candidate attending the convention, and I don't know if a non-voting delegate's pass does the trick.
No such entity exists! Are the people with the power to make this real the DNC? A fuzzily-defined group of state committees and potentates such as Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, the Clintons ... ?
If Jamie Harrison doesn't have the power to do this himself (pretty sure he doesn't) he is at the very least someone who can figure out who has the power to do it and start emailing them with, "people are saying".
One big advantage of the Harris coronation that can't be replicated is the element of surprise. The American system is so drawn-out and public that the opposition is always prepared, but this time the Republicans seem to have been caught completely flat-footed, especially with it coming days after the Vance nomination.
It's not something you could do more than once and they'll get their bearings and find good attacks before the election, but it was sure nice to watch them flail and panic when they realised it wouldn't be Biden and they weren't prepared.
The fact that their campaign did not have an entire file on Harris ready to go the moment she became the presumptive nominee, complete with ad scripts ready to film, websites ready to be turned on, etc, shows how little of the institutional memory of the old GOP they retain.
Opp research doesn’t take that long.
What other information are they going to dig up. She’s already been vetted and attacked as VP
“Harris Likes Mayonnaise!!!!”
Having the info isn't the same as having effective messaging prepared around it. I don't think their attacks are hitting and it's been 10 days.
Field testing does.
(For Republicans, field testing attacks mainly consists of Trump trying out new lines in his campaigns and sticking with the ones that energize his audience the most.)
As we have seen with JD Vance
Is it OP research if JD just seems to be handing it out?
I’m not sure if this is really a fair critique to level at Vance. The biggest memetic hit against him (viz., the couch thing) was literally a fabrication.
I think the cat ladies thing has been a bigger knock. I don't think any mainstream media has written about the couch thing.
I honestly think the cat ladies thing is the Democrats trying to make fetch happen. *This* tongue in cheek statement about an opposing political party—which is totally consistent with the general Republican “family values, motherhood, and apple pie” vibe— is the worst you can come up with in your oppo research? When one of the most prominent mainstream Democratic bloggers (viz. Matt) himself wrote a book that’s in part about how America would benefit from being pronatalist? It’s a memetic Schelling point, I guess, but it’s not much of one.
I mean, consider that Vance’s running mate is the same guy who proudly announced his fondness for ‘grabbing women by the p***y’. I get that Democrats may think there’s only so much mileage they can get out of that considering the prominence of the statement, but it’s like complaining about a mild breeze compared to a hurricane.
I will certainly grant that polling may prove me wrong here—in which case this complaint should be ignored—but my present take is that if this is the best arrow in your quiver, your quiver sucks.
I have only seen the couch thing online but not in actual journalism.
Upvoted for the "fabrication" pun, respectfully suggest revision to "fabricaction"
I wish that I were clever enough for that pun to have been intentional :P
“This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.
“The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
https://www.thestanduplawyer.com/make-the-sonofabitch-deny-it-the-rise-of-pig-fucker-politics/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20race%20was%20close%20and,%2C%E2%80%9D%20the%20campaign%20manager%20protested.
Most opp research is just detailed google searches. Gum leather opp research (eg finding Ws old DUI conviction) is often times most effective if released right before people vote, there’s always plenty of time for that.
Gumshoe/ shoe leather?
Private eye terms, like noir detectives.
One thing that this whole situation has further convinced me of is that we'd all be much happier and better off with a shorter campaign season. I do think a large chunk of voters were basically like, "ugh, these two guys again for the next two years?" more or less immediately after the 2022 mid-terms.
When you work on a campaign and talk to voters, the number one thing that comes through to me is just sheer fatigue by the time the election rolls around. I've literally had people tell me, "Yeah, I am voting for your guy, but if I get one more call from you people I'm not voting at all". Maybe they were lying, and maybe not, but ether way, normal people just do NOT want to be thinking about electoral politics this often and for so long.
3 day presidential election! https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-take-bakery-a-three-day-presidential
This is also a major reason people don't give money to campaigns. They don't want to be harassed interminably for more money and to be even more frequently told to be alarmed about the emergency about what the other side is doing.
^ I have absolutely already made the final political contribution of my life. I know they've already got me, but I hope they slowly forget about me.
They won’t.
There’s your mother, and there’s the political fundraising industrial complex.
I will forever regret donating to Dems in 2020
Interesting article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/weird-wars-online-far-right/679296/
tl;dr We're the weird ones. Most people don't and don't want to pay attention to politics. (Unlike those of us here.)
Paywall, can you post the article?
My text message screen is just one "STOP" reply after another during election season. Stop asking me for money or to attend your stupid Zoom link!
It is crazy to look back at the positions Dem candidates took in the last primary
It's almost oddly reassuring that the two parties have an identical structural problem here in the long primary and took a sort of pass on executive competence to quickly get ready for the general election. Suggests there are things beyond ideological polarization for explaining party decisions, which is good.
True, but the GOP is in an even worse position without super delegates.
Remember when every single candidate raised their hand to give Medicare to illegal immigrants? I literally gasped when that happened. They are lucky they ran against DJT.
particularly because it was 2020, the threat of another Trump term was staring everyone in the face, and the candidates were fiercely competing with each other over left-wing policy schemes that had zero chance of occurring and didn't address the bull in the china shop.
We'll have plenty of opportunity to do that over the next few months thanks to Republican campaign ads.
