Primary Dolors

Super Tuesday 2020 undeniably shook up the Democratic presidential race in dramatic fashion. But the drama here felt very much like a Lost Weekend–style bender coming at the end of a year’s worth of prim sobriety pledges. After all those debates, all that cable news blather, and those quaintly unrepresentative caucuses, the Democratic electorate wound up with a pair of septuagenarian alpha-males-in-decline, with the 78-year-old pledging to upend the handful of status quo political certainties still in play and the 77-year-old determined somehow to conjure forth a golden age of bygone senatorial deferences and decencies more suited to a Victorian theme park than to America in the twenty-first century.

Puzzled onlookers—which is to say a sizable part of the American voting public—surveying the scene had to wonder if this was, in fact, the best that our republic can do by way of conferring the greatest complement of power in the world on a deserving public servant. New Republic staff writer Matt Ford revisits the ugly course of the primary season thus far and explains just how we got here:

After the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, both parties set out to reform their methods for choosing presidential nominees. The solution they hit on was to stage a staggered set of elections throughout the spring of an election year with no overarching logic to shape the process. Iowa and New Hampshire went first in 2020 not by some sort of divine mandate but because they happened to be chosen to go first way back in 1972.

Yes, this year’s Iowa caucus was like an advanced graduate seminar in the uncertainty principle; it’s still not clear who actually won the ballyhooed first nominating referendum of the 2020 cycle. (Republicans had their own hair-raising descent into Hawkeye chaos in 2012, when the caucus title was stripped 16 days after the fact from Mitt Romney in favor of professional culture-war ghoul Rick Santorum.) But even if there’s never another cursed Iowa caucus, the primaries will remain in profound miasma mode for the foreseeable future, as was all too plain in the unconscionably long voting lines in Texas and California on Super Tuesday—and in the strategic-to-manic flurry of campaign suspensions and recalibrated poll reporting leading up to this week’s big main primary event.

The reason behind the endurance of this dismal status quo is simple, Ford explains. First, there’s “the sheer number of choke points that could hinder sweeping reforms to the process,” since all the primaries and caucuses are organized (to use a very polite euphemism) under the erratic and uncoordinated direction of state party leaders and political operatives. And then, of course, there’s the most reliable first rule of political life anywhere—rank personal and professional self-interest: “[T]hose who are best positioned to implement reforms often have the least incentive to do so,” Ford writes.

What, then, is to be done? For starters, Ford argues that an equitable and uniform primary voting system has to be rescued from the clutches of variously compromised, venal, and/or just plain inept state-level interests. Via a constitutional amendment, the job of scheduling and administering nominating primaries should go to Congress, Ford argues. This is the solution most closely in line with the Founding Fathers’ own vision of how the national legislature must arbitrate factional interests and elevate the common good above them. “Congress would be better positioned to weigh [primary-related] interests than those with a direct stake in the matter,” Ford maintains:

Setting up a new calendar under the current system would require the assent of every state, and some will jealously guard their power and influence. New Hampshire law, for example, requires that state’s primary to be held at least seven days before any other state primary. Iowa leaders mounted a bipartisan defense of their preeminent status last month after the Democratic caucus debacle, eager to preserve their traditional role in American politics.

Don’t look for any such outbreak of common sense on the primary stage anytime soon, however; constitutional amendments, too, must pass in three-quarters of the country’s state legislatures, where many of the same interests that have bollixed up the primaries to begin with hold decisive sway. Still, Ford’s proposal helpfully suggests a way out of the present primary morass—and toward a sanely configured nominating process, in which no one will ever again have to pretend to care about the public mood in Ottumwa or Dixville Notch.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor