Bring Back the Bosses: The Case for an Open Convention

Democrats should seize the chance to hold a chaotic and exciting open convention.

The Democratic party establishment says its presidential nomination is closed. It’s a titanic blunder. Democrats should seize the chance to hold a chaotic and exciting open convention.

In fact, presidential primaries were a terrible and naïve mistake. This is a rare opportunity to fix our broken presidential nominating process, which every four-year cycle yields frustrating and disappointing results. We should go back to making every major party convention an old-style open convention. The very thing Democratic leaders are now desperate to avoid is exactly what Americans should embrace.

To understand why open conventions are better, it helps to understand why we started having party primaries in the first place.

Party primaries aren’t some old and sacred part of American democracy. They were a turn-of the-century Progressive Movement reform to break up political machines. Primaries didn’t become a major part of our presidential nominating process until the 1970s. For America’s first century, they weren’t even a thing.

During the earliest years of our republic, the leaders of our parties chose presidential nominees amongst themselves in a caucus. This was natural because political parties weren’t meant to be an official part of our government. Our Founders viewed them as irrational and dangerous conspiracies to subvert the independent judgment of officials, forcing them to pledge fealty to outside opinions and cooperate to get around the very checks and balances designed to prevent such cooperation. Parties are entirely private political associations we invented and then grafted onto our democracy.  

By the 1830s, however, parties had become institutionalized and we needed a more stable process so parties started holding national conventions. State parties sent delegates to choose a candidate. Since this process was completely made up by the parties, state parties had a lot of freedom choosing delegates. Naturally, they tended to send people loyal to local leaders. Then, with the rise of powerful political machines, that turned into a tool for bosses. Local bosses would select delegates loyal to the machine, and the nomination became a bargaining process between machines and bosses.

This was the “smoke filled room” of legend, a foundation of Gilded Age corruption. America’s bosses would horse trade and bargain over who got the nomination.

During the late-nineteenth-century, the Progressive Movement rose as a reaction against rampant Gilded Age corruption. The Progressives were good-government types who wanted to clean up the country, bring rationality and social science into management, eliminate abuses like child labor and fourteen-hour work days, educate children, and conserve natural beauty and resources. Most of all, they wanted to destroy the corrupt machines. To snatch back control of nominating candidates from bosses, they championed primary elections to put nominations into the people’s hands through elections.

It made sense. Breaking the bosses and machines was clearly good and well intentioned. Machine politics is corruption. It’s also undemocratic. Putting nominations directly into the people’s hands should make government more rational, efficient, and fair. There was, however, one advantage of the smoke-filled room the Progressives didn’t see. It relied on compromise.

A brokered convention is not a winner take-all game. It’s a game of wheeling and dealing and trading favors. You can’t win a brokered convention by just overpowering your opponents. Every party faction gets a strong seat at the table. The winner is the faction that can build a coalition out of their many rivals. That means everybody has to be bought off for their support—cabinet positions, support for other offices, or policies they want—and the candidate must be someone everyone in the hall can accept. In a brokered convention, everybody walks out with something and everyone is guaranteed a candidate they can live with.

A primary election, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game in which one candidate gets the prize and everybody else gets nothing. The winner gets full control of not just the nomination but the party, even if they only control a minority. All the losers walk away with nothing, no matter their support. There’s no incentive to compromise with other factions in a primary election. There’s only motivation to dominate and destroy.

The Progressives had limited success pushing their party primary idea. Some states adopted presidential primaries, but they remained a small minority for the next three-quarters of a century. These contests came to be viewed as testing grounds for upstart candidates. Outsiders could run in primaries, and if they did well prove to party leaders they were serious contenders. Established candidates could still win the nomination without running in any primaries.

Then came the disaster of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention was a historic and violent mess. The incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, his popularity plummeting because of Vietnam, saw the writing on the wall and dropped out. The party’s labor-backed establishment mobilized around Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Young New Left activists, energized by anti-war protests, came to the convention determined to defeat the establishment. They mainly backed anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy, who actively campaigned in the primaries and did quite well. Humphrey hadn’t even run in the primaries.