I just feel like the agreement to avoid spending money would never happen. You'd get one group saying "all's fair in love and politics" and break the rules, then some other group would protest that "they did it first" and then you're done.
A national primary would be ideal (I've also seen proposals for four regional primaries spaced a month apart, which isn't as good but far better than the current system). The single best switch though would be *approval* voting. This allows you to signal that you're okay with a candidate without having to worry about wasting your vote. Plus it would highlight when someone's support is rabid but not strong across different factions (Bernie) thus sending out a warning about electability.
Another big worry with the superpac ban is that the political ecosystem depends on those organizations for jobs. So people might just says screw it, I’m not working without it, might as well just stay on ship
Careerism is a big underrated malevolent force in politics. Much of what plays out as "field clearing" happens due to careerism.
I can see this going either way. If there’s a real norm that working in a primary superpac means you never work in a general election campaign or pac, then careerism means people don’t do it as long as the latter are more important employers than the former - but it could suddenly undergo a phase transition where it switches the other way.
The SuperPAC limitation is challenging. They're by law independent organizations, so any party saying they'll "blacklist" SuperPAC employees runs right into illegal election funding coordination and possibly even antitrust issues.
It would do the Democratic party no good for a judge to rule that the SuperPACs on their side of the race that coordinated can't spend like the other side, or deal with an employment antitrust lawsuit from someone with a personal grudge who can't get a job, while the party candidates are also campaigning for broadly more antitrust enforcement.
If the “keep it cheap” norm broke, a national primary would quickly become a fundraising contest where candidates would whore themselves to PACs in order to build name recognition.
I also wonder if it cedes too much control to bad actors. If the RNC/Trump/Elon Musk wants to run anti-Hilary ads because they think Bernie is more beatable, they could dominate the airwaves.
Don’t mind that method, but it does throw a wrench in the follow up bargaining process since there wouldn’t be a need
Would that be a bad thing?
It’s a different thing. The pro is it’s more fully democratic. The con is you lose the parliamentary like bargaining this article is extolling.
I think the thing that has most soured me on primaries has been the explosion of number of candidates in 16 on the GOP and 20 on the left.
It’s anti-coherent trying to really sort 10 or more candidates who believe similar but not identical things and I mean the core of it usually comes just to a sort of who seems likable. And in this place there’s a kind of reason to appeal to the parties’ unrestrained ids.
Which is why approval voting is the way to go for primaries!
Approval voting is probably OK, but the reason why it doesn't do that much in practice is that it's quite cognitively challenging across a large field. Quick, think of the 2020 Democratic candidates- what's your personal cutoff for who you'd approve of and who you wouldn't? There's over a dozen candidates, so it requires some thought as to who you'd approve and who you wouldn't, right? Then keep doing that at every stage of a state-by-state primary- now some of the candidates have dropped out after Iowa, who you'd approve then probably changes, right? Then after New Hampshire, now more have dropped out, who you'd approve probably changes again, no?
If you have a favorite candidate, then 'approving' anyone else reduces his/her odds of winning a bit. So AV degenerates into bullet voting, where technically you're allowed to approve multiple candidates, but in practice you only vote for 1
I've actually thought about this a lot, and I have totally the opposite philosophy. If my vote had mattered in 2020 (Biden was solidly ahead by the time he got to my state), my votes would've been Booker, Klobuchar, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Inslee, with a maybe on Gillibrand, Harris, Castro (all three were gone before NH but probably would've stayed in in such a paradigm). It gives my stamp to the moderates that I'd want to see duking it out, plus Warren whose ideas were formulated a lot better than Bernie's IMHO and Inslee who was never winning but whose focus on climate change was worth more attention.
But really, it's about how you approach it. If you're a Bernie or Bust voter, then only vote for Bernie. I would look at it this way: if you can't convince >40% of the Democratic primary electorate to agree that you're a viable candidate, should you really be the nominee?
But how many voters truly had the long tail of candidates in consideration? Seems fairly telling that Bennet is not in that list, in spite of him a part of the moderate crew. It's just entirely impractical for average voters to truly put that level of thought into their ballot, hence why approval degenerates to bullet voting.
My proposal would be for the states before super tuesday to do approval with a 60% threshold to eliminate any factional candidates and then switch to either the proposed solution above or ranked choice.
This is one reason I don’t like ranked-choice voting. The chaos of the voting process attracts a dozen also-rans (like primaries, they usually all belong to the same party) and it’s our duty as voters to either 1) figure out which ones are the serious candidates, and ignore the rest or 2) learn everything about every candidate’s position on everything.
Almost nobody has the patience to do #2, and even #1 is a lot to remember for the average voter.
I really like the idea of ranked choice voting in a national primary, particularly if limited to 1-2-3 ranking. It avoids the back-room dealing during the convention (and I think Matt underestimates how deeply voters would hate that), and it's a perfect example where knowing people's 2nd choice is useful. There will be candidates with small, passionate support (like Bernie) who may struggle to rise above their natural threshold, while someone who is everyone's second choice might generate less passion in a primary, but be even more electable.
As a side benefit, it would make life much more difficult for Trump-like candidates.
