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The GOP Debate Is Proof That Presidential Primaries Must End [1]
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Date: 2023-08-28
Whether you agree with his ideas or believe them to be the root of evil, if Karl Marx told us that religion is the opium for the masses, then the over-democratization of American presidential primaries has become the cocaine for the masses. The first Republican debate of this election season proved it to me beyond any shred of my own doubt. Here’s why:
I watched the whole debate last night on Fox News (I started writing this the next day) - all two hours of it from start to finish. Even before the first opening statements from the candidates, the event had already descended into a circus. In case any of the viewers had forgotten which country we lived in, we were subjected to a shrill rendition of the national anthem from a Christian-pop singer named Natalie Grant, who is (you guessed it) extremely white and extremely blonde.
After the anthem was over, the candidates were asked their first question of the night: to respond to a popular country song making waves on social media called the “Populist Bluegrass Anthem,” which criticizes so-called “rich men north of Richmond" who are supposedly the political establishment neglecting the needs of the working class by taxing them too much, expanding the size of government, and sending their money overseas. Without even addressing the song’s lack of any substantive political intelligence, there’s a great irony when the multi-billion, multi-national corporation of the Fox News Channel - which is quite literally run by a “rich man north of Richmond” - is using this song as the first question for a Republican debate.
After that, the debate was off to the races. Much like many of the news articles published the day of the debate, I could have written about who I thought were the “winners and losers” from the night. I could have hyper-analyzed every candidate’s best moments and greatest one-liners. And there were a few storylines that made sense in the moment - Ramaswamy clearly shined in the spotlight, Pence and Haley definitely over-performed, Ron DeSantis was neither the star nor did he have an epic collapse, and Tim Scott put people to sleep.
But then I thought to myself, “none of this will matter in about 24 hours.” Donald Trump’s arraignment in Georgia and the release of his long-awaited mugshot will immediately direct the media’s attention away from the events of last night. The average person who’s going to be clocking into their job at 9 A.M. for the rest of the week is not going to care about which candidate landed the best “zinger” that can be showed on television or a TikTok video as a 15-second soundbite. For godsake, the combined polling total of all 8 candidates on the debate stage represented a mere 40.2% of the Republican primary vote in the latest Five-Thirty-Eight average. This would be like trying to decipher how the 37-91 Oakland Athletics’ fifth-string starting pitcher’s use of a backdoor slider is going to have an effect on the latest betting odds for the World Series. It is a pointless exercise.
This last debate was among such a small portion of the electorate that it has become a joke
Instead, I want to think about this debate from a 30,000-foot view, and what it means for the health of our democracy. What disgusts me the most about these primary debates, especially on the Republican side, is that they quickly descend into repugnant exercises in performative outrage. We treat these debates more similarly to a WWE smackdown than an opportunity for voters to hear a set of policy proposals for the largest economy in the world, and the most dominant agent of foreign policy in human history.
Four years ago, when we were spending time analyzing the Democratic primary debates, one of the most ubiquitous predictions made by political pundits was that, with the exception of healthcare, the 2020 candidates differed so little on the substantive issues that the debates would quickly descend into a contest of personalities. But after rewatching some parts of the 2019-20 debates, I found that candidates who made the worst playground-bully insults actually exited the debates wounded from the experience. For example, in the 3rd Democratic debate, Julian Castro insulted Biden a grand total of four times in one minute by (incorrectly) making fun of him by saying “are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” That moment in the debate was actually considered the death-knell for his campaign because of (rightful) accusations of ageism based on incorrect facts.
To be sure, the Democratic debates had their moments of smack-downs, such as when Elizabeth Warren called out Mayor Bloomberg for his extensive use of non-disclosure agreements for his former female employees - but it was still rooted in substance. Her argument was based on an issue that mattered to Democrats - electability - and they would be taking a huge risk “if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
Warren’s beatdown of Bloomberg was quite a memorable moment
Republican debates, on the other hand, were a dumpster fire inside a clown car inside a derailing train, even though the eight Republicans on stage differed a lot on substantive issues such as abortion restrictions, Donald Trump, the war in Ukraine, and climate change. You had candidates like Nikki Haley and Doug Burgum who avoided calling for a national abortion ban, while Mike Pence fervently argued for it. You had candidates like Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson calling out Donald Trump’s actions as being “beneath the office of President”, while Vivek and Ron continually made excuses for it.
