My
Vote Means Nothing: How presidential primaries backfired.
By David Greenberg
Posted
Presidential primaries were
created to put power in the hands of the people—to make the choice of party
nominees, once the preserve of the bosses, more democratic. But instead of
producing what you'd expect from democracy—greater disagreement, difference,
and unpredictability—the ascent of binding primaries has turned the
pre-convention months into a dreary slog. After a flurry of excitement
surrounding Iowa and New Hampshire, front-runners typically amass springtime
victories like a college football team running up the score in the last
quarter. Even junkies get bored and turn off the TV.
Why have the primaries become a tedious march
toward the inevitable, rather than an exhilarating saga of democracy in action?
And why do New Hampshire and Iowa continue to exert so much influence that the
balance of the primary season feels like an afterthought? The
answer in two parts.
Primaries were the brainchild of early-20th-century
reformers. Previously, delegates had chosen their nominees by bartering and
scheming at conventions. But in the Progressive Era, good-government types
mobilized to disinfect the squalid backrooms of the party bosses. Over the
course of a generation, they introduced a slew of political reforms, from the
use of secret ballots in the 1880s to the direct election of U.S. senators in
1913.
Primaries were supposed to further this
movement. Wisconsin, which passed the first significant primary law, is a case
in point. Gov. Robert La Follette had watched with
fury at the 1904 Republican convention as party chieftains seated
business-friendly "Old Guard" loyalists instead of progressive
delegations like his own. At his urging, his state passed a primary bill that
let voters choose their party's convention delegates directly.
The
Just when primaries seemed like the wave of
the future, they receded from view. One general reason was the shrinking
appetite after World War I for reform of any sort. More concretely, primaries
proved to be costly, and voters weren't turning out en masse. As a result,
candidates didn't treat primaries as necessary stops on the road to the White
House. In the 1910s and 1920s, most successful aspirants mapped out other
routes to the nomination. In 1920, the Republicans, deadlocked at their
convention, chose Warren Harding of Ohio, who hadn't entered any primaries at
all. On the Democratic side, so few primaries had lured the top candidates that
the number of uncommitted delegates dwarfed the number pledged to any
individual. With primaries seeming irrelevant, only one state, Alabama, enacted
a new primary law between 1917 and 1935. Eight states actually abandoned
theirs.
After World War I, democratic hopes had been
dashed; but after World War II, these hopes were reinvigorated. Primaries made
a comeback in the late 1940s on the promise that they would help fulfill
America's egalitarian potential.
Particular events helped. One was the
surprisingly strong showing in the 1948 GOP primaries of Harold E. Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota. Though New
York's Thomas Dewey, the presumed front-runner, ultimately prevailed, Stassen scored several primary upsets along the way and
gave the primaries new respectability. More states established primaries, and
between 1948 and 1952 turnout climbed from 4.8 million to 12.7 million. (Also influencing this trend was New Hampshire's decision in 1949
to revamp its primary law, on which I'll say more tomorrow.)
Most important, television arrived. Suddenly,
a politician like Democratic Sen. Estes Kefauver of
Tennessee—who once would have had to bide his time and accrue seniority before
seeking the White House—could gain instant fame through the tube, as he did in
1950 by presiding over dramatic hearings into organized crime. Kefauver parlayed his celebrity into a presidential bid,
campaigning across New Hampshire in 1952 in a Daniel Boone-style coonskin cap
and upsetting President Truman in the primary. Kefauver
then won 12 of 15 primaries, and although he wasn't nominated—Democrats went
for Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson—his populist, media-driven candidacy
(along with Eisenhower's defeat of Robert Taft on the Republican side that
year) confirmed primaries as a viable way to outflank party bosses. In later
years, Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Barry Goldwater all nabbed their party's
nominations with key primary victories.
Party reforms after 1968 solidified the
primaries' importance. That year, Sen. Eugene McCarthy came within 4,000 votes
of upsetting President Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic contest,
prompting LBJ to end his re-election bid. Robert Kennedy then jumped in the
race—his primary fights against McCarthy would determine the party's nominee. RFK's assassination on June 5 was all the more devastating
to his supporters because it happened the night he won the crucial California
showdown. In August, at a deeply divided convention, the Democrats chose the
plodding Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had won none of the preliminary
contests, whose selection met with despair, and who went on to defeat in
November.
The Democrats appointed a commission led by
South Dakota Sen. George McGovern and Congressman Donald Fraser to reform the
nomination process. The McGovern-Fraser reforms required greater transparency
in how states chose their delegates. To meet these new strictures, many states
found it simplest to hold binding primaries—making delegate selection a
function of the popular vote. (The Republicans, responding to the same
democratizing pressures, did similarly.) Before 1972, an average of 14 states
held primaries each election; today almost every states
holds one. Turnout also climbed.