My bugbear for years has been that all of the attempts to come up with eligibility criteria for debates have skirted around the edges with stuff like funding and opinion polls rather than come straight out and say it: the democratic nomination is going to be won by a democratic politician. If you're not one of:
- a statewide office holder
- a current or former member of the cabinet
- a member of congressional leadership
(or you weren't elected to those on a Democratic ticket)
then you have no business on that stage. Even in 2020 that'd only have been 14 candidates, including the ones that dropped out before Iowa. That's still a big field, but a lot of the wasted time was on gadflies like Bloomberg, Steyer, Yang, and Williamson.
Maybe you can argue for some red-state friendly rule where you allow the highest elected democratic official from any state run, but honestly that's basically the Buttigieg rule, and despite my liking him he's really the problem here - the presidential primary is not a vehicle for boosting your profile.
>Does he endorse Harris? Almost certainly yes, because to do otherwise would raise questions about his own judgment.<
No doubt Matt's correct about this...except....is there a way to thread the needle? Faced with such a situation, could Joe Biden have endorsed Harris's ability to do the job of President of the United States while explicitly and formally remaining neutral with respect to the nomination? Something like: "I wouldn't have chosen Kamala Harris as running mate if I weren't 100% confident she would make an outstanding president. But because I don't think this office should put a thumb on the scales, and because I want the nomination process to be as fair and as open as possible, I will not be endorsing any candidate for president at this time. Let Democrats throughout this great land decide."
Obviously moot now. And so we'll never know. And maybe the above would in any event have been interpreted as an endorsement.
I think that's a great way to thread the needle.
I think that only works if it becomes the norm/pattern. If you're the first person to do it, it sure reads like "I can't endorse the person I really want, so I'm going to make this wishy-washy statement".
Agreed, the headline would be "Biden drops out, declines to endorse Harris"
Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with factual reporting. But the VP's stature, combined with the words of praise from Biden, would likely ensure she's nonetheless be in a strong position to secure the nomination (just less of a lock).
Also remember that Obama, who probably has way more clout amongst Dem voters, would have almost certainly stayed neutral until a candidate won the primary. That was his policy this year too but he eventually endorsed Harris once it became definitively clear that no on was going to challenge her.
I also think Pelosi would have stayed neutral, as she was in favor of a competitive contest when Biden dropped out
Agree with both of these. How about also stipulating that a candidate needs to get a certain number of house or senate members to nominate them to stand? Surely reasonable to insist that you can get (say) an eighth of the congressional caucus to nominate you, if you're running to lead the federal party
I like that idea, almost similar to how some all star game voting/end of season awards has a "fan vote" and a player vote.
I like this or any sort of rules to make a barrier or step for entry. Another simple rule for both parties could be something like a rule saying you must have ALREADY won an election AS A DEMOCRAT (or Republican) in a district or state of X amount of people. This would have easily (1) eliminated Trump or any other person who thinks their first election should be for president and (2) prevent B. Sanders and the like from switching between party labels whenever it suits them. I can’t believe these rules weren’t in place.
This proposed rule would also have eliminated Eisenhower.
Eisenhower could have easily found some office to win instead of being president at Columbia, which was always an odd fit for him.
I had no idea Eisenhower had been president of Columbia until doing my Learned League trivia this morning.
https://learnedleague.com/oneday.php?5462
I should have posted this New Yorker article that explains it: https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-pleasures-of-learnedleague-and-the-spirit-of-trivia
It's an online trivia league that you need a referral to join.
During the 25 or so days of a competition, you get sent 6 questions, you have to answer them without cheating (looking on the internet or asking anyone else - pure honor system, though apparently they have given lifetime bans when they have discovered individuals cheating), and then you assign how many points each question is worth for that day's opponent. Over the course of the competition, whoever wins the most head-to-head matches wins the league.
In between the main competitions, there are one-day contests, where someone has submitted 12 questions on a theme. Today, one of the one-day contests involved identifying famous people that have lived in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
(For anyone reading this that wants to join, I just got an e-mail reminder that I can make referrals to join the waitlist.)
I thought of that as well, but I think it would be worth it overall.
Republicans wouldn't want to adopt such a rule (even if it would have stopped Trump in 2016) because their brand for the past couple decades has leaned so heavily into the theory that prior political experience is actively disqualifying for running for public office. (That said, I have thought that it might be possible to get Republicans to adopt a rule that someone has to have been a registered Republican for at least 10 years before running for the GOP ticket for President, which also would have disqualified Trump in 2016.)
NB: the registered Republican for ten years rule *also* would have disqualified Eisenhower.
Many states don't have party registration.
Fantastic idea. Kind of a way to bring back elite veto power without the smoke filled rooms
I think this a great idea.
This is also roughly how the UK Labor Party works. You need the endorsement of a certain number of MPs to be a candidate for the party leadership. Candidates are then put to a vote of regular party members.
Yes, the media over-rotates on ‘who won’ - but maybe there’s still some benefit to having that…the drama of the scoreboard gets people interested in the process in the same way debates do…without necessarily proving anything about governing.
And don’t you want to give candidates a chance to evolve and grow into the job of being a campaigner & candidate (and vice versa)? Doesn’t a primary season demonstrate a candidate’s organizational leadership and messaging skills? A one shot primary would have given us Hillary in 2008 instead of Obama.
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter took some getting used to. George Bush demonstrated early primary strength that put him on the Reagan ticket in 1980. Hell, Jed Bartlet emerged after a surprising 3rd place showing in Texas, remember? Then we have examples of candidates who sound good in theory, but who don’t live up to their hype after they join the fray - Fred Thompson, Wesley Clark, dare I say Kamala Harris(?) - it was good the process winnowed them. With a national primary nobody ever drops out - and I’m not sure that’s good.
