Why The Presidential Primary System Is Broken
I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting we had a presidential primary this year, given that these contests felt more pointless than ever. We’re headed to a rematch between Joe Biden (who no one wants) and Donald Trump (who is currently on trial for 34 felony counts). Both parties held primaries and did their song and dance pretending to care what everyday Americans thought, knowing what the outcomes would be. While majorities of US adults polled are dissatisfied with Biden and Trump being the Democratic and Republican nominees for president, it’s happening anyway.
Surely there’s gotta be a better way, right? A system that gives us the same bad options over and over can’t be the best one. Today, I’m going through how our modern presidential primary system came to be, why it’s broken, and how we can fix it.
HOW WE GOT HERE
Under our current system, three key steps happen to determine the nominee for each major party:
- Democratic and Republican voters show up to their primaries/caucuses over the spring of an election year and vote for their preferred candidates.
- Each state’s share of “delegates” (a set number of votes/points represented by party members) is awarded to candidates based on those results at the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
- The delegates “vote” at the conventions and the candidate with the majority of the delegates for each party moves onto the November general election.
Steps two and three are the only two that have been around for a long time — considering voter preferences at all in the nomination process is, unfortunately, a novel concept. To spare us the trouble of going through America’s entire electoral history, I’ll highlight three elections that were turning points for how we got to the system we have today.
1824
While Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and the Electoral College over three other candidates (all of whom won states of their own), he didn’t get an outright majority. That sent the election over to the House of Representatives, which chose second-place finisher John Quincy Adams as the new president. Outraged, Jackson and his supporters broke away from the Democratic-Republican party to form the Democratic party, while Adam’s people then dubbed themselves the “National Republican party.” With two parties each nominating one candidate for the 1828 election, our two-party system was cemented.
1912
At this point, 13 liberal states had begun to hold Republican primary elections for president by this point, which were between former president Teddy Roosevelt, and his successor, the more conservative William Howard Taft. However, these were used to gauge opinion rather than award delegates. Despite 9 out of the 13 states that held these primaries voting for Roosevelt, party insiders at the Republican party convention nominated Taft anyway. From here, Roosevelt broke off the Republican party and formed the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party, which advocated for states to award their delegates based on the results of primary elections.
1968
While some states set up primaries to award their presidential delegates by this point, most did not. Voters in states that held Democratic primaries backed anti-war candidates like Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, but party bosses nominated establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey anyway. Activists like Geoffrey Cowan campaigned for openly accessible primary elections, while Humphrey lost badly against eventual president Richard Nixon. Realizing that their preferences clashed with voters, Democratic party insiders finally adopted primaries more widely. Under public pressure, the GOP did the same thing, and today, all 50 states hold binding primaries or caucuses to award their delegates for both parties.
While our current primary process is undoubtedly more democratic than it used to be, it’s still a long way from fairly reflecting the will of voters. Let’s break down why that is.
WHY THINGS ARE STILL A MESS
State parties get to do whatever the hell they want.
This year in Nevada, the Republican primary was won by no one. You heard me right, folks — 60% of the over 80,000 votes went to “none of these candidates,” while just 30% went to Nikki Haley, the only candidate running on the ballot. It gets worse, though — said primary didn’t result in any delegates being awarded. Instead, delegates were awarded two days later at a caucus that Nevada Republicans insisted on also having. When Nevada Democrats changed state law to transition away from party-run caucuses to state-run primary elections (as all states should), the state Republicans decided they could *own the libs* by hosting a caucus anyway. Turns out, Trump was the only one on the caucus ballot, rendering two separate elections completely pointless.
While I found that example particularly ridiculous, the reality is that primaries are still a wild West. State parties can host primaries (where you fill out a ballot and you’re done) or caucuses (a medieval method from the 1800s where you stand in a cramped room for three hours to indicate your choice in front of your neighbors) and then award delegates with any math they want. There is no reliable source where voters can see the most important and up-to-date rules by state. A 2016 report from the USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy tried to do that and came up with this:
I’m a political nerd, and this makes my head explode — no way would an average voter be able to follow that.