After some failed political maneuvering by anti-war forces in the convention, the delegates gave the nomination to Humphrey. The anti-war New Left was outraged. Mayor Daley’s policemen, operating under the establishment, beat rioting protestors bloody outside the convention hall on television in “The Battle of Michigan Avenue.” It was a public relations disaster the party was determined not to repeat. The Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to reform the delegate selection process.

The most important result of the McGovern-Fraser Commission was to push every state toward primaries. Energized New Left activists, now a growing force within the party, were enthusiastic about this new tool to challenge the establishment. In 1972, the Democrats nominated George McGovern using primaries, and in 1976 nominated Jimmy Carter. Neither would have won under the bosses, whose power now was withering away. Republicans, seeing the shifting momentum, soon moved from conventions and caucuses to primaries as well.

Presidential primaries, in other words, are a pretty new idea. Have they worked?

Primaries no doubt helped break up the last vestiges of the political machines, although they were already fading out in most of America. They brought more democracy into the process—so much so that Americans today feel entitled to directly choose their presidential nominees. But are the candidates any better?

I’d argue presidential primaries substituted one problem for another.

Every four years we hear the same complaints. How in a country of over three hundred and fifty million people can’t we find two reasonable, dynamic, principled candidates with leadership potential ready to serve the country? Why do we always end up with two unsatisfying candidates most people in America mainly hate? The reason is primaries.

Presidential primaries have two major downsides. First, what kind of people are consumed by presidential primary elections enough to put tons of time and work into influencing them? In theory, primary elections are open to everybody—at least everybody in the party. In practice, they’re playgrounds for the party establishment, who want to retain control, and people with extreme and impassioned views who treat politics as an obsession.

In other words, party primaries shifted power from bosses to two groups: party insiders, staffers, and financiers, and obsessed activists.

Second, primaries create incentives not to compromise but to dominate and destroy. The end goal of a negotiated convention is to cooperate and trade favors until we find a candidate everyone can live with. Primaries are a winner-take-all game in which one faction wins one-hundred percent control of the party and everybody else walks away with nothing. It’s a fight to the death.

The primary system is the source of everything we hate about presidential politics. It’s designed to select candidates not looking to serve the entire party, much less America. It isn’t even built to find the best candidate to win the election. It’s an arena for small factions to seize control of the party machinery to maintain jobs for themselves and their friends, or to impose impassioned beliefs on everybody they can’t get through regular politics due to their unpopularity.

Presidential primaries don’t give us more democracy. They give us a choice between two unpopular candidates nobody likes, pushed by people in politics for the wrong reasons. A negotiated process would obviously be better.

We can, however, fix this. We can seize this priceless opportunity to bring negotiation, compromise, and reason back to candidate selection. It’s too late to change up how we choose this year’s delegates, but they’re a good cross section of party factions with skin in the game. Let’s have them battle it out, negotiate, reason, and trade favors until they consolidate around a consensus choice. It would be exhilarating and inspiring to watch.

I want us to stay up all night like the old days watching the nervous convention hall on our screens as the red, white, and blue bunting on the walls blows rhythmically with the industrial air conditioners while bits of streamers flitter across the floor. We all watch with tense anticipation into the evening as one after another vote gets called—a fifth, a sixth, a seventh ballot. We follow the rumors on Twitter about backroom deals. Someone shares an overheard hint about what the Michigan delegates will do on the next vote. Finally, after the kids are long in bed and most candidates have dropped out, a deal is made. Fueled by adrenaline masking tired lines on their face, the candidate comes out to riotous applause and makes a historic speech.

A negotiated convention would seek to produce the kind of candidate we all say we want but never get. People think this is chaos and undemocratic? It’s liberating and more legitimate. We get someone everybody can accept that, most important, is positioned to be a good president.

Then we start talking about refining the process for the next election. We shouldn’t just go back to the nineteenth-century boss model. That was corrupting and dysfunctional. We could however develop a hybrid model to turn conventions into a representative model. Parties could parcel out delegates widely. They could allocate some to elected party leaders. They could allocate some regionally. They could award some to important factions and interests. Finally, they could allocate some to the people directly through primaries—not pledged to candidates, but delegates elected to serve as representatives. Then let them negotiate it out.

What the Democrats are doing is a massive missed opportunity. Let’s bring back the smoke-filled room. It’s better for America.