In theory, the greater power of ordinary
voters should have made for more open conventions. It's easier for party
insiders to close ranks behind an anointed candidate—or to bargain their way to
a consensus—than it is for tens of millions of atomized citizens to do so. But
since primaries became the main method of choosing nominees, the opposite has
happened: Despite occasional upsets in the early going, front-runners have
mostly held on to win the nominations by racking up primary victories. Voters, sheeplike, dutifully follow the winner.
Several interrelated factors explain this
phenomenon. One is what pollsters call a bandwagon effect. Because people like
to hold opinions that the majority shares, they will unwittingly adopt the
opinions of the majority. After Gary Hart's victory over Walter Mondale in the
1984 Democratic primary, he gained 27 points in the Gallup poll overnight.
The second is the news media. Even if people
don't consciously cast their ballots for the most "electable"
contender, candidates enjoy a surge of positive news coverage after winning New
Hampshire or Iowa. This golden glow makes them more attractive to voters in
later rounds. In 1976, Jimmy Carter trailed the pack of Democratic aspirants
when a victory in the Iowa caucuses landed him on the morning news shows and in
the newsmagazines. Evening news programs allotted him five times as much
airtime as any of his rivals. New Hampshire media coverage is even more
intense. According to a study of the 1996 Republican race by political
scientist Emmett Buell, the New Hampshire primary generated more than six
nightly news stories per delegate at stake, compared with an average of 0.18
stories per delegate overall. The disproportionate media coverage that New
Hampshire enjoys means voters in subsequent weeks are much more likely to be
influenced by the outcome in the Granite State than in states where many more
delegates are up for grabs.
Third, campaign-finance reforms passed in
1974 capped individual donations at $1,000 apiece (raised
to $2,000 as part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act). Candidates' fund-raising
thus became less dependent on big donors, more reliant on mass appeal. Poor
showings in New Hampshire, or at other points early in the campaign, now dry up
not just a candidate's publicity but also the dollars that publicity brings.
Finally, in 1972, the Democratic National
Committee banned winner-take-all primaries. (The ban was
lifted but imposed again in 1992.) This made it harder for candidates
(at least for Democrats) who are lagging in the race to become viable later on.
With winner-take-all primaries, a trailing candidate could regain viability
with a first-place finish in a big state; now, with delegates allotted in
proportion to how candidates place, a front-runner can steadily grind out a
victory merely by doing well enough to maintain his lead.
Not since 1968, then, have voters felt the
excitement of a June primary where the nomination is at stake. On the contrary,
the trend of the last 40 years has been to front-load—to move contests earlier
and earlier in the campaign season. The 2008 campaign is already looking
radically different from those of years past, with nearly 20 states, including
California, Florida, and New York, having pushed up their primaries or caucuses
to compete with Iowa and New Hampshire.
But front-loading created another irony. So
far, at least, it has strengthened the hand of those first states, making the states
that follow them little more than dominoes waiting to tumble into place. More on this tomorrow.
Article
URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2167725/
My
Vote Means Nothing: Nearly 20 states are moving up their primaries, but it
won't change a thing.
By David Greenberg
Posted
Presidential primaries were
conceived in the Progressive Era as a tool for democratic reform. But, as I
noted yesterday, they have ironically wound up sandblasting the road to the
nomination into a bump-free ride for most front-runners after the Iowa and New
Hampshire contests. Victories in those early states—or even close seconds that
become "perceived" victories—have typically bestowed big bounces,
while losses there have dashed once-formidable aspirants. That nearly 20 states
have moved their primaries or caucuses to late January or early February in
2008—most of them scheduled for Feb. 5—represents just the latest stab at
challenging the supremacy of these two states and giving others a greater voice
in the nomination process. But it's far from clear that this strategy will
work.
For many years, the goal of
other states was simply to dethrone New Hampshire. Ever since its emergence in the
1950s as the key primary, critics have grumbled that the Granite State, which
is neither large nor reflective of the American populace, had no business
hosting the most influential primary. Compounding the unfairness, New Hampshire
attained its first-in-the-nation status through dumb luck. Back in 1916, it
scheduled its contest for its Town Meeting Day, which fell on the second
Tuesday in March—the same day as Minnesota's vote and one week after Indiana's.