I like the idea of shortening the primary season into fewer voting days - but maybe more realistic would be diversifying the early primaries so that the first isn’t just New Hampshire, but NH, plus a rust belt state plus a southern state plus a western state. Then vote day two is a month later and includes two states from each region. And so on…
Had there been a national primary, Clinton almost certainly would have easily won the nomination in 2008. It's possible that Obama wouldn't have even run.
I also think Howard Dean would never have emerged as a credible candidate.
“Byaaahhhhhh!”
If I remember my history, I believe it was Matthew Santos’s surprise showing in New Hampshire that propelled him to eventual nomination. Jed Bartlet did well enough in South Carolina to survive until Illinois, which led to him becoming our President.
"NH, plus a rust belt state plus a southern state plus a western state" -- this mirrors the Iowa / New Hampshire / Nevada / South Carolina "first four" that came into being a few cycles ago.
They’re still in sequence though, right? Do them on the same day so the NH results and headlines aren’t bending the next state’s results and so on.
I guess it’s possible we’d end up with a similar outcome - where we’ve seen some candidates focus on a single state and ignore the ones their weak in.
Either way, I strongly suspect you can’t get away from the negativity thing, and you can’t get away from the $$, no matter how you design it.
Yeah, I had hoped that these four could evolve into a coordinated same-day "Round 1" primary day (maybe add Michigan or something to it, so at least one large metro area is included). But NH seems dead set on preventing that from happening.
‘they’re weak in’🤦🏼♂️
New Hampshire politicians will never allow "New Hampshire plus", so if you are going to propose devaluing New Hampshire, you probably have to destroy New Hampshire anyway and risk the general election hit.
Biden already gutted IA / NH in this year's rules. Those rules are the starting point for 2028.
It helped that Biden was the first Democratic president since LBJ to owe nothing, nothing at all, zip zero nada, to the Iowa Caucus and New HAmpshire FITN primary.
He gutted Iowa but New Hampshire totally gutted and fileted Biden in that fight. They still held their primary and the media still.went there and treated it as important, and Biden then chickened out of any attempt to truly punish them.
It would probably require lawsuits, court injunctions, and tons of hardball to prevent NH from holding a primary, with all the pundits talking about how it concedes a swing state in the general.
Isn't the simplest solution for the Democratic party to say that anyone on a ballot that doesn't follow the rules of the party cannot be a member of the party and will not be listed on any ballot as a Democrat thereafter?
They could do that. But they'd still have to sue New Hampshire.
NH's basic long term plan is this: if the parties ever crack down, they will contend they are just holding a straw poll and any state has the right to do that. And THEY can put anyone they want on their ballot no matter what parties say because taking a poll is just free speech.
And the media will still cover New Hampshire because the media loves New Hampshire (it's really cheap to go up there from Washington and retail politics is more interesting content-wise than stump speeches). Which means the "winner of the New Hampshire primary" will still be a thing in the discourse.
So you actually have to stop them from having the primary entirely, even as a "nonbinding straw poll". And that very likely requires litigation against the state and the willingness to call NH politicians' bluffs that it will hurt Dems in a swing state in the general election.
I don't think they would have to sue New Hampshire. They key is for the candidates to not go there and participate. Media will cover it some, but if none of the candidates are there, there is no retail politics and it will fade away because without that, its meaningless.
"Which means the "winner of the New Hampshire primary" will still be a thing in the discourse."
For a week or two, until the first compliant primary reasserts the dominance of the front-runner.
1. "the media still.went there and treated it as important" That's not how I remember it. The only people who treated it as important were the NH Dems who organized a last-minute campaign to get people to write in Bidens' name. Because they were about to be a national laughingstock if Dean Phillips or MAriane Williamson or RFK Jr "won" the NH primary.
2. "Biden chickened out of any attempt to truly punish them" Because they bent the knee, discarded the results of the noncompliant primaries and ran compliant delegate selection events.
3. NH can hold a primary. That doesn't obligate the Democratic NAtional Convention to seat those delegates, and it doesn't obligate anyone to care about the results. The NH FITN primary is, in all likelihood, going the way of the GOP Iowa Straw Poll, as the major candidates choose to downplay it rather than risk an unnecessary loss.
Yeah, surprised Matt didn't go into the coordination/legal challenges of getting all states to host a Democratic primary on the same day. All 50 state legislatures--Blue, Red, Purple, NH, Iowa etc--are going to agree to having a primary for the Dems on a given date chosen by the DNC chair?
So the actual answer is that the Democrats could fund it themselves and hold it, and bar anyone from seating any delegates any other way, and if the Dems did that most of the states (but not New Hampshire) would quickly come on board.
New Hampshire, though, is going to fight hard against any system that doesn't have them going first. You literally have to decide "we're going to invest a ton of money and time and effort into royally screwing New Hampshire over and we won't cave even though they are a general election swing state". It probably requires the Party to sue the state and literally seek to prevent them from holding any election that advertises itself as a Democratic Primary.
In this scenario, it seems it's New Hampshire royally screwing over the rest of the party.
Are you perhaps from MA?
