Why Do We Have Primaries?

To understand why we have primary elections, we need to start with the basic premise that modern democracy involves elections between at least two political parties. Political parties are the preeminent institutions of modern democracy because they make political competition coherent and accessible to the masses. They limit the potential choices (i.e. candidates and policy priorities) to a manageable amount and shape the kinds of coalitions necessary to govern a diverse society.¹

However, political parties, especially American political parties, are abstract and frustratingly diffuse. They are everywhere and nowhere at once, and famously difficult for political scientists to define.² Elections are fought between actual people—candidates—even if they are affiliated with political parties. And it is individual representatives who ultimately draw up and vote on our laws, even if those representatives are affiliated with parties. This creates endless confusion among political analysts, who tend to castigate representatives who are too partisan, and praise individuals who are more independent of political parties. Yet without political parties to limit the number of candidates, elections would be confusing and chaotic, with too many competitors and no gatekeepers. At the same time, political parties are ultimately defined by their elected representatives, who together form a coalition. If the coalition were too loose and incoherent it would become meaningless, throwing elections and governing into disarray. Parties always form in modern mass democracy because something needs to structure politics, to make it possible to conduct elections and pass legislation. That something is the political party.³

If a political party is ultimately defined by the coalition of individual representatives who get elected and come to represent that party in the public mind, then the process by which those representatives are nominated to compete is “one of the central defining functions of a political party in a democracy.”⁴ But how should nominations work? One can imagine any number of processes, from giving the power to a singular party leader, to holding a public election open to all. Most political parties around the world are closer to the first than the second, with a small group of core leaders who control nominations. In many political systems, parties assemble candidate lists and voters can only select among the candidates on the list, or simply select the party. The United States is at the extreme end of leaving nominations to the public. Compared to those of every other democracy, modern American political parties are uniquely porous and non-hierarchical in their selection of candidates.⁵

Despite how they operate today, American political parties historically worked more along the lines of the first model. Prior to the introduction of the direct primary in the early twentieth century, parties were more clearly private clubs, which nominated their own candidates through various gatherings or conventions, and, for the most part, their members took turns in office. But around 1900, this chaotic approach to nominating candidates had become increasingly fraught.⁶

In attempting to fix or change any institution, it is crucial to understand why it exists in the first place. After all, existing institutions are not random piles of sand. Rather, institutions are edifices constructed by a previous generation, and they reflect the compromises, intentions, and assumptions of previous leaders. These previous leaders were attempting to solve a particular problem at a particular time. As with many political institutional changes, attempts to fix one problem create different problems down the road because politics is always changing and all institutional changes have unanticipated consequences.

So what problems did the direct primary solve—and what new problems did it create? First, we need to consider the problems parties were facing at the time the reform was introduced. As America grew and became more diverse both culturally and economically in the late nineteenth century, parties were struggling to manage a rapidly growing number of competing interests and factions. It was becoming harder to agree on candidates, which meant (even) more chaotic nominating conventions. Resolving these unruly conventions required more bargaining among party elites and the factions they represented, and that bargaining required many dubious deals, prompting frequent and often justified cries of corruption. Meanwhile, ambitious politicians grew increasingly frustrated with the power that the convention system gave political bosses and wire pullers. Tired of having to suck up to some political machine, and confident that a direct connection with the voters would afford them the autonomy and power that they deserved, many candidates decided to run on their own.

In short, the old convention system had fewer and fewer defenders, as its problems became harder and harder to manage. The only consistent proponents of the existing primary system were rural delegates and representatives who feared that a more popular-vote driven system would undermine their power relative to urban voters, who were underrepresented generally.

In the 1890s, political parties in some places had already turned over their role in administering candidate selection to the states when internal divides prevented them from doing so, marking the first versions of the direct primary. The same decade also saw the introduction of the “Australian” ballot, in which states printed universal ballots that listed all candidates, rather than parties and candidates handing out individual ballots or “tickets.” This put pressure on parties to establish consistent procedures for selecting official nominees in order to control their spot on the ballot. Additionally, as the realignment of 1896 created more solid single-party states and districts, the nominating convention effectively became the election. For reformers, the only way to ensure electoral competition that gave voters a meaningful choice was to move to a direct primary. And for party leaders, particularly in the solidly one-party South, a primary election was a tool to keep all the dissenting factions within the party ranks, rather than leave open the opportunity for a dissenter to mount a general election challenge.

