Change the Rules: Presidential Nominations

Jeb Bush speaks before the Iowa Agriculture Summit in March (Jim Young/Reuters).

What is it about Iowa and New Hampshire? What is so special about those two states that warrants them going first during every single presidential cycle?

Neither state is that particularly heavily populated. Iowa ranks 31^st among states, New Hampshire 42^nd, according to 2014 Census estimates. No city in either state has more than 220,000 people.

It’s not diversity either. Both states are considerably notably whiter than the rest of the nation. Iowa is 92.5% white and New Hampshire is 94.2%, compared to 77.7% for the country as a whole (*).

The actual reasons these two states get to go first is tradition and inertia. In Iowa’s case, a major factor was the availability of hotel reservations in Des Moines in 1972. New Hampshire has passed laws entrenching it as the first primary, and the national parties have never bothered to overrule them.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is not a good reason, and it’s not without consequence. Both states winnow the field considerably, typically eliminating all but three or four candidates before the vast majority of the other states get to weigh in. Not to mention a quadrennial boost in tourism, which has benefits that should be more evenly distributed among all states.

But Iowa and New Hampshire’s outsized influence is just one problem with our nomination process. As the presidential campaign gets underway, it’s worth reviewing the rules by which our next nominees will actually be picked. It is, like so many things in the American political system, a bizarre convoluted process. We can and should do much better.

Vote at the same time, later in the year

Of course, if not Iowa and New Hampshire (and Nevada and South Carolina shortly thereafter) then who should get to go first? The way it works now, with states and territories holding their primaries and caucuses every week or two for several months means that some people won’t vote until the nomination is basically decided. Just as one has to go first, another has to be last.

The very act of ordering nomination contests inherently leads to inequality in the amount of relative attention candidates and the media pay to different states and territories. 

This is why the entire country should vote to nominate at the same time.

Ten to twenty states already typically hold their primaries on one day in February or March of a presidential year. “Super Tuesday” is scheduled for March 1 in 2016. Why not have a national nomination day in which the whole country votes concurrently? After all, the general election in the fall is held on one day, with varying periods of early voting preceding the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. When parties nominate candidates for state or local offices, different parts of a state, city, or country vote together.

Alternatively, the voting period for a nationwide nomination could take place over a month or so, made possible by using universal mail balloting. This method would accomplish the goal of weighing the votes of all party members equally. Additionally, it would be an opportunity, especially for Democrats, to demonstrate that a longer voting period boosts turnout and can work effectively, undercutting the arguments of Republicans who support cuts to early voting.

A short period of nomination voting would also mitigate the problem of the interminable nature of American campaigns.

Instead of a six month stretch beginning in January or February, nomination voting could be pushed back to August or September and limited to no more than a month. Primary campaigning could be confined to the preceding summer, party conventions could be pushed back to mid-September (when voters actually begin to pay attention), and debates to mid-October. It would cheaper and significantly less mind-numbing (**).

Popular votes, not delegates

Voters do not actually directly pick presidential nominees under the current system. Delegates at national party conventions officially select the general election candidate.

The rules for how that happens are a bit complicated. Each of the 50 states and several non-state groups send delegations to the conventions (***). The number of delegates corresponds roughly though not exactly to state population size and level of party support in each state. 

Democrats mandate that delegates are allocated proportionally based on primary results as long as candidates clear a 15% of the vote threshold. Delegates in caucus states are allocated through a series of conventions after caucus-goers weigh in, which occasionally produces strange results. Republicans have begun to move in that direction, but for states that hold primaries after March 14 in 2016, they will have the freedom to allocate delegates on a winner-take-all basis. This post-2012 change was intended to help the frontrunner at that point clinch the nomination, something the RNC perceived would have helped Mitt Romney during the last cycle.

Party leaders and elected officials, known as super-delegates, also get a direct say in the nomination process and make up 15-17 percent of all delegates.

The various mechanics of the delegate process range from subtly to explicitly anti-democratic, mitigating the influence of the party in the electorate (p. 15), magnifying the influence of party elites, and empowering frontrunners.

Disparities between popular will and delegate allocation are rare, but do happen. Hillary Clinton received slightly more popular support than Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries even though Obama received the nomination. Ron Paul finished third in the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses behind Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, but ended up receiving 22 of the state’s 28 delegates.

A better approach would be to simply get rid of the delegates as intermediaries and allow voters to directly elect nominees. Nationwide, most votes wins (sort of, which I’ll get to in a second).

