No political party can thrive in the long term if it is not a mass-based organization, drawing support and enthusiasm from a broad array of Americans and certainly from its own base.
Many thoughtful conservatives have pointed to the absurdities of the existing nomination process, but most proposals seek to tinker around the edges by limiting the number of debates or by including more states in the early contests. These ideas are helpful, but they do not go nearly far enough.
The core of the problem is that the current process empowers several groups that are not representative of most Republican voters. Any successful reform effort must therefore shift the balance of power to the party's grassroots. People who live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and contribute money to Republicans, people who live in Northern Virginia and do polling for the party, and Democratic-voting members of the mainstream media should not have considerably more say than the average Republican voter.
The question, then, is how to give the typical voter that power. The best way to draw more Republicans into the candidate-selection process is to revitalize the local and state party organizations. The contemporary system contributed significantly to the decline of these groups, which used to possess real political power and thus attracted the attention and involvement of the grassroots.
Today, conservatives who want to get involved in politics rarely, if ever, look to their state and local parties. And why should they? Local parties are no longer a locus of political power or influence. Unfortunately, state and local party organizations are misremembered as un-republican and corrupt. More often than not, they conjure images of the "smoke-filled rooms" in which corrupt influence-peddlers traded favors for nominations.
Yet the Tammany Hall days are now generations past, and, in reality, such corruption was never as prevalent as people now believe. Most Republican nominees between the Civil War and the Great Depression were not wrapped up in machine corruption, and William McKinley actually won the nomination in despite having denied the party bosses the patronage system they desired. The reformers of the s thus threw the baby out with the bathwater: Party organizations surely needed to be reformed, but instead they were effectively destroyed.
Any proper reform effort should breathe new life into these organizations. But that does not necessitate a return to the old national convention system: That ship has definitely sailed. The ultimate goal should be to democratize, in a meaningful sense, the nomination process, so that Republicans all across the country feel as though they have a real voice in the process and that their nominee represents them. The framers of the Constitution realized the importance of citizen participation in the establishment of our government.
In and '88, the 13 states held ratifying conventions to determine the fate of the newly proposed Constitution. That document had been written and signed during the summer of at Philadelphia's Independence Hall but, by its own terms, would not take legal effect unless two-thirds of the states ratified it. Ratification required each state to set up a ratifying convention of delegates; though the manner of selection was not specified, in most states, these delegates were chosen by the people.
The delegates then cast an up-or-down vote on the proposed Constitution. Apart from the regrettable limits on who was eligible to vote generally confined to white male property owners , this process of ratification was quite republican, open to a broad swath of the country while still promoting careful deliberation. Indeed, the republican nature of the process provided the legitimacy necessary for superseding the amendment provisions of the Articles of Confederation. Today's Republicans should learn from the framers' republican example.
If locally selected delegates decided something as weighty as whether to adopt the Constitution, wouldn't a similar process be fitting for determining the Republican Party's presidential candidate? It is in this spirit that we propose the following procedure for selecting the GOP presidential nominee.
During the week of Lincoln's birthday February 12 , the Republican Party would hold a Republican Nomination Convention that would borrow from the process by which the Constitution was ratified. Delegates to the convention would be selected by rank-and-file Republicans in their local communities, and those chosen delegates would meet, deliberate, and ultimately nominate five people who, if willing, would each be named as one of the party's officially sanctioned finalists for its presidential nomination.
Those five would subsequently debate one another a half-dozen times. Their fate would ultimately be decided by Republican voters from every state in a series of regional, direct-ballot elections. If nobody won more than half the vote, or won by at least ten percentage points, there would be a runoff between the top two finishers.
Through such a process, GOP voters across the country would finally have a say not only in who would ultimately become the nominee, but also in selecting the candidates among whom they would get to choose. As a result, the five formally chosen finalists would be much more likely to be among the best and the brightest the party could offer than has generally been the case with candidates under the current system.
Meanwhile, the new system would reinvigorate local and state party organizations, which would play important roles in conducting the elections of delegates. The entire selection process would generally be wrapped up by the end of April, and the nominee could then focus on staffing a campaign, raising money for the general election, picking a running mate, preparing for the made-for-TV convention in the summertime, and mounting a case against the prospective Democratic nominee.
