Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The United States Presidential Nominating System

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

The United States Constitution lays out a set procedure for the election of a president and how a winner is determined from various candidates.  However, it says absolutely nothing about how those candidates are determined in the first place.  Since the first presidential election, the process by which parties have chosen their candidates has changed multiple times and quite dramatically. Learn more about the United States Presidential Nominating System on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The United States Constitution lays out a set of procedures for the election of a president and how a winner is determined from various candidates. However, it says absolutely nothing about how those candidates are determined in the first place. Since the first presidential election, the process by which parties have chosen their candidates has changed multiple times and quite dramatically. Learn more about the United States presidential nominating system on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The United States Constitution is very clear about how a president is to be selected. I've actually covered the procedure in previous episodes, including how the electoral college works and how all the paperwork is filed once the election takes place. There are contingencies built in for what happens if one candidate doesn't get a majority of votes, and most of these contingencies have had to be exercised at least once in history.

However, the Constitution says nothing about how the candidates for president are selected in the first place. The one thing that the founding fathers tended to agree upon, at least immediately, after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, was that political parties would be bad for the country. George Washington's farewell address gave a warning against political parties when he noted, quote, the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, in which different ages and countries has perpetuated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism, end quote. John Adams said, quote, a division of the republic into two great parties is to be dreaded as the great political evil.

To be honest, this was more idealism than anything else. There were very clear divisions between the founding fathers from the very beginning. While avoiding political parties may have been ideal, even Thomas Jefferson knew that eventually parties would form because humans tend to organize into factions. When the first presidential election took place, there were no other candidates other than George Washington. Washington was a consensus choice and won the first electoral college unanimously. He was viewed as the only person who could lead the country precisely because it was so divided. He was re-elected again in 1792 unanimously because it was feared that if he wasn't president, things could fall apart.

Factions appeared almost immediately, and when Washington stepped down, they played a central role in the first partisan presidential election in 1796. By this time, there were now two established political parties. the Federalists who included the likes of Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic Republicans who were led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The parties at this time were not nearly as organized as they are today. They were alliances of like-minded individuals, but there weren't necessarily party dues and membership cards. When it came time for the parties to put forward who their nominees would be for president,

it was done via a caucus of party members in Congress. party members from both the Senate and the House would get together and come up with someone who would be the standard bearer for the party. Once they came to a decision, they would notify the members in the states, and if the state legislatures voted for electors of that party, that was who they were supposed to vote for. The caucuses of 1796 were very informal, but by 1800, it had become much more organized. And here I should note that for people who live in countries without caucuses, a caucus is just a meeting where people select a nominee. There might be a vote, but votes are usually made in a public group

setting. Both parties held secret caucuses in 1800, only announcing their candidate to the public after the fact. However, while secret, the caucus did at least consist of formal votes amongst the congressional members. The Federalist Presidential Caucus of 1800 was the last one they ever held for their party. They continue to informally nominate candidates for the next 20 years without a formal caucus. The entire process was rather undemocratic. While there was an election for president, the candidates for president were selected in a way where the citizenry had absolutely no input. This system eventually became known as King Caucus. The Democratic Republicans continued to hold congressional caucuses through 1820.

By 1820, the Federalists had completely fallen apart and James Monroe ran unopposed. By this time, King Concus was widely considered to be. be an unworkable system and almost everyone objected to it. The 1824 Congressional Caucus by the Democratic Republicans was only attended by 66 of the 240 members of the party in Congress. The caucus nominated Albert Gallatin, but there were three other members of the party who threw their hat into the ring. As I covered in a previous episode, the four candidates split the vote, no one had a majority in the electoral college, and the election went to the House of Representatives, which selected John Quincy Adams. The election of 1824 effectively killed the congressional caucus system for selecting presidential

nominees. In 1828, there were no caucuses. There were two candidates that everybody naturally gravitated towards. Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote in 1824, and the incumbent John Quincy Adams. Jackson and his new Democratic Party won in a landslide. In the run-up to the 1832 election, a new party known as the Anti-Masonic Party decided to select their presidential candidate in a new way. They held a nominating convention. Held on September 22nd to the 28th, 1831, it was the first nominating convention for a political party in U.S. history.

They had 116 delegates from across the country, assemble in Baltimore, Maryland to elect their party's nominee. The National Republican Party, not to be confused with the current Republican Party, of which it was not a forerunner, also held a nominating convention in 1831. The Democrats were united behind Jackson, but there was division about who would be the vice president. In order to establish a consensus, the Democrats held their first convention in 1832 and selected Martin Van Buren as Jackson's running mate. The convention system was an improvement over the Congressional Caucus system, to be sure, but it still had its drawbacks. More often than not, a party had no clue who its presidential nominee would be before the convention started. there just wasn't a very long campaign.

