How Primaries Pick Candidates And Reshape Elections

Primaries decide far more than most voters think and the process that was supposed to make politics cleaner may be one reason it feels uglier. We sit down with Dr. Sean Beienberg to unpack what primary elections actually are, why they took off in the early 20th century, and how they replaced the old convention system where party leaders and delegates negotiated nominees behind closed doors. If you’ve ever heard “smoke-filled room” and assumed the cure was obvious, this conversation adds the missing context: those insiders were often obsessed with one boring metric that mattered a lot, picking someone who could win.

We walk through how primaries and caucuses work today, including the difference between open primaries and closed primaries, and why low primary turnout gives a small slice of voters outsized power. Then we dig into the central irony: instead of producing more moderate, broadly responsive candidates, modern primaries can reward people who are more extreme in style and less willing to compromise. Dr. Bienberg connects the dots between nomination incentives, campaign finance rules that weaken party organizations, small-dollar fundraising pressure, and the way cable news and social media can turn outrage into strategy.

We also zoom out to the larger election ecosystem: gerrymandering and “safe” districts can make the primary the most dangerous election for many officials, which shifts their focus from governing to surviving the next nomination fight. We close by revisiting why conventions used to be unpredictable and substantive, and why they’re mostly spectacle now. If you want to understand polarization, party power, and why Congress struggles, start here, then check your state’s primary rules and vote. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with your take on whether primaries help or hurt democracy.

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Transcript

Welcome And What Primaries Are

0:02

Welcome back to Civics in a year. Today we're talking about primaries with Dr. Sean Bienberg. And if you're interested, you should go back to the political parties episodes that we have done. And we've mentioned primaries a couple of times in our podcasts. Dr. Beienberg, what are primaries? Primaries are the way that parties choose candidates that then will run in the general election. So they are largely a product of the early 20th century, when particularly sort of progressive era reformers looked at them as a way to create more responsive candidate pools, basically. Because beforehand, the parties themselves would choose the nominees. So this is the proverbial smoke-filled room. Who are we going to run for president? Who are we going to run for senator? Who are we going to run for alderman? And write it all the way down the system. And the thought was that during the progressive era, right, we've seen this theme again and again. The idea was we wanted to re-empower the people and particularly reduce the power of sort of interest groups or special interests. So primaries were sort of seen as a way to clear out corruption, to prevent co-opting by sort of those political elites. And the theory was this would make it so that voter, average voters, would be able to choose people. Again, that they're within the parties. So ostensibly, these are people who sort of believe broadly speaking the things that you believe, but to let the citizens uh pick them rather than political elites. Again, the thought was that this would weaken interest groups. There may be reasons to think that that doesn't work, but that was their original sort of objective. So when I think about like primaries now, it's very different than when I watched Death by Lightning. And those primaries are different, like when James Garfield became the nominee. So how have primaries changed throughout American history? And what effect has that had on the political system? So back in the early through most of American history, so conventions, the conventions were where that was chosen. So Garfield gets basically tapped at the convention. And one of the things that I haven't seen the show, but from what I know of the political year, like conventions could be exciting, right? I remember talking to my grandma, and she would say, Yeah, sometimes we didn't know who was going to be the nominee at the end of it, particularly who's going to be the vice presidential nominee, because it was basically party elites or and party elites

From Conventions To Modern Primaries

2:34

makes it does sound like a sort of conspiracy, but often this is just somebody who's sort of worked their way up through serving in this, you know, the state Democratic Party or the State Republican Party or whatever. And so the conventions used to be predominantly, particularly, we'll just say at the presidential level. You could scale this down if you wish, and it's maybe your neighborhood, you know, convention or something. So it would be, say, all of the elected members of Congress from that party, and maybe the head or number two or three top officials from each of the state parties. And this is actually one thing that is striking and makes an ideological difference. The convention delegates used to often be people who were coming up through the state parties. They had an incentive to keep power decentralized so that they're like, you know, member who's their friend who's a state senator still views themselves as having power. So it's kind of almost the logic of the U.S. Senate as being sort of representing the different states in their interests. So the convention folks often had an incentive to lean toward candidates that would say, you know, we respect federalism. We're not going to be as aggressive in pushing for federal policy at the at the pushing for policy at the federal level. Over, again, basically from the 1910s, they start rolling them out in some places. Some states pick them up, not all of them. So, for example, in the 1960s, you know, when like Barry Goldwater, I'm trying to think of sort of primaries that were kind of quasi-contested, right? He wins the California primary, but a lot of the New England ranking, a lot of the New England political leadership doesn't like him. So there's like a question of sort of how many of them are going to fall in line. But primaries get basically after the 60s, primaries become pretty much the exclusive way to choose. I mean, you have caucuses, and those are slightly different. You're from Iowa, so uh Iowa is a caucus where it meets a little differently, but functionally it's it's still pretty close. You're not pulling a lever, you're talking to each other, but it's still just all the registered voters, or some places have what are called open primaries, where if you are non-registered voter, non-party registered, you can choose either the Republicans or the Democrats, but you can't be a Republican like in the Democratic primary. Some states are called closed primaries. So you have to be a registered Republican, you have to be a registered, or have to be a registered Democrat. Now the irony is in terms of how have they changed over time, how they changed American politics, how they changed over time, and how has American politics changed over time. The

