As political parties got more democratic in choosing candidates, the candidates got worse | Opinion

Against my better judgment, another presidential primary season will kick off Monday in Iowa.

When these beauty contests began appearing in the early 1900s, they basically functioned as opinion polls. In 1952 and 1968 the Democratic party ran candidates who hadn’t bothered with them. The real work of choosing nominees happened in conventions.

That changed in 1972, when both parties began allocating convention delegates according to primary votes. No longer would cigar-chomping political bosses out of old movies choose the nation’s leaders. Now the people would decide.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, their people decided on South Dakota senator George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who went on to lose 49 states. The party appeared to recover four years later when Jimmy Carter won the White House from Gerald Ford. But when he ran for reelection against a Republican who had not pardoned the disgraced Richard Nixon, Carter lost in a landslide.

Two historic defeats in three elections prompted the party to reclaim some control over its nominations. In 1984 it set aside convention slots for “superdelegates” – party elites free to support candidates of their choice. With luck, they would temper the populist impulses that produced weak nominees.

Our politics would be healthier today if the Democrats had simply restored the old system after McGovern’s loss. There was nothing wrong with unpledged delegates and party insiders deciding whom to nominate. No one had more incentive to find candidates with broad appeal who could win elections. But Vietnam and the disastrous 1968 Chicago convention had splintered the Democratic coalition, and a more inclusive and transparent selection process represented a peace offering to the disillusioned.

The Republicans, who didn’t need to mend fences or change their procedures, had little choice once their opponents ditched the dreaded “smoke-filled room” for power to the people. Allowing the Democrats to preen about giving ordinary citizens a voice (and disparage the GOP because it didn’t) was out of the question.

Thus both parties outsourced their most important job, picking presidential candidates.

Primary contests on average draw fewer than half the voters who turn out in November. Conventional wisdom says the early birds are more partisan and ideologically extreme than the median general election voter. Yet when social scientists compare primary and general electorates, they often find little difference in either demographics or ideology. The evidence for a moderate “silent majority” that would dominate the primaries if they could drag themselves to the polls is at best spotty.

That said, at least two nominations in the modern era are unimaginable in earlier decades. In 1972 the Democratic establishment would not have tried to unseat Nixon with a populist who promised to cut defense spending and redistribute wealth – but the grass roots insisted. In 2016 the Republican establishment was slated for demolition by Donald Trump, and stopping him was the old guard’s only chance for survival. You know how that turned out.

Today our parties exercise less control over candidate selection than those of any other major democracy. They could fix the problem if they wanted to – but for the same reasons that applied half a century ago, they would need to do it at the same time.

Crazy talk, I know. But crazier than discarding a system that produced Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and two Roosevelts? I don’t see that modern “improvements” to the nominating process have improved the product. No self-respecting smoke-filled room would give us Donald Trump – or, for that matter, a nominee who would have any trouble beating him.

We seem fated to get both, despite telling pollsters for two years that we’d rather eat dirt. The people pleasing approach to national politics isn’t pleasing a whole lot of people these days.

Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown.