It’s Time to Move Away from Primaries

Part 1: On the Current Nomination Process

A certain sort of conservative will find herself muttering the names of the Republican candidates from the last decade that squandered winnable races after narrowly winning competitive primaries. Sharron Angle. Todd Akin. Richard Mourdock. Roy Moore. Christine O’Donnell. Ken Buck. It’s not obvious that Republicans would have won all of those seats; Colorado, Nevada and Delaware are tough lifts for the GOP even in a good year. But on balance, Republican nomination choices since 2008 have resulted in several missed opportunities.

Indeed, it is fair to say that with better candidate selection, the GOP would have a minimum of 54 or 55 Republican senators and some latitude for defection. They’d also have a president that reflects the party’s more traditional policy objectives, rather than an inchoate and incoherent nationalism. Instead, they have a sort of governmental chaos coupled with a razor-thin majority at risk in the impending midterms.

The culprit is our candidate nomination system. Aided by an imprecise and careless public discourse, primary wins confer upon victorious candidates the appearance of democratic legitimacy. But they can easily be the triumph of narrow factions or pockets of low-information voters taken in by a celebrity candidate unfit for high office. The parties need to reassert control over their nomination process, dramatically reducing the significance of multi-candidate first-past-the-post contests.

In Federalist 10, James Madison argued that the competing interests of various factions would cancel each other out, and the result would be better outcomes. To Madison, a large republic of many competing factions promised “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

Small republics were vulnerable to factions gaining majority control and governing in ways that were contrary to the general interest. An extended republic, on the other hand, would create many different forms of political conflict and as such guarantee liberty through the competition of factions and the difficulty of gaining a governing majority. Madison wrote, “… as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.”

This theory has largely played out in American politics, with the national parties being an unanticipated element. But primary elections, being such narrow, low-turnout affairs, more closely resemble elections in a small republic, where a plurality of a narrow slice of population can run roughshod over the broader interest.

Worse, in an era of strong loyalty to parties from voters, the problem of primaries is compounded. Minority factions in the extended republic — with the help of strong parties — can exert outsized influence, as the weakness of the small republic is ported into the extended republic. It’s like toxoplasmosis: the tiny fungus controls the brain of its host.

What Hath the Current System Wrought

Fundamentally, political parties exist so that like-minded people can work together to gain control of the government to implement one’s policy preferences. Therefore, the interest of a party is in the implementation of a sort of balancing act: find the candidate that can win that will also stay as close to your consensus policy preferences as possible. Previously, conservatives had the so-called Buckley Rule: nominate the most conservative viable candidate. This combined both electability and governance goals.

It should follow, then, that the nomination process should be focused like a laser on that two-part objective. But it is not. There are many examples where the reliance on first-past-the-post-style nominating contests has led the Republican Party to suboptimal outcomes.

Below are three separate cases, examined in some detail; they reflect different pathologies of the process, but share some unifying themes.

2011 — The Ames Straw Poll

Two Minnesotans sought the 2012 Republican nomination: the successful former two-term governor of the state, Tim Pawlenty, and a conspiratorial back-bench congresswoman, Michele Bachmann.

Pawlenty was boring. It was a characterization that stuck quickly; someone put together a site, ExcitingThingsAboutTimPawlenty.com, that was just a blinking cursor on a white background. On paper, though, he was a strong choice: A candidate from a competitive state, successful governor, executive experience, solidly conservative record and a good stylistic contrast to President Barack Obama.

Bachmann, on the other hand, was exciting. Telegenic and forceful on the debate stage, Bachmann roared into a strong poll position after a couple of good cable-news debates. By summer 2011, Bachmann looked like a decent darkhorse gamble for the nomination; Intrade had her as the second-most likely nominee, behind Mitt Romney, at various points in July. Meanwhile, Pawlenty’s campaign flagged.

The death-knell for Pawlenty was a double-shot of bad news in mid-August. The final nail in the coffin was the entrance of Rick Perry, another successful conservative governor who could actually excite the grassroots and rank-and-file, but first was the now-defunct Ames Straw Poll. Both of the Minnesotans focused heavily on the straw poll and Bachmann got the win, getting 4,823 votes. Pawlenty was a distant third, getting only 2,293 votes.