Every state wants to go early, frontloading the election cycle.
Geoffrey Cowan and his fellow activists in the 1960s proposed rules stating that delegates had to be selected within the same calendar year as an election and that primaries would be open late into the year. Those weren’t adopted, and we’re now left with a system where outcomes are determined based on what happens in a few states, with no regard for any other voters.
After the Iowa Republican caucuses this year, the Republican primary field was culled to just Trump and Haley; in more than half of the states, voters didn’t even have the opportunity to choose between those two. In 2020, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar both dropped out after Biden’s victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary and immediately endorsed Biden, leaving their coalitions of voters who wanted both a moderate and a fresh face with no options. Which candidates you can vote for is determined by a combination of party elites and results from states that were lucky enough to go before you on the calendar.
Not only is frontloading the process undemocratic, but it’s also not good for the parties. Perhaps the most commonly shared concern among voters about both Biden and Trump as candidates is their age — as the two oldest presidents in history, both risk not living through Election Day, let alone the presidential term they’re running for. If one of them can’t finish his campaign, political experts predict chaotic conventions that will result in a new candidate selected from the backroom deals of the olden days.
That’s not the only reason both parties would benefit from having alternative candidates available. Hypothetically, Trump could need to be replaced because of his ongoing criminal cases, and Biden could also be a liability to Democrats due to the massive amount of support he’s lost by endorsing the genocide in Gaza. However, because states are incentivized to hold their primaries early, candidates can’t get on the ballot in most states and can’t earn delegates until after these problems escalate, even if the previous frontrunner is now unavailable.
Early states don’t speak for America.
Media outlets tend to cover early primary/caucus states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) as tests of how candidates will fare with certain demographics. That’s, um…kinda awkward considering that the first two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, have populations that are 85–90% white. While Nevada has a sizable Latinx electorate and South Carolina has a higher-than-average Black population, this combination of four early states still skews whiter, older, and far less urban than the nation as a whole. Aside from Las Vegas, there are no large urban centers — a key part of the Democratic base.
Our system now essentially tokenizes voters by asking Nevada to speak for Latinx voters nationwide, South Carolina to speak for Black voters nationwide, and New Hampshire to (I guess) speak for rich white suburbanites. If the purpose of early primaries is to reflect which candidates can inspire broad support, they fail at doing this.
Embarrassing glitches in the process.
I believe we have very secure and professionally run elections in America — if we’re talking about general elections. Presidential primaries — not so much. In 2020, Democrats kicked off their primaries in Iowa with an app that was supposed to streamline the process failing. They couldn’t even declare a caucus night winner, leading both Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg to claim that they had won Iowa. Afterward, unintentional irregularities still appeared in the tallies and did nothing to help voter confidence. Given how much skepticism people already have about voting, neither party should be willing to look this incompetent if they want to win in November.
Outright cheating.
After the 2016 primary, interim DNC chair Donna Brazile discovered that a joint fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was signed in August 2015, a year before she became the Democratic nominee. Typically, a presidential candidate doesn’t assume control of their party’s finances until they are…I don’t know, ***officially the nominee?*** However, the Clinton campaign got to control the DNC’s operations, fundraising, and hiring well before a single primary voter had weighed in on whether Hillary should be nominated. In 2017, Sanders donors filed a class action suit against the DNC, which was dismissed on the grounds that the DNC’s promises of impartiality were not enforceable in court:
“For their part, the DNC and [former DNC Chair Debbie] Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise — political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts…while it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates ‘go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way,’ the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle.” — Federal Judge William Zloch
To recap, the DNC got away with this because neither state nor local parties are legally held to the same standards as state election administrators. If that’s true, why do we trust them to run elections? While what they did may not be a crime, it is antithetical to the party’s claims that they care about democracy.