"So the actual answer is that the Democrats could fund it themselves"
Even ignoring New Hampshire, this is easier said then done. If you want voting to be done the traditional way, state-run elections typically cost the taxpayer around $1-10 per registered voter, per election, which would add up to hundreds of millions of dollars, scaled across the entire country. If the party were to bear that cost themselves, that would amount way too much spent spent on election administration that would be better spent actual campaigning.
You could probably run an election much cheaper if it were held online, without polling places/mail ballots/voting booths/etc. But, that has its own problems. How do you make sure that only registered voters can vote, and that nobody can vote more than once? It's not like every registered voter has a digital account with the Democratic party, and asking voters to create one would create difficulties in ensuring that each account actually represents a unique human individual who is actually eligible to vote, not to mention effectively excluding non-tech-savvy people from the voting process.
I just don't think a party-funded election, completely separate from the state-run election apparatus, is actually feasible.
My claim is that once the Democratic Party demonstrated seriousness on that, it wouldn't end up having to pay all the costs because states would realize they had no choice but to sign on. So it's something of a bluff actually.
Maybe, but I'm skeptical. I could see blue states getting on board, but I think states controlled by Republicans would be all too happy to call the bluff.
Didn't some states have Democratic and Republican primaries on different days?
Yeah, I think Matt has previously written that moderate DC-outsiders make for very successful candidates: Carter, Reagan (not sure how moderate he was as candidate), Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump.
These seem like people who would have struggled with both A) a short primary, given their lower national profile at the start and B) consolidating power at a brokered convention, due to having less deep and long ties to the national party. You'd probably end up with more 3rd or 4th term senators.
This is why I'm really torn on this issue. A longer primary season does mean that the candidate that emerges needs to have more lasting power. A single-day primary makes it easier to consolidate around a known front-runner, and probably makes it easier for a well-funded dark horse, but it probably challenges middle tier politicians who may have the juice but need some time to demonstrate it.
At the same time, Matt's point about the way this hands the reins to the media horserace and the Groups is spot on and the consolidation around Harris (and the focus on electable VPs) has been refreshing. No competing whitepapers for left wing policies that will never pass! Thank goodness
(Fantasy Constitutional Reform Zone)
Something that seems obvious to me but that I never see anyone else comment in is that we do general elections and primary elections in the wrong order. We go from specific (choose who represents the party) to general (choose which party wins the presidency) when most selection processes in day-to-day life go from general to specific. I expect that's always going to lead to weird results.
Consider Parliamentary democracies. In theory you are just voting for a party, and afterwards the party will choose who its leader will be. In practice, the party makes as part of its campaign platform, "This is who the leader will be," because people like to know that. The difference is that the party isn't committed to keeping that leader through their whole term in government. Look at the succession of PMs the British had before their most recent election. Sunak was selected by the party, not the voters.
I’ve been banging on the ‘Constitutional Convention 3.0’ drum for a while. I will add your great idea to the list of reforms to be reviewed when we convene…
Others include: nuking the Electoral College, the Senate, and possibly the whole concept of ‘states’ as well…plus Jonah Goldberg’s idea which is to simply make it a little bit easier to change the Constitution.
Eliminating the states would make amendment somewhat easier…
I'm sure everybody's got a ton of ideas about what they would do if they Quantum Lept into James Madison, I'm no different. This one's just something I've been mulling over since 2016 and I don't think I've ever seen anyone really give a case for or against it.
A constitutional convention raises the issue I warn students of when they ask for a re-grade: the grade might get better but it might get worse. Our system isn’t great but it could be a lot worse.
Very interesting and weird idea!
Plus, I like the Ada Palmer reference in the follow up.
So we decide in say July that we will elect a “Republican”, then we have what, 10-12 Republicans on the November ballot? Are there any limits on who can be a Republican? Wouldn't both parties have huge numbers of “sleepers” registered in the opposite party, ready to deploy as candidates just in case their party loses the primary?
For starters, I'll just say that I'm not married to the first "solution" I came up with. I'm just a guy, I'm not going to JEDD Mason my way to a perfect solution on my own. But I do think there's an assumption here that's going underexamined, regardless of how you feel about my other ideas.
My first thought when I noticed this issue was that candidates would declare as usual and have to self-sort into "bundles." Someone can only join a bundle if the rest of the bundle agrees, so it's sort of an implicit approval system. Strictly speaking, they wouldn't have to map to parties, but I expect they often would and it doesn't really matter to me either way.
Now do SCOTUS…
Huh. Huh. Never thought of this.
That’s similar to how proportional representation works, right? (At least in some systems.) You vote for the party, and the party decides who fills the seats they get allocated.
As a late-voting state resident, I always thought that the mid-voting states got the advantage of having useful data about electability (provided by the early-voting ones). If there were a national vote in 2008, I wonder if Obama would have had less of a shot? There could have been a lot of "sure, I'd like Obama, but I don't want to throw my vote away when Clinton is going to win." (Of course, with proportional voting it makes sense to vote for him anyway, but do people understand that?)
I was at the Iowa caucus in 2008 and I strongly believe that Obama only got the nomination specifically because it was a caucus and there hadn't been any primaries beforehand.
Caucuses are great for candidates like Obama because they are technically complex and highly public, so people tend to vote for people *that they would like to be seen* voting for, and it's pretty easy for well connected/high info participants to significantly influence the outcome because of the crazy caucus math. In our caucus a particularly clever local guy personally screwed Hillary Clinton out of two delegates by convincing some of his noncommittal neighbors to take pity on the Edwards and Richardson groups so that they wouldn't feel bad at the end of the night.
