Over the last week I've listened to three podcasts explaining how we came to our present strange and convoluted process for picking a presidential candidate. I'd recommend all of them: 538 Primaries Project, The Weeds: How we pick a president, and On the Media. Everyone agrees there's nothing particularly rational about it; what we do is a product of historical accident and accretion, generally in the direction of more popular participation and less elite control.
As somebody who has lived through and watched most of this evolution, all three of these shows felt as if they had left a huge hole their accounts. In the first half of the 20th century, coming out of the Progressive era, parties and states held more and more primaries -- but most were beauty pageants, creating no particular hold on delegates to the party conventions -- and also no stop to political bigwigs choosing candidates in private meetings. As late 1960, John F. Kennedy famously had to run in and win primaries -- not to capture delegates, but to show the men who mattered that a Catholic could win Protestant votes. So he did.
But although the Kennedy assassination in 1963 had made his Vice President Lyndon Johnson an incumbent and thus there were not contested primaries in 1964, in that year a popular uprising threw the nominating process into chaos -- and set the stage for the tumultuous convention of 1968 which in turn led directly participatory primaries and killed off nomination from the "smoke-filled room."
Nineteen-sixty-four was the height of the struggle by African Americans to overturn Jim Crow laws and practices that effectively prevented Black people from voting in the states of the former Confederacy. The center of that struggle was in Mississippi. Mississippi was a one party state -- in those days a Democratic one.
When Blacks had attempted to vote in state government primaries the previous year (1963), they were turned away, harassed and intimidated. Organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee including Bob Moses and Mississippi stalwart Fanny Lou Hamer organized an unofficial, but enthusiastic, "Freedom Ballot" in competition with the fall election. Some 80,000, mostly Black, Mississippians participated, demonstrating demand for the right to "One Person, One Vote" for all adults.
The next year brought further struggle for the right to vote. In the spring, the entire Civil Rights coalition grabbed the attention of the nation with the Freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Meanwhile organizers toiled on in Mississippi. They created the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to compete with the "regular" --all white -- state Democratic party. They continued to work to register Black voters. Just before the Mississippi regular state party convention in August, the bodies of three voting registration workers -- James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- turned up in a swamp, murdered for their efforts.
The MFDP attended the national Democratic convention, demanding the delegate seats that would have been allocated to the segregated regulars. The Democratic National Committee tossed this controversial hot potato to a credentials committee. In those days, unscripted television sometimes emerged from political conventions. TV broadcast and rebroadcast Ms. Hamer's speech:
The 1964 affair of the MFDP brought the inequities of the party nominating system out into the open. In 1968, there was no Democratic incumbent because the movement against our war in Vietnam had made it impossible for Lyndon Johnson to run again. A wide open race was fought over the direction of the party in primaries; the ranks of insurgent antiwar organizers for both Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy (assassinated midway through) were inspired by and full of veterans of the Civil Rights struggle. Johnson and party bigwigs still had enough clout to foist Hubert Humphrey on the Chicago convention, but only in conditions of literal rioting and police repression.
Our current primary system with binding votes in states for delegates who actually make binding choices of the nominee in the national convention came out of the disruption it took to win the vote for Black people. Trying to tell the history of the primary system without an awareness of that is a telling historical omission -- simply wrong factually and morally.
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Something else historically false we're seeing in current primary punditry is also worth noting. We keep being told to understand that Trump could be re-elected because incumbents usually are, that since 1945 only Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and G H W Bush had failed re-election. True. But it seems worth noting that another incumbent who loved being President decided not run for re-election; Lyndon Johnson dropped out because the force of the antiwar movement made another term seem untenable. This is shocking to think about -- and we were certainly shocked at the time that a seemingly immovable obstacle to peace was gone ... Struggle is long.
As somebody who has lived through and watched most of this evolution, all three of these shows felt as if they had left a huge hole their accounts. In the first half of the 20th century, coming out of the Progressive era, parties and states held more and more primaries -- but most were beauty pageants, creating no particular hold on delegates to the party conventions -- and also no stop to political bigwigs choosing candidates in private meetings. As late 1960, John F. Kennedy famously had to run in and win primaries -- not to capture delegates, but to show the men who mattered that a Catholic could win Protestant votes. So he did.
But although the Kennedy assassination in 1963 had made his Vice President Lyndon Johnson an incumbent and thus there were not contested primaries in 1964, in that year a popular uprising threw the nominating process into chaos -- and set the stage for the tumultuous convention of 1968 which in turn led directly participatory primaries and killed off nomination from the "smoke-filled room."
 |
| Ms. Hamer |
When Blacks had attempted to vote in state government primaries the previous year (1963), they were turned away, harassed and intimidated. Organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee including Bob Moses and Mississippi stalwart Fanny Lou Hamer organized an unofficial, but enthusiastic, "Freedom Ballot" in competition with the fall election. Some 80,000, mostly Black, Mississippians participated, demonstrating demand for the right to "One Person, One Vote" for all adults.
The next year brought further struggle for the right to vote. In the spring, the entire Civil Rights coalition grabbed the attention of the nation with the Freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Meanwhile organizers toiled on in Mississippi. They created the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to compete with the "regular" --all white -- state Democratic party. They continued to work to register Black voters. Just before the Mississippi regular state party convention in August, the bodies of three voting registration workers -- James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- turned up in a swamp, murdered for their efforts.
The MFDP attended the national Democratic convention, demanding the delegate seats that would have been allocated to the segregated regulars. The Democratic National Committee tossed this controversial hot potato to a credentials committee. In those days, unscripted television sometimes emerged from political conventions. TV broadcast and rebroadcast Ms. Hamer's speech:
Johnson and party honchos stonewalled. The MFDP was not seated, despite pointing out that the regular Mississippi Democrats were going to bolt the party anyway for fear of Black equality. They were right. The almost all white Democratic electorate voted for Republican Barry Goldwater over Johnson that year, beginning the state's shift to the Republican column.All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
The 1964 affair of the MFDP brought the inequities of the party nominating system out into the open. In 1968, there was no Democratic incumbent because the movement against our war in Vietnam had made it impossible for Lyndon Johnson to run again. A wide open race was fought over the direction of the party in primaries; the ranks of insurgent antiwar organizers for both Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy (assassinated midway through) were inspired by and full of veterans of the Civil Rights struggle. Johnson and party bigwigs still had enough clout to foist Hubert Humphrey on the Chicago convention, but only in conditions of literal rioting and police repression.
Our current primary system with binding votes in states for delegates who actually make binding choices of the nominee in the national convention came out of the disruption it took to win the vote for Black people. Trying to tell the history of the primary system without an awareness of that is a telling historical omission -- simply wrong factually and morally.
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