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What Do We Want From A Nomination System?
1) The parties should nominate the candidate who has the best chance to win the election
2) The primary contest should minimize internal party divisions to maximize the chance of victory
3) The voters should be able to pick the nominees.
4) All candidates should have an equal chance at the nomination
5) The campaign should be interesting.
6) The campaign shouldn't be too long
7) Oh, and the nomination system should pick qualified candidates.
Let me discuss the consequences of each of the above principles one at a time.
1) How does one know that a candidate has the best chance? Oftentimes this is not clear until the candidates is in the midst of the general election. Just because someone is polling well know doesn't mean that they are the best candidate - they might just be better known.
2) This principle will push for a quick, front-loaded process that mitigates against 3-5. It is basically what we have now - short and sweet nomination contests, but that favor certain regions of the countries, well-known candidates, and makes the process boring.
3) This is of course a very slippery notion - which voters? Party activists or the general mass of voters? Should all voters everywhere have an equal say? And should every group of voters have an opportunity to make their preferences known? The latter two would push us towards something like a national primary.
4) This principle generates another big set of problems. If we have a sequential contest, then candidates from certain regions are favored (why do you think New Englanders do so well? New Hampshire, that's why). If we have a national primary, then less well-known candidates are favored.
5) An "interesting" campaign would have to be very long, and would divide both parties as they experience prolonged internal feuding. This would also generally favor incumbents, since usually their party is going to be more unified.
6) Alternatively, a short campaign means frontloading and establishment candidates, and will be "boring."
7) Who decides what a qualified candidate is? Well, we can certainly argue that the present system doesn't favor this criteria, since the chief assets a candidate can have is fundraising ability and a good media personality. On paper, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden should be front-runners. Obama and Edwards should be out of it. Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney should be also-rans to Huckabee, McCain, and Brownback. Sort of the opposite of what we have now, isn't it? Frankly I'm not sure how one even gets this criteria considered.
So as you can see, there isn't going to be a perfect system, because there are so many competing principles at work. We're going to have to make a decision as to which principles are most important, and try to reduce the negative effects on the others. And we can also determine whether any of the many proposals out there meaningfully address these concerns, or does too much to privilege one over the others.
Next time: Evaluating Proposals for Reform.
1 Comments:
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I think it is time for me to say something at this point. I have been eagerly waiting for you to post these supposed principles to see if they make any sense. The seven principles you have articulated make some sense, but I think they can be grouped under 2 categories.
By
1. The primary system should produce the best president.
"1) The parties should nominate the candidate who has the best chance to win the election
2) The primary contest should minimize internal party divisions to maximize the chance of victory
7) Oh, and the nomination system should pick qualified candidates."
2. The primary system should promote voter and candidate access and participation.
"3) The voters should be able to pick the nominees.
4) All candidates should have an equal chance at the nomination
5) The campaign should be interesting.
6) The campaign shouldn't be too long"
It has surprised me that no one has really talked about why the primary system is falling apart. This is largely a byproduct of (1) extreme dislike of Bush and (2) the first open nomination in 80 years and (3) life and death consequences of who becomes the next president. This combination makes voters in every state want to have more say than they previously had before, and there is an assumption that the more information voters have about the candidates, the more likely they are to make a better choice. Thus, there is a big push for genuine participatory democracy, and against consumer voting.
If we abide by principle 1, "The primary system should produce the best president", then we want to have long campaigns so that voters can get more information. Yet, long campaigns often produce divided parties because voters often go more for personality choices, not policy choices. The myth of the rational voter takes a beating if we follow this principle. Most voters are not rational, do not have a long attention span, and are not educated enough to really consider differences in policy proposal. Thus, personality is the only useful tool voters have, even if it is often a bad tool. Most voters are used to sizing up personality in the space of 30 seconds, at least, and 2 hours at most, because that is how the media frame the candidates. Thus, with personality as the most important factor, a short campaign tends to produce an interesting campaign, but not the best candidates, an equal chance for all candidates, or an opportunity for all voters to have their say.
This leaves us with 2: "The primary system should promote voter access and participation." It is impossible to objectively determine which candidate is truly the best since it is so difficult to predict future decisions of presidents. Therefore, since we can quantify access and participation, more and more people now lean toward this principle. The problem is that the dominance of personality choice over policy choice makes the campaign seem too long because the system is trying to shift the emphasis to voter participation.
The end result is that we have a primary campaign that thinks it is about picking the best candidates but is really trying to be about voter participation. In order to really focus on voter participation, a national primary makes the most sense. If we nationally mandate that all states have the primaries on the same day, then all candidates will have to travel to every state to create the necessary organization to win the nomination. The nomination should then go to the candidate who has traveled to the most states and has the most robust organization (the most volunteers or potential voters, the largest donor base, etc.) The general election would then be about the policy preferences and ideas espoused by the candidates, not about personalities. A primary process should be used to attract people to a campaign an build an organization (access), not about hashing out policy differences. The policy debate can wait until the general election.
Marriah, at 5:54 PM
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