To clearly show all the benefits of this proposal, we need to dig into the details. The Republican Nomination Convention would include about 3, delegates, 3, of whom would be elected by rank-and-file Republican voters across the nation in elections put on by local chapters of the Republican Party. Each delegate would represent about 22, Republicans, ensuring a strong level of local influence. Given Republican registration rates, this means a typical town of , people would have a delegate at the nomination convention.
A heavily Republican town of that size would have two. An average-sized state like Missouri would have about 60 such delegates at the convention. In addition, each Republican member of the House and Senate, each GOP governor, and during a Republican administration each Republican cabinet secretary would also be invited to serve as a convention delegate. These delegates would make up the additional or so at the convention. During the years in which an incumbent Republican president was eligible for re-election, the nomination-convention delegates would first cast votes indicating whether they supported the president's nomination for a second term.
Bush would likely have had no problem surpassing, but that Gerald Ford and even George H. Otherwise, and in all years in which there was not a sitting Republican president eligible for re-election, the whittling process would then follow these set steps: The delegates would cast three preliminary votes.
During each vote, every delegate would list on his ballot up to five prospective candidates for the party's presidential nomination, in order of preference. The candidate listed first would get five points, the second four, and so forth. An incumbent Republican president who had fallen short of the three-quarters threshold would be eligible to be listed on such ballots. The results for every round would be tabulated and released, including each candidate's point total.
The votes would be spread out so that the whole process would last two or three days. During the time between each round of voting, delegates would be able to see which potential candidates were faring well, which were not, and which might be poised to make a move. Deliberations about the merits of various candidates would ensue, delegates would rethink their ballots, and informal coalitions might begin to form.
After two such preliminary votes involving various prospective candidates, the convention would then have one last chance to affirm its support for an incumbent Republican president who was eligible for re-election but who had fallen short of the requisite three-quarters majority at the start of the convention. In such instances, a second vote on the incumbent would be taken at this time. If two-thirds of the delegates supported his nomination, he would then become the convention's sole nominee.
Otherwise, or in years without a Republican president who was eligible for re-election, the process would then proceed to a third preliminary vote. This third and last preliminary vote would take on added importance, as it would determine which ten candidates would be eligible to be considered for the final vote.
The results of the third preliminary vote would be tallied; the candidates who finished in the top ten would each be notified by a convention official; and each candidate's willingness to accept a nomination to the final field of five should that nomination be forthcoming would be affirmed. If any of the ten refused to accept a possible nomination, the eleventh candidate on the list would move into the tenth spot, and so on.
The full list of the top ten willing candidates would then be released, in order, complete with their scores. A half-day or so after the third preliminary vote, the delegates would then cast their final votes. As with each of the three preliminary votes, each delegate would be allowed to list up to five candidates on his ballot, in order. Once the final votes were cast and tabulated, the results would then be released, with this difference: The only information revealed would be the names of the five highest scorers, listed in alphabetical order.
Point tallies would not be released. Each week for a month, another debate would take place among these five finalists. Ideally, questions would be asked by conservative journalists or conservative audience members. Is that how this works? Greg Abbott. Popular governor of a delegate-rich state. Given your experience covering Texas politics, that actually does make me think twice …. Tom Cotton. This is a controversial take, I know.
But I do think Cotton has some likability issues too, like Cruz. And given the GOP gains among Hispanic voters in , especially in Florida and Texas, it might be good for the party to lean into this part of its base. Marjorie Taylor Greene might throw her name into the ring. Plus, she echoes that same fighter rhetoric we were talking about earlier. Take the debate about whether she should be stripped of her House committee assignments.
She would have some serious appeal among some in the GOP, as Kaleigh Rogers and I pointed out in our recent look at her rise. Bring that last pick energy!!! Swing state governor and term-limited ahead of the midterms, so he could look ahead to a presidential run, maybe. Elise Stefanik. She became a national star during the House impeachment inquiry , and could help the base win back the suburban women that Trump lost.