It would require the entire country to use primaries instead of caucuses and fully break the link between the selection of nominees and the national convention. But neither of those qualify as major losses. As is, the conventions are mostly glorified party infomercials and networking events for party activists and affiliated interest groups (and expensive ones at that). Meanwhile caucuses produce much lower turnout than primaries. 

A national one-person, one-vote model would be eminently more democratic, and would replace the currently delegate system that has few compelling virtues.

Preferential voting

Most American political elections use a first-past-the-post system: the candidate with the most votes wins. Whether a candidate received a majority isn’t relevant. Typically it is also “winner-take-all,” as there is no reward for placing second.

The primaries individually don’t quite work this way because of the delegate model. The eventual nominee has to get a majority of all delegates (****). Finishing second or third in discrete primaries or caucuses isn’t fatal.

But replacing the delegate process, as I propose, with a direct primary brings the problems with traditional first-the-past-post to the fore. The principal one is what to do about elections with winners who receive less than 50% of the vote, which is common in a multi-candidate field like a major party presidential nomination.

The 2016 Republican nomination is a textbook example of what this looks like. Until the Donald Trump surge, there was no clear frontrunner. He is the clear leader of an average of recent national polls, but with less than 25 percent. Support is fragmented among the 17 candidates in the field at this, granted, very early stage.

Support inevitably concentrates as the nomination contest drags on, but we only need to look to the most recent GOP nomination to see how long that process can take.

Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses in 2012 with under 25% of the vote, beating Mitt Romney by just 34 votes. Romney won New Hampshire convincingly, with 39%, but he still wasn’t close to a majority. Most of the nomination contests Romney won were with sub-50% shares of the popular vote.

When the field of candidates is as large as it is this year, voters must make strategic calculations. Do they want to support their first choice or do they want to pick someone with a realistic chance of victory?

Both options carry drawbacks. Idealists may be unknowingly supporting a “spoiler” candidate who doesn’t have a chance at winning but takes votes away from a more viable candidate (think Nader voters in Florida in 2000). More pragmatic voters may have to support someone who they are not entirely comfortable with.

Fortunately, there is a better way.

Preferential or instant-runoff voting is a superior alternative to first-past-the-post for candidate-centric elections. Instead of choosing one candidate among many, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, the least popular candidate is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to whoever they ranked second. The process continues until someone has a majority.

In the context of presidential primaries, parties would be better equipped to reach consensus on a nominee. Party voters could support their first-choice candidate while also unifying around the frontrunner or leading alternative with their second or third choice. According to FairVote, preferential voting also promotes greater civility in campaigning and motivates candidates to appeal to all voters rather than just narrow constituencies. And if Republicans’ goal is ultimately to pick the best candidate to beat the Democrats next fall, shouldn’t party unity be a top priority?

Change is constant

For the better part of the 20th century, the broader public had little role in presidential nominations. Conventions determined nominees. State party bosses decided who their delegation would support at the convention in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms.”

The 1972 McGovern-Fraser reforms changed that, democratizing the process. Delegation sizes were made to depend on state population size and overall Democratic support. The Commission affirmatively increased the share of delegates who were people of color, women, and young people to more accurately reflect the Democratic coalition. And crucially, primary elections became the principle way convention delegates were selected, empowering the party in the electorate.

George McGovern on the campaign trail in 1972 (Mark Perlstein/Wisconsin State Journal).

Forty years later, it is time for new reforms and even more democracy.

The type of national party nomination I’m proposing closely resembles this year’s Labour Party leadership election in UK, the nearest equivalent in that country to a presidential primary. I bring this up because it’s not perfect, and these reforms are not a panacea. Frontrunners and candidates with higher name recognition would still have immense structural advantages, namely in money and media coverage. The difficult question of whether primaries should be closed, or open to independents and members of other parties remains.

But these reforms would be a vast improvement over the status quo. American democracy too often fails to hear the voices of too many. One person, one vote must be our guiding principle. Let’s take a step in that direction.

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(*) Keep this in mind when you see presidential candidates stumble when talking about issues facing black voters.

(**) Shortening the endless nomination phase is easy on paper, but it can only be contained to a degree. Ambition for higher office and the tendency to look ahead are natural human qualities, not just in the U.S. Informal campaigning and media speculation are unavoidable. But pushing back the voting period would help.

(***) District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, and the Virgin Islands also holds primaries and sends delegations to the convention. Democrats Abroad will also hold a primary and send about 17 delegates to Philadelphia next July. Approximate size of each of those delegations as well as the 50 states for Democrats and Republicans in the links.

(****) Regardless of delegate allocation, in a primary system in which perceived momentum is valuable currency, finishing first in discrete contests is especially valuable, even if it’s with only 25 or 30 percent.