I have a friend who was also at the caucus, strongly disliked Clinton, and somehow finagled the caucus he was at not to let her get any delegates.
With a national vote in 2008 I think we get a Clinton-Obama ticket as he makes a deal with her to box out Edwards.
A radical proposal: For a quick primary, the candidates don't need to be on the stage with each other to compete.
I just want to see:
- One speech describing their vision for the country
- A 1-hour tough interview from a skilled interviewer
- A 5-minute attack video generated by a red team
That would give us most of what we need, while letting the candidates avoid damaging each other.
In the case of Kamala, we would find
- She has a cookie-cutter vision
- Her thinking is weak and can't stand up to pressure
- Her history is full of attack material
Kamala became the quick winner because people weren't thinking creatively about a fast primary.
Idk whether “people” were thinking creatively or not, but there’s no way a scattered group of stakeholders could agree on an innovative new system in a short time - that’s the “coordination problem” part.
Your idea sounds like a great system, though, just like Whitney Shapiro sounds like a great ticket - there wasjust no realistic way to get there
Right, like how was the actual voting even supposed to happen?
This was (roughly) my dream, too, and I wanted to see it all happen at the convention. Structure it like a reality TV competition, and it would have been Must See material, and been a tremendous launching pad for the rest of the campaign.
I love the idea of the 1 hour interview - set it up like a thesis defense.
In the same vein - debates have gotten a bad rap - but instead of talking heads who are mere traffic cop moderators, how about we get real time fact checkers on the panel? Or god forbid - some subject matter experts on the issues of the day, and people who are intimately familiar with the candidates’ voting record. Make the moderators more adversarial and part of the discussion - where they actually hold candidates’ feet to the fire for being evasive or unrealistic or have facts wrong. We could even *score* them! Pull the Ted Cruz tactic of ignoring the question in favor of a rant and you get your mic turned off.
Each podium has three digital panels on the front. Any participant can ask the judges for a fact check on anything another participant says. If the judges rule “false”, one of your panels gets a bright red “X”. If “true” you get a green thumbs up. Three red Xs and you have to leave the stage.
This reminds me of how weak the media is in covering candidates. In the past, I would look forward to the Washington Post’s “guide” to the candidates and found out that the candidates themselves would craft short blurbs on issues that were never challenged or explored by the Post. Or only sporadically and spread out over months of coverage, making it very difficult to understand where candidates stood or had voted on important issues. It’s still hard to find anything like this, and “debates” - as you pointed out - are almost useless.
These reforms make sense to me, but don’t address the central problem with the primary system — the primary electorate is unrepresentative of the general electorate, so candidates are forced to take extreme, unpopular positions that hurt them later on. (And that lead to a more extreme, polarized polity in general.)
I think because coalition support would be negotiated later, candidates would be incentivized to work together.
In the 2020 primaries, you could easily imagine this dynamic pushing the eventual (Dem) candidate to the left rather than the center
I think, in practice, even if no candidate had a majority at the convention, the pressure would be enormous to award the nomination to whichever candidate has the most pledged delegates, which effectively turns the primary process into a plurality, rather than a majority system.
People like to confuse Congressional primaries (where the turnout averages like 10% of the general electorate) with Presidential primaries (where the turnout averages like 50-60% of the general electorate). But they're two separate things. The primary electorate for the presidency is not really that small or unrepresentative. I say this as, like, the number one critic of primaries on this site
In the general election a Democrat gets about half of the vote. So the primary has about 25% of the electorate, selected primarily from the left half of the general election Democratic voters. And winning half of those voters is sufficient to win the primary.
If somehow the primary voters were selected uniformly at random from the general election voters, that would mitigate the issue quite a bit. But they’re not.
And even so, it would be easy to win a primary with just the left half of the party, even if the primary voters were uniformly selected from party voters.
I do not agree that Joe Biden was the ideal candidate for the 'left half of the party', so you'd have to explain how he won then. I also think the onus is on you to prove that presidential primary voters are more left-wing than the general election voters- you basically just stated this as fact, but offered no evidence for the claim
I think a lot of people voted for Biden in the primary simply because they saw the polls, figured that Biden was going to win anyway, and voted for him as a vote against a protracted primary process (which Biden would likely win anyway) that might help Trump.
At least, that's why I voted for him, and I'm probably not the only one.
I don't have specific breakdowns by ideology of participants in general elections and primary elections. But swing voters both have a tendency to be less interested in politics (and thus quite a bit less likely to vote in lower-turnout elections, including presidential primaries) and sometimes vote in the opposite party primary. And in some states, you can't vote in the primary unless you are officially registered with the party, which creates another layer of selection for ideology.
In any case, I don't think it's a reasonable null hypothesis to assume that people whose ideology is closer to the paradigm of the party are no more likely to vote in a primary than people whose ideology is closer to the median of the electorate. I think the onus is on someone who claims that primary voters *are* representative of the general election voters to give at least *some* evidence for that fact.
If primaries were structured by polling organizations trying hard to correct for various kinds of response bias, then we could expect primary electorates to be fairly representative of the general election electorate. But they aren't, so we should expect there to be bias towards people who feel stronger attachment to the parties, which is very likely going to correlate with being on the non-centrist side of the party.