I think that since Trump lost reelection, Republican women will likely provide the leadership for rebuilding the party. We already saw this in both and As a representative from New York, she has no obvious higher office to run for other than president. My last pick is Florida Sen. Rick Scott. She has a massive following in right-leaning circles — 2. Readers, let us know who you think has the best one.
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. Nathaniel Rakich is a senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight. Geoffrey Skelley is an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight.
Alex Samuels is a politics reporter at FiveThirtyEight. All Videos YouTube. But then, because of the clustering of the primaries, a de facto nominee can be chosen in a month, as was the case with Biden in The initial hopes of reformers that debates would elevate the tenor of presidential politics have long ago been drowned in a sea of practiced sound bites and evanescent gotcha moments.
And almost no one could have imagined that pre-nomination debates would become a profit center for cable TV networks. In this era of the permanent campaign, Republicans with White House ambitions have already moved on to regardless of whether Donald Trump runs again, with would-be GOP nominees making exploratory treks to Iowa and New Hampshire.
Democrats, in contrast, are frozen by the assumption that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris will be their nominee , but early indications suggest that the party may jettison the Iowa caucuses. Despite this initial skirmishing on the Republican side, nothing about the race is set in stone.
It will be months before the political parties and the states establish the order of the primaries. And it will be years before any arrangements for the debates are made or the convention sites are chosen. In short, everything about the underlying structure of Campaign is still in flux, and there is time for significant improvements across the board. Presidential politics has been afflicted with an inflation problem — a glut of not-quite-serious White House contenders.
In the Republicans boasted a near-record field of 17 candidates, including a reality TV star named Donald Trump. The Democrats easily topped that in with two dozen. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang — who later admitted that he had only run in to promote the idea of a guaranteed annual income — was a regular participant in Democrat debates until the New Hampshire primary, in which he received 2. All that changed in The Republicans allocated 10 slots on the main debate stage to the candidates who polled the best in national surveys.
Six months before the Iowa caucuses, with many voters barely paying attention, national polls ranking the candidates precisely were about as accurate as a blunderbuss. Pollster Lee Miringoff , who oversees the respected Marist Poll, actually delayed a national survey to prevent it from being used in the Republican rankings. Lesser known candidates will now frontload their efforts to try to make the cutoff. Public polls altering campaign strategies? These undercard debates consigned an influential senator Lindsey Graham and the runners-up in the and GOP nomination battles Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to perpetual limbo.
Failing to anticipate that Donald Trump would prove a major profit center for cable TV news, the Republicans ceded almost all control of the actual primary debates to the networks that broadcast them. That meant that everything revolved around TV ratings rather than informing the voters.
Candidates were grouped on stage based on their poll positions which meant that Trump was invariably center stage , the audiences were permitted to be raucous, and debate answers were so short usually one-minute responses and second follow-ups that they resembled haiku.
The result was debates that would have undermined serious discussion of the issues even without the disruptive presence of Trump on stage. In theory, the Democrats in should have learned from the Republican demolition-derby debates. The Democrats retained polling thresholds and added another wrinkle by requiring candidates to have a certain number of individual donors. The initial requirements for the first debates in Miami in late June were modest — either 1 percent support in the polls or 65, individual donors.
But the Democrats soon abandoned the notion of fairness for a format designed to create more dramatic television. The September 12, , debate in Houston required participants to both score 2 percent in national polls and have a minimum of , donors. Rather than encouraging grassroots fundraising, this arbitrary requirement perverted campaign strategy and spending decisions.
The toughened criteria for the September debate played a major role in prompting New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Washington Gov. Among the active candidates permanently exiled from the debate stage beginning in Houston were Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. And before was over, New Jersey Sen. Until recently, the voters in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire winnowed the field of presidential candidates.
But the arbitrary debate rules in both parties of late have meant that senators and governors whose campaigns fail to catch fire immediately are either forced to drop out prematurely or rendered semi-invisible by their absence from the televised extravaganzas.
Looking ahead to the and nomination fights, there must be a better way to organize primary debates. Voters need help in sorting out large fields of candidates who, because they are in the same party, often tend to agree on most policy issues.
