The first-in-country Iowa caucus was—to use Trumpian language—a total disaster. However, this are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the unruly, imperfect and, frankly, absurd U.S. system of choosing presidential candidates that has existed in its current form since 1972. It is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and in fact, the framers of the constitution didn’t even believe in political parties. Instead, this system has evolved haphazardly within the national and state party institutions and is an anomaly compared to other democracies in the world. Yet, it is far from certain that the Iowa fiasco will be enough even to bring about change in the system the elects the so-called “leader of the free world.”
While primary and caucus voting began at the state level in the early 20th century, these votes were mere consultations and they were certainly not legally binding. Those times are popularly represented by the image of party bosses sitting in back rooms choosing candidates while they puffed on cigars. We can argue over the veracity of this old stereotype, but it’s breaking point came in 1968. Tensions over the 14-year old Vietnam war broke into violent protests at the Democratic convention when leaders chose President Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, as the party’s nominee. Not only was he seen as representative of the old politics that continued the Vietnam War but he hadn’t won a single primary. The protests and subsequent police crackdown played out in Chicago with the entire country watching and that was enough to force reforms. The Democratic Party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to figure it all out.
Here is an important point when it comes to parties choosing their candidates: political parties, while often subject to government regulation, are private organizations with no obligation to open up their candidate selection processes. This gets more complicated because both parties are made up of fifty-plus state committees (all the states plus overseas territories), each of which have their own state-level election laws and ultimately run each primary or caucus in their own way. (Hence, the Iowa Democratic Party brought us Iowa debacle, not the Democratic National Committee.)
This chopped up the system makes some sense given that presidents aren’t elected by a national popular vote but an electoral system that concentrates votes at the state level. At the same time, fifty-plus contests, each with their own process and peculiarities makes for an extremely complex system that’s nearly impossible for journalists, pundits and academics to wrap their heads around, let alone foreign spectators. But this is hardly the most problematic part of the system.
The most distinctive feature of the U.S. primary system is its inclusiveness. The U.S. primary system is more inclusive than just about every candidate selection process across democracies, with the exception of Argentina. This may seem like a very positive thing and indeed it is in some ways. The U.S. system that was put in place in 1972 allows for wide participation both in terms of who can run and who may vote.
Who can run
Anyone who can gather the necessary signatures, which requires money, may enter a primary race, not just for president but further down the ballot to state governors, U.S. and state congresspeople and so on. Because the parties don’t have any sort of vetting process in terms of who can or can’t run, it allows outsider candidates to get into the game. But this can be positive or negative depending on your point of view. Donald Trump was certainly not a life-long Republican, in fact, had donated to Democratic candidates in the past. Bernie Sanders had always run for Senate as an independent who mostly voted with the Democrats. He only became a Democrat in order to run for president since it would give him a much better chance than running as the candidate for one of the smaller parties that never get a significant vote share. Leaders from both parties have not be thrilled with either Trump or Sanders but have had to at least put on a show of running a neutral primary.
This is not to say that the party remains neutral. Throughout the 80s, 90s and into the 2000s, many political scientists subscribed to a “the party decides” theory. The evidence was the influence of endorsements from party leaders as well as money and just general campaign help. Also, structural reform after the system was deemed too open in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the Democrats introduced the figure of the super-delegate and the Republicans innovated a winter-takes-all primary system. But to some extent in 2008 and much more so in 2016, this theory seems to have blown apart, with small, online donations becoming more critical to success as well as digital media coupled with grassroots campaigning. This is not to say that raising money and launching a campaign is easy, it helps if you’ve already built a name nationally, but candidates don’t necessarily need a party apparatus like they once did.
The downside here—yes, there is a downside—is that this makes it difficult for political parties to assure that candidates represent the party’s values and policy goals. This is an advantage to the central role parties play in the parliamentary systems here in Europe. Norway, for example, has one of the most exclusive systems in that the party leaders choose the candidates, much like how it used to work here in Spain.