The debate was taken over by the candidates who simply screamed the loudest and hit viewers with the most popular right-wing talking points from primetime Fox News. Unless you had a PhD in MAGA or QAnon theories, it was hard to even parse the winners from the losers, because the average Republican voter has now become so detached from the rest of us. We have departed so far from the days of balanced budgets and “the business of America is business” that it feels like we’ve transported to an alternate universe. What I found to be uninspiring could have easily been gospel to a Republican. As Bill Kristol aptly tweeted after the debate:
If the news media treated the substantive issues of the debate with as much care as the 10-second clips of rhetorical zingers, the chyrons of every news channel would have shown the words, “RON DESANTIS CALLS FOR INVASION OF MEXICO.” Or, if that wasn’t exciting enough, they would mention that Vivek called for a 75% cut in government employees, which would not only induce an immediate economic meltdown in the states of Virginia and Maryland, but kneecap the entire Social Security and Medicare programs. But we’ve become so desensitized to the craziness of the moment that we barely even notice anymore. All it takes now to become a prominent contender for the nomination of the third-oldest living political party in the democratized world is a couple million dollars and just spewing out whatever nonsense people want to hear that makes them feel good. Our once-proud American desire to treat our universal right to vote as constituting a sacred privilege to participate in choosing our own future - we have driven it so far past the last exit to irrelevance that we now treat a random billionaire from Ohio with the government experience of a middle school student as the “winner” of a debate simply because he “dominated the stage.”
Seriously?
Donald Trump may have been the first politician to take enough advantage of this rot within the American electorate to win the presidency, but that doesn’t mean his eventual exit from the political stage, whenever that day may be, will make the problem go away. It won’t. We remember Christopher Columbus for discovering the Americas, but that doesn’t mean the continent didn’t exist before he got there; it doesn’t mean another country like France or England couldn’t colonize it too; and it certainly doesn’t mean that the Americas would magically disappear when Columbus was gone.
This Republican debate proves that there will be no such thing as the “post-Trump” era of American politics. As long as there exists within the Republican Party a large enough segment of voters that can fall victim to a vacant-of-rationality demagogue, it doesn’t really matter whether its Donald Trump or someone forty years younger reading out of the same nationalist cookbook.
This era of our politics is the result of many different factors, including the ever-growing influence of money in our politics. But the power of that money is much more influential in the halls of Congress and our statehouses, not in a presidential primary field. Presidents do not write pieces of legislation granting tax benefits and regulatory loopholes for venture capitalists and hedge fund managers - that’s what your members of Congress do. Presidents just sign the bills they are handed by the Congress, over 97 percent of the time. Rich donors and Super-PACs did not create Donald Trump - if they had been able to choose the Republican nominee, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 opponent would have been Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. When it comes to the presidential primaries, the voters themselves are clearly the problem.
To paraphrase a famous quote by John Adams, we are watching our democracy waste, exhaust, and murder itself before our eyes on national television. America has defeated every enemy it has stared down since the American Revolution - the Redcoat Army, the Mexican Army, the Spanish, the German Empire, the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Soviets. Our greatest existential threat is now the possibility that we will conquer ourselves. We have fallen victim to “vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for [our] easy gratification,” and last night’s debate is proof that this disease within our society and our democracy did not start - and certainly will not die - with Donald Trump. I continue to watch in horror as so many voters gravitate to these vacuous characters in the political world like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, and even R.F.K. Jr. - individuals whose moral compass points only at themselves - I am left with only one conclusion: This system of electing a presidential nominee, the “primary,” has truly become cocaine for the masses.
In 2016, about 230 million American citizens were eligible to vote, and Donald Trump received a grand total of 14,015,993 votes in the G.O.P. primary, meaning that the nominee for one of the country’s two major parties got to the finish line with just the support of 6.1% of the possible electorate. Even if I become more generous, and only count registered voters, Trump only earned 8.9%. Just so you understand how horrifyingly low this number actually is, I’ll give you a few reference points:
That number is 2 percentage points smaller than the percentage of Americans who do not know what the Holocaust is. That number is 9 percentage points smaller than the number of Americans who believe the Sun revolves around the Earth (I AM NOT JOKING!). It’s 3 percentage points smaller than the number of Americans who believe the moon landings were fake.
You get the point?
Just because voters get to vote for the nominee of a major party instead of it being the choice of the party’s elites doesn’t make it the “choice” of the people or any more democratic. Is it really healthy for the next leader of the free world to be hand-picked by the whims of 300,000 people in Iowa and 600,000 people in New Hampshire? I hope you see the same warning signs that I do. The idea that the primaries bring more power to the people is an illusion; it only brings power to a very tiny minority of our fellow Americans. That is dangerous beyond belief, and it is the main reason we are stuck in this mess.