Turnout is also correlated with age, and at least among Democrats, older voters are more moderate. I think that counteracts some of the other issues.
That's a good point!
70% of 2020 Dem general election voters in New Hampshire, also voted in the primary. The numbers are 59% for Massachusetts, 60% for Oklahoma. I don't feel like going through and adding up more states. (BTW, contrary to common belief very few states have truly closed primaries these days. Most states are *somewhere* on the spectrum of openness, it's just a question of how open).
Obviously, 60-70% of the electorate is 'closer to the median' and cannot be more leftwing than the average. I am using these 2 pages as a data source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries#Schedule_and_results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results
I don't understand what you're saying. How is it obvious that 60% is "closer to the median" and cannot be more leftwing than average?
It is obvious that in a set of 60% of the population, at least some individuals are right of the median. That is not what I mean to deny.
What I mean to say is that it is not that 60% of the Democratic voters who were left of the median Democratic voter voted in the primary and 60% of the Democratic voters who were right of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary. It is more likely 70-80% of the Democratic voters who were left of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary and 40-50% of the Democratic voters who were right of the median Democratic voter who voted in the primary.
Unless there is some reason to believe that marginal Democratic voters from the general election are equally enthusiastic about participating in the primary as core Democratic voters from the general, it seems that the default should be to assume that the median voter in the primary is left of the median Democratic voter in the general election. There is a real empirical question about whether it's only a little bit left, or quite a bit farther left. If it's really 60% of the general election electorate who participates in the primary, then it definitely can't be more extreme than the 70th percentile of the general election voters, but it could easily be the 55th or 60th percentile.
I am not sure what you say is correct:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/13/few-voters-decide-trump-biden-nominations/
Where are you getting these stats from?
By looking at actual vote totals from the elections, not a Washington Post opinion piece. For example about 37 million votes were cast in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary (1), and Biden received about 81 million votes in the general. (2) That's 45.6% of the general election voters who took part in the primary. Actual rates in the early states, Super Tuesday states etc. approach 60% or even a bit higher. I feel like that's sufficiently representative. Feel free to go through the Wiki page on the 2020 primary for yourself
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries#Schedule_and_results
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
Sure, but the WaPo stat is still correct — in 2024, about 22 million people voted in the Republican primary, and 17 million voted in the Democratic one. I would call these numbers small, and (although I don’t have direct evidence of this) the samples are presumably unrepresentative.
2024 was a weird outlier. The Dems didn't have a real primary because they had an incumbent, for one thing. The Republicans hardly had a primary because they're in a personality cult with 1 guy. I don't think you can generalize presidential primaries from 2024. I really don't think you can make generalizations about primaries when you have an incumbent President. I'm sure Dem primary turnout was low in 2012 and Republican turnout was low in 2020, etc.
Yup, in my past argument about this, the South Carolina primary totals for the Democrat's were about 50% of the total votes they got in November.
Indeed— it is worth remembering that the 2020 democratic primary electorate pretty decisively picked Joe Biden.
Also "electibility" was by far the most important issue for Democratic primary voters in 2020. Now, are primary voters better equipped to answer this than party insiders? Probably not, but they do have an incentive to nominate winning candidates.
One national primary might increase voter participation because people would feel like their votes counted and mattered, rather than the current situation where the primary in many high-population states primary is "over" by the time they vote. Additionally, this really would be an "every vote counts" situation. Even if you live in a "red" state, your primary vote counts the same for the nominee as the vote from someone in a battleground state. That too should increase participation.
1. Smaller and mid-sized states would be apocalyptic about a national primary removing their ability to help select the President. A national primary would be heavily tilted towards the larger states, which is maybe fine, but Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Arkansas and Maine and Oklahoma would team up and fight to the death to prevent it. So probably not realistic
2. I'm not sure about Matt's idea of 'make it cheap'. A national primary would be the opposite, it'd require huge amounts of money to cover multiple large media markets. I think it'd end up being the opposite, it'd be much more expensive
"Smaller and mid-sized states would be apocalyptic about a national primary removing their ability to help select the President."
The current system doesn't really increase the influence of small/mid-sized states. It increases the influence of early states. Small/mid-sized states which vote late in the cycle have essentially no influence under the current system.
An obvious way to improve would be to insist you need the support of 20 House Dems before they let you on the primary ballot. That would mean you have to show you have significant party support and aren't an oddball hated by your colleagues.
You might want to look at how Jeremy Corbyn got on the Labour party ballot in 2015 before committing to this.
His faction was a handful of MPs short of being able to nominate, and a few supporters of the next-most-left candidate (Andy Burnham) agreed to nominate Corbyn because that would make Burnham look more moderate and make the more centrist candidates (Cooper and Kendall) look more right-wing by comparison.
No-one expect him to win: two previous candidates from his faction (MacDonald in 2007 and Abbott in 2010) had come last in leadership elections. They expected him to get 15-20% of the vote and the demonstration of the weakness of the left to make it easier for the winner to consolidate the party. They were also concerned that not letting him on the ballot would create a "Corbyn woulda won" narrative on the left.
Corbyn did win, and the vast majority of Labour MPs were opposed to him and this created all sorts of problem, including an attempted coup to replace him a year later (he gradually consolidated, in part by replacing MPs with new ones from his faction).