Who can vote
Perhaps more important that inclusiveness in terms of who can run is inclusiveness in terms of who can participate in choosing the candidate. In this sense, the U.S. system falls in between a highly exclusive system like Norway, where party leaders choose or slightly less exclusive ones like in Spain or Ireland where party members are allowed to vote vs. the most inclusive system of all, Argentina, where there is a national primary system, Primarias Abiertas Simultaneas Obligatorios (PASO), in which all citizens are obligated to vote. Some political science has found that the more exclusive systems do better at choosing candidates who not only represent the country better (think gender, race, sexual orientation) but also are more responsive to the people because they are less indebted to the money interests that paid for their campaigns, for example.
The American system is complicated by different voting laws and preferences in the state committees, but in most states, you may vote in a primary if you have registered to vote with the party in question. Some states have so-called open primaries (as if they weren’t open enough) where voters can vote with any party the decide to vote with at the time of voting. This leads to a relatively high participate rate: anywhere from 15-25%, with a record high of 30% in 2008 when neither party had an incumbent president. Much lower than in Argentina, but much higher than where only militant party members get to vote. On the surface this might seem like more democratic system since we tend to equate voting with democracy. And in some ways, this is true.
Why Iowa and New Hampshire are so important
The United States is an enormous country and holding primaries over the course of six months allows the candidates to travel the country and meet voters and also allows the voters to get to know them. This allows parties to battle test candidates and their campaigns so that they are proven ready when they get to the general election. Then there’s the argument for the first-in-country Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. That these are small states that don’t require large amounts of money to run campaigns in (compared to expensive media markets like California and New York). The idea being that this allows lesser known candidates to launch a campaign and make a name for themselves so they can raise money for the big show.
On the other hand, because U.S. primary voting gets dribbled out over five to six months, the early states have enormous importance while the later states are often irrelevant. This is called path dependency in political science because the road to the nomination is dependent on winning early in order to survive and go on to other states. Democratic candidates such as Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker dropped out before voting even began because they weren’t polling well in Iowa. This was the same fate that the field’s only Latino candidate, former Obama cabinet member Julian Castro suffered, and he correctly griped publicly that Iowa is not the right state to go first because it doesn’t represent the country’s diversity. Iowa skews older and white, while the Democratic base skews non-white, young and female. Yet, the field of candidates is currently dominated by three men and to a lesser extent, two women, all of which are white.
Besides this unruly and unfair calendar, these contests follow one of two general formats, the first being a straightforward vote where everyone can cast their ballots either in person or by mail. The second is the more curious caucus system, which requires voters to participate in an event that might last several hours. Caucuses are a leftover from the pre-1972 days when results from the states were non-binding. In Democratic caucuses, voters gather in a public place like a church or school gymnasium and then physically groups themselves according to the candidate they support and then they cast ballots. Any candidate that doesn’t get 15% of the vote drops out and other candidate groups vie for their voters so that they can get a bigger share in the next round of voting. Voting ends when a candidate reaches a majority.
What is good about a caucus is that it allows for more consensus building that in a straight vote. But as part of a national primary system, the caucuses still only serve to add to a candidate’s over delegate count for the part convention. And many analysts contend, this lack of consensus building is perhaps the biggest fault with the U.S. system. This is especially evident in the current Democratic primary that is currently in a five-way split with two progressive candidates battling over that side of the party and three moderates contending for the other. Many voters are fretting about choosing the candidate they think will best be able to beat Trump and most often choosing this candidate over the one who they really like the best. But there’s no way to register preferences beyond the first choice, such as in a ranked choice voting system.
Chances that this system will be reformed are slim, but the Iowa disaster might just bring about some change. Institutions are, after all, highly path dependent and notoriously hard to change unless there is some sort of massive breakdown like the Democratic Convention of 1968. Both the Republican and the Democratic Parties are somewhat afraid of their party faithful and, in fact, real change would probably have to bubble up from the bottom rather than come from the top. If this is the case, activists will never move in the direction of having a more exclusive primary system and in fact, they have successful pressured the Democratic Party to scale back its super-delegates, who are widely seen as a way to exert elitist control over the process, rather than put some power back in the hands of party leaders. Given all this, the better question to ask these days is whether American political parties matter at all and if the next phase in the candidate selection system is eliminating them all-together.
This article was published in Spanish in esglobal.