Essentially, the decisions of 2,500 voters led to Tim Pawlenty dropping out of the race.

Five months later in the Iowa caucus, Bachmann got only 6,000 votes — barely more than her straw poll showing — and a mere five percent of the caucus total. She dropped out soon after. Meanwhile, the last few months of 2011 — and the first few months of 2012 — consisted of anti-Romney conservatives veering wildly between different options: Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, even Herman Cain, all had their moments. (It was a strange cycle.)

Absent from this was Pawlenty — but the stable, responsible Pawlenty may well have looked like an attractive alternative to Romney as the Iowa caucus neared. Instead, he had been eliminated by the decision of 4,800 participants in a straw poll. 1,582,180 people eventually voted in the 2012 presidential election in Iowa. Therefore, 0.3 percent of voters in Iowa made the decision for the other 99.7 percent: Pawlenty would not be an option for them in the 2016 election.

Romney has gained in stature on the Right since 2012, but it’s worth remembering that at the time, many conservatives were deeply skeptical of Romney; commentator Jonah Goldberg memorably described Romney as speaking “conservatism as a second language.” Romney was perhaps uniquely unable to carry one of the Republican Party’s most promising attacks in the 2012 campaign — the unpopular Affordable Care Act was modeled heavily on the Massachusetts health plan that Romney had backed in 2006 as governor of the state, and his opposition to the ACA was always half-hearted.

The Straw Poll was eliminated in 2015, but it is part and parcel of the problems of our nomination process — randomness and tiny factions eliminating plausible options. A deliberative nomination process may well have have selected Pawlenty over Romney because of Romneycare. But we do not have a deliberative process, and Pawlenty was disqualified by 4,800 participants in a straw poll.

2012 — Missouri

The 2012 Missouri senate race saw Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from the 2006 wave, defending her seat. Missouri was once a national bellwether akin to Ohio, but it had turned increasingly red over the preceding decade. McCaskill was one of the most vulnerable candidates in 2012, and as such, she attracted a sizable Republican field that included two very strong candidates; self-funding successful businessman John Brunner, and former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman. It also included Todd Akin, a congressman with a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth. Akin won narrowly against a split field.

Over the next three months, Akin became a national disgrace and laughingstock en route to losing an easy Senate seat and running a full 14 points behind Romney. So, what happened?

First, although 217,404 voters out of 603,120 total in the primary decided on Akin, 2,713,623 voted in the senate race. That means that (roughly) eight percent of the voters made the decision that resulted in McCaskill’s victory.

Second, Akin’s margin of victory over his nearest opponent in the primary, John Brunner, was a mere 36,616 votes, or just 1.3 percent of the total votes cast in the general election. If 18,309 of those voters (down to 0.7 percent of our overall total) had voted Brunner instead of Akin, the result would have been different.

Third, Akin had some help in the primary — from McCaskill herself. McCaskill’s campaign knew that she would be an underdog against a conventional Republican, and that Akin was the most likely opponent to fall flat on his face. So she boosted him, putting together a seven-figure ad buy designed to portray him as the most conservative candidate. It worked. Low-information voters bought into Akin, and he won the nomination. And McCaskill reaped the benefits.

In short, the decision of 18,000 voters forced the Republican-leaning electorate into a no-win situation: either back the execrable Akin, or tacitly allow McCaskill’s re-election.

One shouldn’t condemn McCaskill’s campaign for its cleverness; what she did was well within the rules. But one should ask: why do the Republicans accept a process that allows their opponents to meddle so effectively in their nominee-selection process?

2016 — New Hampshire

It’s worth noting that the violence of faction can hurt everyone, not just upstanding moderates. Factionalism exists throughout an entire spectrum. The 2016 New Hampshire primary is a textbook example of where the “moderate” faction cost the Republicans a better outcome.

