Pols should pick nominees
Politicians are better suited to choose a candidate who can win a general election
Twenty years ago I wrote an op-ed, published in a major newspaper, which the editors called “Let’s Quit Having Primaries.” That title overstated my dismay with primaries, but not by much. The piece was a defense of the oldfashioned view that professional politicians should play a major role in selecting candidates. That’s still my position. The pols — who, according to legend, used to deliberate in smoke-filled rooms — have an interest in picking folks who can win general elections, and that’s a good thing.
Yes, primaries can provide useful information. Jack Kennedy’s 1960 victory in the West Virginia primary showed that he, a Catholic, could do well in Protestant states. But with the number of primaries and the way results are interpreted — a candidate can be declared the “winner” with, say, 20 percent of the vote in one party — primaries are given way too much weight.
Primaries reward candidates who aren’t in the political center. In general, Democratic primaries favor those on the relatively far left (I could insert names here), and Republican primaries generally overstate the significance of far-right voters (ditto).
I’m not sure what Donald Trump is, or was yesterday, or will be tomorrow, but he’s no centrist. All of this is relevant because Mr. Trump claims he deserves the Republican nomination. The reason? He’s received more votes in primaries than any other Republican candidate. Not picking him, he says, would ignore the will of the people and maybe lead to rioting.
That view is only superficially appealing (and the rioting part isn’t appealing at all).
Until last week, Mr. Trump had “won” the Republican primaries in most states with between 30 and 40 percent of the vote. A plurality is better than finishing third, of course. But we know that, of the Republicans who didn’t vote for Mr. Trump, many consider him unacceptable. Add in the Democrats, and Mr. Trump is an almost certain loser in November. The results in last week’s primaries don’t change anything: Mr. Trump’s “majorities” were in one party (obviously), and in states in which the Republican candidate is almost certainly going to be a loser, like Maryland. The primary “victories” are mirages; a reasonable process for selecting a nominee would take that into account.
Treating someone as a winner who gets only a plurality of the vote has its dangers. Michel Houellebecq wrote a wonderful novel published last year, “Submission,” about a future French election. In France it usually takes two votes to select a president. After the first one, a runoff takes place between the top two finishers (unless someone already received a majority). Each of the two finalists is thus, by definition, preferred only by a plurality.
That system might make sense if the number of serious candidates is small. But if the first round’s vote is divided among many contenders, the two with the highest totals may both be distinctly minority candidates, each unacceptable to the majority of voters. The more centrist candidates there are, the less likely it is that any will survive the first round.
In “Submission,” with the mainstream candidates eliminated, the runoff occurs between candidates from Marine Le-Pen’s National Front and the Muslim Brotherhood, neither close to the political center. Fiction? Of course, and maybe overdone. But that result is conceivable in a world in which pluralities control.
That’s the world of primaries. Is it really better for a candidate to be the first choice of 30 percent of the party but viewed as poison by everyone else, rather than to be the first choice of only 10 percent of the party but potentially acceptable to a majority of Americans?
Mr. Trump has his answer to that question (although he’d bite my head off for asking it in this way). The pols in smoke-filled rooms would have thought differently, however. In selecting a candidate, they would have looked at more than pluralities (and even majorities) in primaries. In particular, they would have considered likelihood of success in a general election. And, in doing that, they wouldn’t have subverted the people’s will. How is it anti-democratic for a party to try to pick candidates who have decent shots at being elected?
One way to give extra voice to the professionals is the Democrats’ unfairly maligned “superdelegates.” But it would be simpler just to go back to contested conventions and smoke-filled rooms. Let the pols have a significant say in deciding who the strongest candidates would be.
If you want to modernize the process, cut out the smoking.