Caucuses And Open Vs Closed Rules

5:10

theory was that primaries would end up choosing candidates who were more aligned with average, average people's perspective rather than, say, political elites. But it turns out this is wrong. So the thought was that voters would actually choose more moderate or more responsive candidates. And it turns out that's not the case. Because if we think about this, if you are a member of a political party and its leadership, what is the thing that you want to happen, right? What what is when you're choosing candidates, what is the thing that you want to most see in a candidate? If you are an average, if you are say this, you're the head of the Arizona Democratic Party, what is the thing that you want the

Why Primaries Reward Extremes

5:56

most when you're picking a candidate? What's the best crit you can find in a candidate? I mean, it regardless of party, I think somebody who is going to do the things I want them to do depending on my political party, right? If you want them to do those things, what do they have to do first? Win. They have to win. They have to win. They have to win, right? This is like a really, really basically elemental part of our politics that has been lost. Because the party people would say, you know what? I'm willing to take somebody that agrees with me like 85%, if that person is going to win. Yes. Because if I lose, then the upper other party may agree with me 20% or maybe 0%, right? So parties were much more invested in choosing candidates just because of boring technical, just raw self-interest. We want to pick people who will win. But it turns out that average voters may be a little less incentivized by that. And so primaries, particularly coupled with fundraising changes, mean that we have at this point actually really strong partisanship and really weak parties. Right. The irony is in the 1950s, as with many things I keep, we were just, we, as you know, Liz, we've been doing teacher trainings this week. And one of the themes I keep pointing out is how college professors often make the world worse. One of the ways that they did is in the 1950s, the American Political Science Association, moving from things that Woodrow Wilson had said way back in the day, but said, you know what we need? We need clearer, stronger party coalitions. We want, we don't want to have the world where there are some sort of conservative Democrats and some progressive. Like we want to be able to make sure that the parties are very clearly distinguished. And so they wrote this big report saying that. And lo and behold, they sort of got it. And people have now thought, oops, maybe that was a mistake. The parties hate each other too much. Because now it's not even an issue of you have a strong view on a particular set of few things, but you're not going to fight over potholes or something like that. But now you have an incentive to fight over potholes because the person in the primary is going to say, Can you believe so-and-so worked with the other party to clear your potholes? Okay, so what? But that makes primary voters really mad. And so not only so you saw the movement towards stronger parties, but then particularly after the 1968 Democratic nomination, which Eugene McCarthy, He Humphrey, I'll spare the listeners all the arcana of that. But they commission the Democratic Party basically commissions a report. It's called the McGovern-Frasier Commission. And they say effectively, we want to make sure that our average rank and file Democrats have more of an influence in the process of nominating, particularly presidential convention delegates. And this functionally convinces Democrats that they want to have party primaries in all states, which because of the way that the state laws work, they have to basically be symmetric when the state legislature is setting up a rule for the Democrats, they have to set up the same rule for the Republicans. Okay. So functionally, that means that you end up with primaries across the board. Now, the other part that weakens it is campaign finance laws make it so that they put restrictions on how much you can give to parties. They also put restrictions, obviously, on how much you can you can give to individual candidates, but limiting the amount that gets given to parties means that the parties which have been the place you would primarily donate to. You wouldn't donate to the candidate. But again, if you are now that we have especially social media turbo and cable news turbocharging this, you want to get small dollar donations for the primaries. And how are you going to do that? By being as absolutely radical as you can be. So primaries have, I would argue, and I think most political scientists argue that they seemingly have failed at the goal of trying to choose people that are in fact less narrow in their interests. They may be less ideological in the sense of being aligned with the party, but they're often more extreme temperamentally and more resistant to being willing to compromise. Because the most dangerous, and then on top of that, if you layer in the tendency to drop safer and safer district lines with computers, kind of gerrymandering, right, these all sort of interact to create more overlapping phenomena. But the part the for most members of Congress, most state legislators, depending on how their state state has an independent districting commission or not, your primary vote is your most dangerous vote. So you're the one you're most likely to lose. And you're and to raise money, you now need to basically win the Facebook primary of making people mad and running on cable news. And so this is creating real problems for governance. I would say this is one of the reasons that Congress particularly doesn't work well. If you have members who think their role isn't to make policy, it's to raise money in primaries and to raise money in primaries, you're actually incentivized not to say, well, you know what? I'm gonna get 75% of what I want if I make this compromise. That seems like that's policy. 70 years ago, the folks that were running the conventions would have said, Of course you take that deal. But primary voters tend to be a little less and they're such a small, I mean, I don't, it depends on the state and whatever, but a very, very small percentage of people actually participate in primaries at this point in terms of choosing. It's it's it's a it's a quite small number. Whatever you think the general election numbers are, they're they're they're much, much smaller for primaries. So you have a very, very narrow set of people who are having, I'm not gonna say like an unfair, because they show up and there's something to be said for that. But they have, I think we'll just use the neutral term, a disproportionate influence. And they're not necessarily, as we're seeing empirically, from the perspective of party professionals, they're often frustrated because primary voters will choose people that can't win in a general election. And we've seen plenty of examples of this, just like even with U.S. Senate candidates from both parties in the last like 15 years. But that's the way it goes. So that's primaries. And it feels complicated, but it also, you know, we'd done an episode on gerrymandering, and you talked about independent commission. That is what the state of Arizona has, even though the Arizona State Legislature sued for that. They actually had a decent legal case. The argument is actually a decent legal one. I assigned that case in my Arizona one. The Constitution does say legislature on that. Maybe that's a maybe that's a flaw, at least for the federal districting. But yeah, uh they there's actually a decent case. I there I'm sympathetic to independent commissions as a matter of policy, but they had a decent case. Anyway, sorry, Conlaw Nerdhat there. But I but we taught we've mentioned the case briefly in another podcast episode. And and it again, this all goes into elections.