Wisconsin, then a hotbed of progressive reform, enacted the first official direct primary statute in 1903. Within a decade, most states followed Wisconsin’s lead. Corruption had grown rampant under the previous system, and many reformers at the time saw a purifying effect in the new approach. As one chronicler of this history explained, the reforms “might be described as democratic in their approach only to the extent to which they wished to see more respectable, middle- and upper-class citizens participating in the process. Immigrant and working-class voters dominated the caucuses and primaries, so it was claimed, because so few of the ‘better element’ turned out for these events. Corrupt political machines employed fair means and foul through their control of the nomination process to fend off challengers. Civic-minded citizens knew that the system was rigged, reformers averred, hence their decision not to participate was entirely understandable. The same citizens would flock to the polls if they knew their votes would be honestly counted by election officials who were not beholden to a corrupt political boss.”⁷

Nebraska Sen. George Norris (R), a leading progressive, explained his high hopes for the direct primary in a 1923 essay entitled “Why I Believe in the Direct Primary.” The direct primary, Norris noted, places “a great deal of responsibility… upon the individual voter. The intelligent American citizen assumes this responsibility with a firm determination of performing his full duty by informing himself upon all the questions pertaining to government. It therefore results in a more intelligent electorate, and as this intelligence increases, it results in better government.” Norris predicted that, with this added citizen responsibility would come “the enlightened judgment of reason that will pervade the firesides and homes of a thinking patriotic people.”⁸ As was typical of mugwump progressive reformers, Norris shared an abiding faith in the wisdom of ordinary citizens to exercise reasoned and independent judgment, as well as a deep-seated conviction that partisan bosses and organized interests were corrupting forces.

The direct primary, of course, did not bring the desired transformation in the intelligence and reasoned engagement of the electorate. In this respect, it followed the path of other Progressive Era reforms that envisioned a more enlightened and engaged electorate if only special interests and partisan machines were sidelined. Instead, citizens proved mostly uninterested, and happy to turn power back over to the parties and the interests.⁹

Despite primary reform, party bosses largely maintained their grip on power, though their power involved more indirect means of marshaling endorsements and money. These factors became more important when candidates had to compete against one other more publicly, which made name recognition more valuable and more costly. Though direct primary elections did bring competition more into the open, thus giving voters more direct say, the consensus among historians of primary elections is that primaries mostly enabled the major parties to continue to operate successfully. Party leaders could maintain their big tents by keeping primary elections open to all factions, who could then fight it out amongst themselves without forcing leaders to pick sides and potentially offend anybody.

The most consequential effect of the direct primary was that it increased the importance of candidates in American elections, and contributed to the unique candidate-centeredness of American political parties.¹⁰ Arguably, this trend was already underway, but the direct primary codified the new arrangement. In the wake of the direct primary, parties found it difficult to forge meaningful national identities (at least, until the rise of national campaign financing networks in the 1980s), and party leaders struggled to exercise the kinds of gatekeeping responsibilities that are so common across other advanced democracies. To be sure, parties in all other democracies also struggle with the right balance between top-down and bottom-up power in nominating candidates, and candidate selection remains a live debate. But no other democracy has gone as far in the direction of bottom-up candidate selection as the United States.

The history of the direct primary has two important lessons for us. First, it tells us that reform is possible when political actors widely acknowledge that the current system is failing and unsustainable. When reformers present an alternative that solves a pressing problem for both party leaders and elected representatives, that alternative has a very good chance of passing, even if it creates some uncertainty.

Second, this history tells us that there is no one perfect approach to the process of candidate nomination. If parties are in charge of nominations, party leaders may have a hard time overcoming their own biases to navigate competing factions in a way that everyone agrees is fair and neutral. If voters choose party nominees, politics becomes more centered on candidates, which raises the importance of name recognition and individual fundraising. Under these circumstances, party leaders cannot exert as much direct gatekeeping control, and must instead rely on more informal, behind-the-scenes approaches, such as endorsements and campaign contributions.

Again, there is no perfect system. All rules elevate certain types of candidates and certain factions above others. Parties in every advanced democracy around the world struggle with intra-party politics. Different approaches select for different qualities. But visible or invisible, candidate selection is an essential, defining feature of political parties. And as a general rule, the more bottom-up the process, the more candidate-centric it is.

One of the paradoxes of American politics is the extent to which partisanship has become such a dominating force even as the parties remain weak and porous institutions.¹¹ This paradox has led reformers in two different directions by focusing on two competing aspects of the problem: Is the problem that partisanship is too strong? Or is the problem that parties are too weak?

Both questions lead back to primaries. Those with more affinity for political parties, largely political scientists, have called for turning party nominations back to the party leaders, hoping for more candidate quality control as a way to weaken destructive partisan polarization.¹² Others, particularly supporters of open primaries and independent movements, think that less party control is the solution to polarization. What both groups have in common is that they see candidate selection as crucial. But both camps make very different assumptions about the behaviors and incentives of voters, candidates, and parties, and how these behaviors and incentives might change under different rules. Existing studies of primary elections and electorates have a lot to say about these assumptions. By focusing more closely on what we know (and still need to know) we can get closer to an understanding both of the nature of the problem of hyper-partisan polarization and how we might mitigate it.