All of the campaigning to become a party's nominee was pretty much conducted at the nominating convention. Difficulties with transportation and communication at that time made it impossible to organize a campaign for presidential nomination anywhere but the convention. The convention system also opened up the possibility for dark horse candidates, people who no one considered going into a convention. In 1844, most Democrats assume that, Martin Van Buren would be their candidate going into the convention, but after nine ballots,

James K. Polk came out as the nominee. In 1852, the Democrats took 49 votes to select Franklin Pierce as their nominee. These conventions were hotbeds of intrigue. Who was placed on the ballot and instructions for who a delegate should vote for were determined by party leaders. And this was the metaphorical smoke-filled room where decisions were made. As with the caucus system, The nominating convention was also seen as rather undemocratic, insofar as a small number of party members got to make all the decisions. It really wasn't that much different than the congressional caucus system. It was just a different sort of caucus system. Each state held its own caucus to select delegates, and local caucuses often selected delegates for the state caucus. With yet into the progressive

age at the start of the 20th century, more states began to institute primaries to select delegates to the convention. The first state to institute a presidential primary was Florida in 1901. Wisconsin then mandated the election of delegates to nominating conventions in 1905 and banned the use of caucuses. In 1910, Oregon became the first state to mandate that delegates to a nominating convention had to vote for the candidate that won the primary election. Primaries didn't spread as rapidly as you might think. Only 12 states adopted primaries by 1912, that increased to 20 in 1920 but then dropped back down to 12 between 1936 to 1968. Many of the primaries were not binding, which led to results like the 1912 Republican

Convention, where Teddy Roosevelt won almost all of the primaries that took place, but William Taft won the convention. This weak primary system still led to results like the 1940 Republican Convention, where Wendell Welke became the last Dark Horse candidate for a major political party. In 1952, neither Adelae Stevenson nor Dwight Eisenhower, won the most primaries for their party, yet both were selected at their party's nominating convention. Just as 1824 destroyed the Congressional Caucus system, so too did 1968 destroy the weak primary system that had existed since the start of the 20th century. At the 1968 Democratic National

Convention in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey won the nomination without winning a single primary. He focused all of his campaign on states without primaries. The 1968 convention was chaotic for a host of reasons, but one of the things that came out of it was a demand for more binding primary elections. Senator George McGovern led a commission for the Democratic Party, which encouraged the use of more primaries. The Republican Party followed suit by adopting more primaries, and 1972 marked the beginning of a stronger primary system.

By 1992, the Democrats had primaries in 40 states, and the Republicans in 39. The increase in primaries has led to an increase in the length of presidential campaigns. Rather than being conducted in a single convention, it now takes months with multiple primaries in each state. There are still states such as Iowa that have caucuses. In Nevada, the Democrats have a primary, but the Republicans have both a primary and a caucus. Some states have open primaries where anyone can vote in either of the two-party elections,

and some states have closed primaries where you have to be a primary. a registered member of the party to vote in its primary. And I should note that each party has its own rules regarding how they nominate their candidates. Each party has delegates that are known as superdelegates. Superdelegates are simply elected or high-ranking officials within a political party, such as senators or governors, who attend the nominating convention but were not selected in a primary or caucus. The Democrats currently do not allow superdelegates to vote in the first round of voting for their nominee. If a candidate doesn't win the nomination on the first ballot, then superdelegates may vote for whoever they choose, and they make up about 15% of the total delegates. Republicans

also have superdelegates, but not as many, and they're bound to vote for the winner of their state's primary or caucus. Because the parties can set their own rules, both parties allow U.S. territories to have an equal vote at their nominating conventions. Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern American, Mariana Islands all have primaries. It's been decades since either major party has had a contested convention. The most recent convention where a candidate came to the convention without a majority was Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984, but he still won in the first ballot.

Despite there not having been a contested election for decades, could one still happen? Could someone come out of a modern nominating convention without having been a candidate going in? And the answer is, absolutely. There are several scenarios where this could happen. The first is if no one receives a majority on the first ballot, then the state delegates who were pledged to a candidate who won their state would be free to vote for anyone they wanted to. Likewise, if a candidate were to decline the nomination,

drop out of the race, or die before the convention, then the pledged delegates would be free to vote for whoever they wanted to as well. For the entire episode, I've been talking about the two major political parties in the United States. However, there are smaller third parties as well. Most of these parties do not hold primaries, but they do hold old-fashioned nominating conventions. For most smaller parties, the biggest problem is actually getting ballot access. Most states have requirements to get on the ballot for the general election, which require either a set number of signatures on a petition or having received a threshold

of votes in the previous election, usually 5%. The entire process of selecting presidential nominees is extra constitutional. That isn't to say it's unconstitutional, only that the Constitution says nothing about it. As such, that's why the system has changed so much over time and why it will continue to change in the future. Every election, there are some rules changes that each party makes, either major or minor, as well as changes in state laws. And that's one of the reasons why selecting presidential candidates is such a long and complicated affair. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer.

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