This actually cuts against your point. This shows the value of the rule - its not the rule's fault that the MPs didn't apply it properly. And indeed the rule had kept MacDonald off the ballot in 2007. They weren't concerned about a "Corbyn woulda won" narrative, they just didn't think it was possible, because they hadn't factored in the changes to the voting system (Labour had previously had a complicated electoral college with different sub-divisions for elected officials, party members, and affiliate members...this had been scrapped in favour of one person, one vote ballot where members, affiliates and registered supporters could all vote on equal terms). And it was less Burnham lending votes (although there was a bit of that) and more Corbyn having a load of favours to call in.
Is it really a "coup" to replace a party leader?
I don't need reminding I was in the Kendall campaign at the time.
I hit "like", but I mean "I'm so so sorry". I was in the Tim Farron campaign, which may have worked out even worse.
I’m not sure that I want gladhandling as a precondition of participation. Bloomberg was a comically terrible primary candidate, but I don’t see anything wrong with his having run, nor do I think that making him kiss the ring of some arbitrary subset of House members — any of whom could almost certainly be replaced by a rock with a D next to its name because that’s how most elections but especially the House work — would be other than distasteful.
Also as SwainPDX observes, this precludes dark horse outperformers like Mayor Pete from the high profile stage.
This already happens. We just call it the "invisible primary." We can debate it's effectiveness. Trump broke through, despite party elites hating him, but primary voters usually do rely somewhat on what various groups and personalities who they trust say.
Sure! But then what’s the marginal advantage of formalizing it?
But its those House Members that determine whether the nominee would be able to get anything done as President. If you can't rally an eighth of your own congressional party behind your candidacy, then you're not going to be able to manage majorities in either house behind a clear programme
I think the House’s support for a programme looks extremely different than their support for an individual candidate. People you don’t personally like can still sponsor policies that you — or, more realistically, the Speaker of the House — endorse.
I thought this was actually one of the things that Mayor Pete has been particularly good at. Though maybe it’s more in the current cycle than before his first run.
I would guess--without knowing--that it's much more of a first run thing. What I have in mind is the bootstrapping problem: why would a Congressman take a call from, much less lend an endorsement to, the mayor of South Bend, IN?
I just looked up how many then-sitting Congresspeople endorsed each candidate in the 2020 primary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorsements_in_the_2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
(I won't count Joe Biden, because many of those endorsements came too late to matter.)
Kamala Harris: 17
Michael Bloomberg: 15
Elizabeth Warren: 14
Cory Booker: 10
Bernie Sanders: 10
Pete Buttigieg: 7
Amy Klobuchar: 6
Beto O'Rourke: 5
Julian Castro: 2
John Delaney: 2
Michael Bennett: 1
Steve Bullock: 1
Kirstin Gillibrand: 1
Jay Inslee: 1
Eric Swalwell: 1
Michael Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg are the only people who got Congressional endorsements without either being a member of Congress or a current or former governor. They way over-performed the governors (Bullock and Inslee, as well as people like Deval Patrick who got none).
Somehow it makes sense to me that Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O'Rourke did relatively well on congressional endorsements, and Bernie Sanders did relatively worse than one might have expected (just a few of the obvious suspects and his co-senator from Vermont).
(I think it's funny that Tulsi Gabbard had no sitting congresspeople endorse her, but she did get an endorsement from two former congresspeople - Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul!)
I wish I could like this comment more times.
I would include governors and state party leaders in that endorsement count.
I'd oppose including anyone who isn't personally holding a public elected office.
How about those who once held elected office, but are now party leaders?
I don't like it, the more people who aren't responsible to voters, the greater the risk that they will concern themselves more with their personal political opinions rather than their view of the public and electability.
If you gain significant support in a primary, it shows you have actual significant party support among the actual voters.
An idea that started wandering around my head in the 48 hours between Biden's withdrawal and Harris clinching a majority of delegate pledges is using last convention's delegates as an initial qualifier.
To qualify for the first round of the 2028 race, you need 50? 100? delegates from the 2024 race to sponsor your candidacy.
>If the field is fractured, then it will go to the convention and people will need to bargain.<
Bargain? But that's not democracy!
/s
I jest, of course, but a lot of voters have bought into the notion that party nominations should be as pristinely democratic as general elections. It's a badly misguided framework, but one that's pretty widespread. It's a measure of Kamala Harris's political skill (and the widespread loathing for Donald Trump) that we've heard barely a peep along these lines from Democrats in the wake of her seemingly effortless nomination stitch-up.
Relatedly, I've long wondered if Democrats should just get rid of super delegates altogether (GOP doesn't have them, do they?). I understand their function in a competitive convention, but I've long questioned whether their existence merits the bad optics. I've heard countless times from blinkered hard leftists about how "super delegates stole" the nomination from Bernie in 2016. Sigh.
Anyway, Matt's national primary idea has my full support. It would be a huge improvement.
Both parties probably do want to have major political figures in their party who are not committed to a specific candidate attending the convention, and I don't know if a non-voting delegate's pass does the trick.
Wonderful piece, thank you! Next: who has the power to enact this proposal, and how do you get them to grapple with it?
The Democratic Party!
No such entity exists! Are the people with the power to make this real the DNC? A fuzzily-defined group of state committees and potentates such as Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, the Clintons ... ?
https://democrats.org/jaime-harrison/
If Jamie Harrison doesn't have the power to do this himself (pretty sure he doesn't) he is at the very least someone who can figure out who has the power to do it and start emailing them with, "people are saying".