So, what we’re left with is a system that is chaotic, inconsistent, unrepresentative of America’s wishes, and rife with glitches that leave no confidence in the process. Democrat, Republican, centrist, socialist, I don’t care — if you’re an American and you care about democracy, you should be embarrassed by this.
WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT
If we reconceived the presidential primary system in America once, we can do it again. Based on the problems we’ve talked about, I have a couple of solutions to propose.
All states go at once, and presidential primaries should be run by states.
One day, one nationwide presidential primary. This solves the problem of later states not mattering by eliminating early states altogether and turns election administration over to state and local officials who are equipped to run elections. If you prefer a candidate who is polling in second, third, or fourth place, you’ll still have the opportunity to vote for them no matter where you live and know your vote will count and be reported accurately.
If this sounds radical to you, I’d like to point out that this is already how we hold primary elections for every other office. We don’t have different counties voting on different days to determine who the next governor of Colorado will be — it’s only because of a wildly outdated system that we do that for president.
Filing deadlines must be kept as late as possible.
This benefits both voters and parties for a couple of reasons. First, current events matter when selecting a president, and a single issue (whether it’s a war, an economic crash, or the candidate’s declining health) can turn the outcome of a primary or general election. If you need to replace a nominee, you can use actual election results to decide who steps in rather than backroom deals. Second, this lowers the barrier for entry enough for a candidate with legitimate potential to get in towards the end. In part because of early deadlines, all candidates seem to be either political insiders or billionaires with enough wealth to self-fund campaigns. Rather than a drawn-out spectacle, elections can be tight, condensed, and user-friendly.
For these first two pieces (evening out the filing deadlines and election administration), there isn’t currently a national movement. That said, one example worth drawing on could be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. For those unfamiliar, this is an agreement between states to award electoral votes (in the general election) to the winner of the national popular vote. While the compact won’t go into effect until a majority of electoral votes are pledged this way, it does lay groundwork and put some pressure on states to join — you may remember this is how we got primaries in the first place. I’d expect standardizing primaries would require a similar push — groups like Common Cause are doing related work and could be worth looking into.
Ranked-choice voting.
If you truly want to know who Americans are willing to vote for, this is a great method. For those unfamiliar, ranked-choice voting is a system that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference so that if their first-choice candidate doesn’t win, their vote will be instead awarded to their next highest available choice. This way, voters can choose the candidate they really want and not the one they think they have to vote for because of the spoiler effect. While some candidates will still drop out before the primary in this scenario, switching to ranked-choice gives more candidates a better chance of proving they can earn consensus support. Some states and cities are already doing this, as are other countries — check out The Juice Media’s video on how this system works in Australia below.
God forbid your frontrunner dies, goes to prison, or steps away from a presidential term they know they’re not fit to complete. Based on ranked choice voting results, you’ve got another candidate ready to go who has proven they can earn at least some broad support within your party’s coalition. Voters win and parties have better data on what their voters want. I recommend looking at groups like FairVote to learn more and get involved in this fight.
TL;DR/IN CONCLUSION
It used to be that the candidates in the general election for president (aka the nominees) were chosen by the leaders or elites from each party. Now they are, in theory, chosen by voters. However, nominees are in practice picked by a tiny portion of all Democrats and Republican voters through an outdated, wildly inconsistent, and often unfair process. To fix the primary system, we need to make presidential primaries like any other elections — on the same day, run consistently, and with an equal say given to all voters. Voters deserve to have as much say in what each party will stand for as they do in which party controls the presidency.
I hope you enjoyed learning with me about how we pick our presidents — please leave a comment below with your thoughts, other changes you’d like to see made to our primary system, or with another topic you’d like to learn more about. Expect another piece next week. To get notified when it drops, you’re invited to “applaud” this piece, follow me, and subscribe to our email list here. Later.