John Kasich was a successful governor from Ohio in the midst of his second term. Although he stormed the gates as a Tea Party-style insurgent in 2010, Kasich reinvented himself as a moderate conciliator in Ohio after a referendum rebuked his attack on public sector unions. Kasich’s newfound posture led to a crushing victory in the 2014 Ohio gubernatorial race. Kasich looked poised to be a plausible nominee, potentially on the Romney track, with the benefit of a home-state convention in his future. Needless to say, Kasich declared his candidacy and camped out in New Hampshire for a few months.

And went nowhere. Kasich spent much of his time criticizing the Republican base and his opponents for extremism. He was mired in the low single-digits in national polling, having trouble gaining any traction in the broad field. His very best poll showing in 2015 in a national poll was 6 percent. Even in New Hampshire, Kasich mostly scuffled. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, he was averaging about 13 percent in August, dropped below 10 in October, and never crossed back into double digits until January. In February, Kasich was hovering at 11 percent in New Hampshire, along with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio.

For Bush and Christie, it was a similar story. Neither gained any traction; neither had much of a shot; both hovered in the low teens and high-single digits in polling as the voting began. Bush, Christie and Kasich all did nothing in Iowa; combined, the three got less than seven percent of the Iowa caucus vote. Meanwhile, Rubio finished a strong third with 23 percent in Iowa. This should have triggered a sort of rational consolidation in New Hampshire towards Rubio as a potential unifying candidate — and for a time, it did.

Here, it is worth looking over some polling data to prove this point: On Jan. 31, 2016, Rubio was holding steady at 9.5 percent in New Hampshire. The next day, he exceeded expectations in the Iowa caucus and delivered a well-received nationally-televised address in prime-time. In 15 polls that were in the field from Feb. 2 to Feb. 6, Rubio averaged a 15.6-percent voting share. But in the Feb. 9 election, Rubio only pulled in 10.5 percent.

What happened in the meantime was the Feb. 6 debate.

Rubio had the worst two minutes of anyone in the 2016 presidential campaign, and it cost him. Any effort at consolidation stalled; New Hampshirites split their votes horrendously. Donald Trump began his glide path to the Republican nomination by winning 35 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. None of his opponents got even half of that.

It is hard to deny the conclusion that the debate stopped Rubio’s momentum out of Iowa; indeed, it likely reversed it.

But it’s worth taking a step back. What can two minutes of debate tell anyone about the fitness of an individual for the presidency? About his/her ability to make tough decisions? To persuade people? To negotiate with the Congress? To defend key and important principles? No one should have changed their vote based on that debate. And yet, many must have made their decision at that moment or in its aftermath.

Thus, the Republican primary voters of New Hampshire acted like spectators of a reality television program, punishing Rubio for his tactical error and splitting their votes. The worst offenders, of course, were the Kasich voters. Hanover, New Hampshire, is an instructive example: the home of Dartmouth College gave 42 percent of its vote to Kasich, presumably because they liked him best. But a more deliberative process would have encouraged people to vote more strategically. Kasich was a dead-end. Nothing was going to save him. He was running in just two states: New Hampshire and Ohio. Instead of doing something for the sake of the party, Hanoverites decided to self-actualize and inadvertently boost Trump.

In total, 100,735 New Hampshirites voted for Trump, and 127,433 voted for one of Rubio, Kasich, Bush or Christie. Later that year, 743,117 people voted in the general election in New Hampshire. Therefore, 13.6 percent of New Hampshire voters gave us Trump. If you believe that Rubio would have gotten the nomination with a second-place finish in New Hampshire, it was a mere 15,000 votes separating Rubio from Kasich. On that math, two percent of New Hampshire voters gave us Trump.

The factional interests of various elements of the Republican Party conspired to allow the narrow faction that supported Trump to win, even though his nomination was a worst-case scenario for many of those other factions.

The unifying theme is that the broader interest of the party is surrendered to this patina of democracy. Several factors facilitate this:

First, money. Smart campaign observers monitor quarterly fundraising disclosures closely to determine which way the election is likely to go; fundraising can translate into persuasive, polished ad campaigns, well-choreographed campaign events and direct mailers. In the absence of self-funded campaign dollars, a huge number of contributions from individual donors, or a well-run, well-funded SuperPAC, one has only one alternative…

Free media. This was the Trump approach: overwhelm his opponents by being ubiquitous on cable and broadcast news. Allegedly, this was a deliberate strategy, according to a Politico report.