The easiest (and cynically popular) defense of the presidential primary is that the alternative, a brokered nomination, is a complete takeover of democracy by the elites. It’s hardly a herculean task to make disgruntled, low-information voters who don’t understand the nuances of politics feel victimized if for any brief moment, they feel like their influence is being snatched away by the powerful. If vanity was America’s national currency, we would be experiencing hyper-inflation. We spend more time concerned about how many people liked our Facebook post, or a 15-second TikTok video. We live in the world of a never-ending quest for self-importance, and it’s bleeding into our civic community. Our political culture has become so entitled that we no longer value what our vote can do for our country - to elect the best person to lead our great nation with honor and competency - but instead we ask, “what can you do for my vote?” We demand that our most primitive instincts be stroked and massaged - our insatiable need for the bullying, the narcissism, the cruel humor, the disdain for intellectuals, the outrage, and most importantly, the grievance. It is literally like cocaine - addictive, impossible to quit, and it creates the most fraudulent feelings of euphoria. When an individual like Donald Trump - who can tap into every single one of these emotions - only needs to win over less than a tenth of our voting-eligible population to be the nominee of a major party, we shouldn’t act shocked when it actually happens.
Presidential primaries are the American electoral system’s dirty secret - we all know there’s something very wrong with it, but nobody has the courage to actually change it for the better. As most of us know, it used to be that the nominees of the Democrats and the Republicans were selected by the delegates of the party itself at their quadrennial national conventions. If a candidate received a majority of the votes, they were crowned the nominee, but if not, the convention would continue, with candidates horse-trading and brokering deals in so-called “smoke-filled rooms.” It gets a bad rap as being undemocratic, but some of our greatest leaders emerged not from a terrific ground game in Iowa or New Hampshire, but from a convention hall.
In 1860, the Republican frontrunner for President was not named Abraham Lincoln, but a curmudgeonly abolitionist senator from New York named William Seward. The northern Republican base loved Seward, and he probably would’ve won a modern-style primary. But Republicans realized that in order to make up ground upon their loss to James Buchanan in 1856, they needed a candidate who could win some of the weaker links in the free-state chain of electoral votes. They needed to flip Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois to get over the finish line. That man was Abraham Lincoln. So the party nominated him, and the rest is history.
If the Republican party had used the modern primary system in the 1880 election, their nominee for President might have actually been former President Ulysses Grant. He was very popular among the hardcore Republican base in the North who still sang songs of his victory over the South in the Civil War. But the insiders within the Republican Party knew that he had been damaged by corrupt individuals within his administration, and would have trouble winning the extremely crucial swing states of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. For 35 ballots, former president Grant received just above 40% of the delegates’ support, while his closest rival, former House Speaker James Blaine, was roughly 20-40 delegates behind. But it became clear that neither man could unite a majority of his own party - so on the 36th ballot, a little-known congressman from Ohio named James Garfield, a fierce advocate of anti-corruption laws and a civil-rights stalwart, was presented as the unifying voice for the Republican Party. In finding a unifying face for a very divided party, the Republicans saved themselves from a Democratic victory in 1880 - Garfield won the popular vote by a mere 0.11%, the smallest margin in history, and won the crucial battleground state of New York with its 35 electoral votes…by just 1.9% of the vote.
Former President Grant “surrenders” to James Garfield, 1880
In 1952, when some states had begun to adopt the presidential primary in lieu of the old-style delegate system, World War II hero and national icon Dwight Eisenhower actually lost the Republican primary among conservative voters. The winner of the primaries was actually Robert Taft, a right-wing extremist from Ohio who authored the Taft-Hartley Act, the most anti-union piece of legislation in American history, opposed American entry into World War II, and even voted against the creation of NATO and the United States’ entry into the United Nations. If the Republicans had opted for our modern primary system, Taft would’ve been the Republicans’ nominee in 1952. Granted, he might have alienated such a large portion of the New Deal coalition that he would have lost to the Democrats - but if he had won…his likely running mate, General Douglas MacArthur (to balance out Taft’s isolationism) would have become President in 1953 when Taft died of cancer. This was the same Douglas MacArthur who was fired by President Truman because he wanted to drop the bomb on Red China. Instead, Republican insiders, desperate for an electable candidate after 20 years of losing to the Democrats, chose Eisenhower. That decision, not by voters, but by the gatekeepers of the Republican Party, might have saved the country from a nuclear war.