Gerrymandering And The Real Risk Vote

12:45

This is a bigger piece. So some states, their state legislature draws the line. Arizona, there's an independent commission, and it it's just every state gets to choose, right? Their election, how they are done. Iowa does caucusing, which to this day I think is incredibly interesting. Iowa is an important state. I would have worked at one last a couple years ago. It's very interesting. Well, and you know, we think about like New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a small state, but it's the first primary. So there's there's reasons for things. And, you know, we talked about conventions. When you talked about conventions, all I saw was, you know, the most recent conventions in the past couple presidential elections that have just been these like big parties. Yeah, they're boring. But we don't we already know who the boring. Yeah, they're boring. It's just a bunch of people saying endless versions of why this person is why the presidential candidate is great instead of here's why you fellow delegates should pick this person instead of that person, or why we should make this coalition or horse trading. Yeah, they used to be really fun and wild. The the most interesting one's probably the 1924 Democratic convention. They had 103 ballots. They had to go through 103 ballots before they ended up with the candidate. And in that case, the Democratic Party

Why Conventions Got Boring

14:05

had the rule that made it so you couldn't get nominated unless you had a supermajority. I want to say Al Smith had like 56, 58, 60 percent on some of them, but you had to have two-thirds. And Southern Catholics were saying, we're or Southern Protestants were saying, heck no, we're not having a New York Catholic on the top of this ticket. And so they changed their mind in 28. But uh that that's a you want to read a fun thing, you can look up the 1924 election, which is totally insane for so many reasons. That that Democratic primary, but yeah, as a political historian, it's a fun primary. No one will ever remember anything about the last few primary or the conventions we've had, except for like maybe some goofy celebrity appearance there, like Clint Eastwood talking to a chair or whatever. But but we don't actually care about the politics, right? It's the spectacle. It's as you said, it's a spectacle and not actually substantive. Whereas before they used to actually have some substance. How do we balance this part of the ticket? How do we think about this strategically? Where what's the region we've been doing badly in? That those calculations are not made anymore at the convention. All right, Dr. Beinberg, I think too, we are in primary season. So if you have a state primary, because primaries are important, get out, make sure you vote, make sure you know your state laws. Dr. Beinberg, thank you.