But by 1920,
So long as primaries were
inconsequential delegate-choosing contests—from the 1920s through the 1940s—no
one cared much about this special status. But the attention that the Tom
Dewey-Harold Stassen primary fights drew in 1948
prompted Granite State legislators to revise their laws. In 1949, they let
delegates on the ballot affiliate with a particular presidential aspirant. Now,
for the first time, New Hampshire voters would be not just picking delegates
but indicating a preferred nominee. Suddenly it made sense for a candidate who
wanted to show that he had a following to court New Hampshire voters. Both
Estes Kefauver and Dwight Eisenhower proved their
viability with victories there in 1952. And New Hampshire voters appreciated
their newfound importance: From 1948 to 1952, turnout in the state climbed from
4,000 to 36,000.
After 1952, it was said that
no one could become president without winning New Hampshire. The claim is
somewhat misleading. Bill Clinton defied the rule in 1992, when he finished
second to Paul Tsongas there but spun his way to victory by declaring himself
the "Comeback Kid." George W. Bush also made it to the White House
after losing to John McCain in 2000. And, since 1952, Granite State voters have
actually failed to pick their parties' eventual nominees six of 14 times on the
Democratic side (choosing Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Edmund Muskie
in 1972, and Gary Hart in 1984, along with Kefauver
twice and Tsongas in 1992), and three of 14 times on the Republican side
(choosing Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964 and Pat Buchanan in 1996, along with McCain
in 2000). Still, if New Hampshire hasn't batted 1.000, its average has been
solid. A candidate's showing there almost always matters—something that can't
be said of most other states.
As a result of this
influence, New Hampshirites have jealously guarded
their campaign-season primacy. In 1975, when Massachusetts and Vermont tried to
schedule their primaries on the same day as New Hampshire's, Granite State
legislators accelerated their own by a week. They further mandated that their
primary be conducted a week before any other state's.
Soon, however, New Hampshire
faced a challenge for prominence from an unlikely rival: Iowa. In 1972, to
comply with the McGovern-Fraser reforms, Iowa had moved the first round of its
multistage caucuses to January. Yet because
In 1980, that changed.
Analysts looked back on recent races and saw a pattern in the making. Both
George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 had done well in Iowa, and it
appeared that a strong showing in the caucus might now be able to give a
candidate the kind of boost that had been considered the bequest of New
Hampshire alone. It didn't quite pan out that way: Although Carter repulsed Ted
Kennedy's primary challenge in 1980 by besting him in Iowa, on the Republican
side George H.W. Bush, despite asserting that he had "Big Mo"
(momentum) coming off his Iowa victory, fell to Ronald Reagan weeks later in
New Hampshire.
Iowa has never displaced New
Hampshire in importance. But it did establish itself as a secondary proving
ground. Many a high-flying candidate's bid has crashed there: Democrat John
Glenn's in 1984, Republican Phil Gramm's in 1996, Democrat Howard Dean's in 2004. Moreover, most of those who
skipped Iowa altogether in recent decades—Al Gore in 1988, Joe Lieberman and
Wesley Clark in 2004—found themselves quickly sidelined.
If Iowa managed to establish
itself as a junior partner to New Hampshire in certifying front-runners, the
much-hailed Southern regional primary that was supposed to counteract New
Hampshire's influence never materialized. Starting in 1980, when three Southern
states held early primaries in an effort to help Carter fend off Kennedy's
challenge, Dixie Democrats hoped to cobble together a regional primary to
balance the effects of the Midwest's taste for populists and New England's
preference for liberals. In 1984, pundits began to speak of "Super
Tuesday"—a date soon after the New Hampshire contest on which multiple
states scheduled primaries—emphasizing the importance of the Southern states
voting that day. But other states outside Dixie also piled on. By 1988, Super
Tuesday had expanded so much as to dilute any regional influence. Thus, while
Al Gore, who had done poorly in New Hampshire, won several contests that day,
so did Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the overall front-runner.
Thereafter, he faced no serious threat to his nomination.
Super Tuesday—like so much in
the history of presidential primaries—has backfired. The greater the number of
states that voted in the mega-primary, it turned out, the harder it became for
candidates to personally campaign or even to spend money in all of them. Thus,
"free media"—evening news coverage, magazine features, newspaper op-eds—became the key to scoring across-the-board victories on
Super Tuesday or other early multiprimary days. And
the key to getting free media turned out to be … winning Iowa and New
Hampshire.
Obviously, no one can predict
with confidence how this year's heavy front-loading will play out. But the
crowding of early primary dates seems just as likely to reinforce New
Hampshire's kingmaking mystique, or Iowa's, as to
strip it away. If so, the only difference would be that this year, after Feb.
5, the time between the effective end of the nomination campaign and the
national conventions will seem all the more protracted and all the more lifeless
than it has in the past.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and media
studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and
Calvin Coolidge.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2167726/ 