Primary debates, for all their inherent flaws, remain the easiest way for voters to develop nuanced views of the candidates. As a starting point for the future, the political parties should realize that they do not have to cede control to the networks in order to induce them to broadcast the debates. With intense viewer interest in politics, TV networks presumably would continue to vie to host the debates even if the political parties demanded that they tone down the atmosphere and permit longer answers from the candidates.
The political parties could experiment with hosting debates themselves and letting all networks freely cover them as news events. That would allow some debates to be limited to one or two topics rather than bounce from issue to issue in pogo-stick fashion.
Away from the control of the networks, occasional debates might also feature questioning from policy experts or academics like political scientists and historians. The problem with journalistic panels is that too often the questions are designed to create short-term controversy rather than anything substantive. And while reporters are sometimes adept at forcing candidates out of their comfort zones, town meeting-style debates with voters quizzing the contenders usually produce prefabricated answers lifted from stump speeches.
There also needs to be a better system to separate out candidates who are seriously running for the White House from those who are trying to boost their speaking fees, promote a single cause, or are off on inexplicable ego trips. As both parties discovered in and , this can be a daunting task. One approach would be to guarantee a spot on the debate stage to anyone who has won a statewide election in the prior decade.
Candidates who do not fit into this category and this would have included both Trump in and former mayor Pete Buttigieg last year, among others could be required to submit a certain number of online petition signatures or meet a similar condition to demonstrate support.
A better notion, though, would be for each party to designate a blue-ribbon group maybe a diverse set of former elected officials and retired state chairs to vet the candidates at the beginning of the race for seriousness and plausibility. Yes, this sounds heavy-handed and exclusionary. But before the s, political parties did this in every campaign year, quietly shunning candidates who were, say, secret alcoholics or otherwise known to be unreliable.
These days, although the media tries, no one is vetting the candidates, as the nomination of Trump in demonstrated. Such a blue-ribbon group — especially if it were committed to fairness and a reasonable amount of inclusion — would restore a small role to the political parties in choosing the presidential candidate who would run under their banners.
For the second time in eight years, the overhyped Iowa caucuses failed to deliver a timely verdict. In fact, the Iowa Democratic Party was unable to release any returns on caucus night, February 3, because of the meltdown of its cell phone app.
Bernie Sanders. The supposed logic for beginning the nomination fight in four small states Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina is that this jerry-built system allows voters to winnow the field. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — stayed in the race until after the South Carolina primary. When the Iowa caucus choices were finally tabulated, Biden ran an embarrassing fourth, with initial support from only 15 percent of Iowa Democrats.
In , after an analogous fourth-place Iowa finish, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri dropped out of the race. But was a different story. Biden moved on to New Hampshire, where he finished a woeful fifth. The former vice president then stumbled into Nevada, where Sanders beat him by roughly a two-to-one margin in the caucuses.
So, after that roller-coaster ride, what are the lessons for the future from the early delegate contests? The ineptitude of the Iowa Democrats destroyed the last shreds of a justification for selecting delegates in a caucus rather than a primary. Political parties — which run caucuses independent of state election officials — simply do not have the skills to reliably count ballots in a contested race.
Iowa Republicans demonstrated this failing in when they initially declared former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and ultimate nominee the winner before reversing field two weeks later and awarding the crown to former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. And back in the caucuses , Iowa Democrats deferred to network projections and stopped counting with roughly precincts untallied. More important, caucuses are inequitable because they are invariably low-turnout events.
Traditionally, Iowans in both parties had to meet in person on a Monday evening in the depth of winter to participate in the caucuses. While the rules were always looser in Nevada, the caucuses did require showing up in person. In the Democrats, to their credit, tried to make it easier for voters in Iowa and Nevada to caucus.
Iowa held virtual online caucuses in some group settings for Democrats who worked nights, temporarily resided out of state, or lived in group homes for the elderly. Nevada made provisions for early voting. But neither of these attempted reforms did much to increase turnout.
In about 70 percent of the New Hampshire voters who would ultimately back Biden in November cast ballots in the Democratic primary. The South Carolina primary attracted roughly half of the eventual general-election Biden voters. In contrast, despite the national attention lavished on Iowa, only about , Democrats participated in the opening-gun caucuses, which was less than one-fourth of the votes the Democratic ticket would receive from Iowa voters nine months later.
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