President Eisenhower lost his own primary in 1952
I’m not saying that the old system of nominating presidential nominees is squeaky clean and has no flaws. Some of the major-party nominees that emerged from brokered conventions were disastrous. In 1920, when it was already clear that the Democrats had no chance of winning the general election, Republicans passed up on the opportunity to nominate a moderate progressive WWI general named Leonard Wood who was an ally of former President Teddy Roosevelt. He wasn’t perfect, but he was certainly not in bed with the most pernicious business interests of the era. But after 7 ballots of maintaining front-runner status, he was passed up for a U.S. Senator from Ohio named Warren Harding, who would subsequently lead the most corrupt presidential administration in American history, and lead us down the path to the worst economic depression of our time.
But there’s one kind of candidate that never emerged from one of these brokered conventions - a fascist demagogue. In fact, after the airing of the hit TV-show The Plot Against America, which takes place in an alternate timeline where Charles Lindberg defeats President Roosevelt in 1940, Slate asked a number of presidential historians what they thought about the story’s plausibility, and as one put it -
“Lindbergh was a prominent figure within the America First Committee, or at least one of their most cherished celebrities, but he wasn’t the leader of the organization, and the idea that he would get the Republican nomination in 1940 kind of beggars belief.”
Part of the reason? There wasn’t a modern primary to decide the nomination. Charles Lindberg didn’t have the opportunity to stand on a debate stage while being aired on Father Coughlin’s radio show (the pre-TV version of Fox News) and lay down insults at “Lyin’ Tom” Dewey, “Little Wendall” Willkie, and “Crooked Bob” Taft. Even if such a debate did happen, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the 1/3 of Americans with anti-semitic sentiments, many of them Republicans, would not have decided the nomination.
Charles Lindberg speaks at a rally for supporters of “America First”
I don’t believe its possible to return to the most original version of the nominating process, but I have a compromise that can balance the will of the voters and keep outsider candidates with no ties to a party from receiving the nomination:
Instead of holding a series of primaries that start with states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, we hold a national primary - with every state holding the election on the exact same day. I would outright ban independent voters and members of other parties from voting in the primary - people who don’t have a vested interest in nominating the most electable candidate are more prone to picking extremists. Voters who don’t care about their party winning the election by avoiding the nomination of an ideologue are more dangerous than partisan voters because a lot of them (obviously not all of them) hate the government, they do not understand the basics of compromise and consensus, they’re easily hooked in by single-issue, snake-oil-salesman politicians, and their civic principles are about as sturdy as a bowl of jello.
In each of the states, delegates would be allocated proportionally to each candidate’s percentage of the vote, regardless of how low that percentage is. Currently, in Democratic primaries, which are all proportional, a candidate has to earn 15% to receive delegates. The same is usually true in Republican primaries, but some are winner-take-all. I would eliminate that requirement.
After all the votes are counted and the delegates are allocated, the five candidates with the highest number of votes (not delegates) would be placed into automatic nomination at the convention. If someone who was so popular within the party to achieve an outright majority such as an incumbent President or a popular Vice President like Al Gore in 2000, the nomination would be over. But in most circumstances, because there would be no early states to “narrow the field,” nobody would get close to 50%, meaning that the delegates would need to find a consensus nominee at the convention that could bring all factions of the party together. The candidates who finished in 6th place or lower would have their delegates roam free, giving an ample opportunity for shifts at the convention. If any candidate other than the top-5 selected by the voters themselves decides to place their name into nomination, they would need to get 2/3rds of the delegates’ support.
If we adopted my system, here’s how some of the most recent primary elections would have played out. The numbers are based on the RealClearPolitics polling average on the day of the Iowa Caucus:
2020 Democratic Primary:
Joe Biden: 27.6%
Bernie Sanders: 23.1%
Elizabeth Warren: 14.6%
Mike Bloomberg: 9.0%
Pete Buttigieg: 6.4%
Five-Thirty-Eight’s “best guess” of the primary map on the day of the Iowa Caucus, 2020. Biden is in dark blue, Sanders in light blue, Warren in purple
2016 Republican Primary:
Donald Trump: 35.8%
Ted Cruz: 19.6%
Marco Rubio: 10.2%
Ben Carson: 7.6%
Jeb Bush: 4.8%
Donald Trump did not achieve a majority of the vote in the 2016 primary
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