“He said, ‘I’m going to walk away with it and win it outright,’” a long-time New York political consultant recalled. “Trump told us, ‘I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.’”

This gathering of New York’s political class was not held on the eve of Trump’s announcement. It was much earlier than that — 25 months ago, in the weeks before Christmas of 2013, a period well before most Americans and even many politicians were thinking about the 2016 presidential contest. Well before Trump would come to utterly dominate the GOP race from the very moment he declared himself a candidate.

The specific quote has a monologuing feel to it, but that’s exactly what he ended up doing. By one estimate, Trump had gotten over $2 billion worth of free media exposure by March 2016. That’s sixfold above what the next closest competitor, Bush, got in free and earned media combined.

The money and media profile combination is ultimately the weapon of choice for building name recognition, which is critical for winning elections where there is no party distinction between the candidates: voters must know their candidate to vote for him/her. Elections analyst Patrick Ruffini has identified the mechanism, noting that, for as much as people talked about Trump’s focus on a certain type of working-class Republican primary voter, Trump also appealed to a substantial share of “normal” primary voters:

We often understand primary elections on a one-dimensional ideological scale. But in reality, there’s (at least) a second dimension: the voter’s level of political engagement. “Low-information” voters often masquerade as moderate or somewhat-conservative voters in polls, and as a result, we assume they have a substantive preference for more moderate, or electable candidates. But in reality, it’s a preference for the strongest horse, one that doesn’t demand that they first embrace a specific set of ideological precepts.

The untold story of this primary is how Donald Trump has incapacitated the Republican party’s establishment wing by shearing off the kinds of rank-and-file, non-ideological voters they have always relied upon to muscle through conservative primary challenges. Trump’s apostasies don’t matter just as the (relatively tamer) apostasies of Romney and McCain didn’t matter. As a result, the “establishment” has been an army with officers but no enlisted men, unable to command more than 20 percent for support for its preferred candidate at any time in the process.

One problem is that the media’s interests and the party’s interests are not necessarily aligned; indeed, they may well be at loggerheads. And yet the current nomination system grants the media ecosystem an enormous amount of influence, between hosting debates, granting interviews and merely setting the agenda for the day.

A couple of other factors are relevant in our nomination process as currently constructed:

Intensity of support. This is why Ted Cruz won Iowa, and why Elizabeth Warren will be such a formidable candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination: their style attracts fervent support. Cruz was the type of candidate that attracted such intensity of support that he had volunteers filling an abandoned dorm to get out the vote in Iowa. Meanwhile, his style and approach engenders intense opposition. A system that required consensus would make it very hard for a Cruz to get the nomination. But the current system gives Cruz a real shot, in part because of…

Momentum. Early victories in the nomination calendar are a godsend for a campaign. In fact, since the advent of the current system, the Republican Party has always nominated a candidate that won at least one of Iowa or New Hampshire. This is in part because that candidate is the beneficiary of enormous positive media attention. Most partisans can support most politicians within a party and backing a winner is enjoyable. Thus the factional candidate hijacks the party apparatus: while they are factional and their core supporters are factional, many of the party’s rank-and-file voters really don’t work that way. This was, of course, what the RNC was banking on in 2016 when they stacked their primary calendar the way they did.

Money, free media, name recognition, intensity of support and momentum are major factors in driving the nomination. Note what is missing: electability and consensus. The current system does not foster the selection of candidates with broad appeal that will reflect the will of the broadest coalition possible. Therefore, while primary elections may appear democratic, they are part of a process that is not republican in the Madisonian sense of trying to have a government that represents the will of the people while simultaneously protecting dissenters from majoritarian tyranny.

If bad nominees were destined to lose every time, parties might take this problem more seriously. But general elections are different in an era of ideological parties.

To be continued…

Dan Scotto has written for Ordinary Times and The Federalist. He currently lives in Oregon.