Why Do We Have Primaries?
...lessons from a crazy one from 1880's Chicago. (Is there any other kind.)
Saturday, January 27. Good morning.
If you blinked, you might have missed that the New Hampshire primaries took place this past Tuesday. Despite the number of Independents (and some Democrats) who voted for Nikki Haley, former President Donald Trump won it in a romp. When you are banking on the support of voters who are not members of your party to win a primary, you're in a bit of trouble.
President Joe Biden won in the Democratic primary as a write-in candidate because the DNC had forbidden New Hampshire from holding its primary early to give more diverse states more powerful representation. An impressive number of people wrote his name in. Still, as
noted on Pod Save America the other day, this speaks more to the organizational capabilities of his campaign than any grassroots enthusiasm.This was the dullest primary night possible because the conclusion was so foregone. And we're not thrilled about our options. Voters to the right and left seem equally unhappy with the looming match-up.
Is the system broken? In a sense, the primary system works just the way political parties intend. They protect the party incumbent, which Trump essentially is, in fact, literally is, according to him and many of his supporters. Recall, if you will, the op-eds that last year called for such Democratic leaders as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, or Hakeem Jeffries to enter the primaries, only for those propositions to die on the vine.
It doesn't feel very good to the rest of us. Aren't primaries designed to give us options? It's worth asking what the original intent of primaries was and how we got here.
Whence Primaries
What was the original goal of primaries, and what has been the outcome?
As an article from "Governing" Magazine points out, whatever guidance our country’s founding documents offered regarding the conducting of elections was aimed at ensuring our democracy wasn't wholly democratic. As was made awfully clear in the Constitution, not just anyone could or should vote, especially not for federal offices. (Hence state legislators voting for U.S. Senators and the Electoral College standing in for the electorate.)
I didn't know until I read this article that the United States is one of the only democracies in the world that holds presidential primaries. They were instituted in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century in response to the emergence of political machines in the 19th century that hand-picked their candidates. Primary elections were intended to give the people more input earlier in the election process. It was part of several Progressive-era reforms, including anti-trust laws and banking reform. (As you might recall, the Progressive Era was the peoples' corrective to the excesses of the Gilded Age.)
It hasn't exactly turned out that way. Pretty much everyone who reads this Substack is a political junkie, or close enough, and I imagine most, if not all, of you are primary voters. Most people aren’t because they don’t pay that much attention to politics.
The Atlantic’s Nick Troiano puts it this way: “A small minority of Americans decide the significant majority of our elections in partisan primaries that disenfranchise voters, distort representation, and fuel extremism––on both the left and, most acutely (at present), the right.”
But local primaries have existed for much longer than that. While primary elections as we understand them today were widely practiced in the early 20th century, there were earlier candidate selection processes that could be considered precursors to modern primaries. However, these early methods differed significantly from today's primary elections.
By the 1840s, primary meetings were held to elect delegates to conventions. Here, the Democratic Republican Standing Committee of Adams County urges that it is “the duty of every man” to attend, as printed in the Gettysburg Compiler in 1843. (I imagine it as the ur-Drudge Report. Or Connecticut’s own CTCapitolReport.)
In Chicago, as in New York, primaries from the get-go were a magnet for political shenanigans. (Basically, the more you provided an opportunity to vote, the more you provided an opportunity for political shenanigans.)
By the late 1850s, some were calling for election reform. Too many voters were voting in primaries for the other party. In the November 3, 1859 edition of the Chicago Tribune, a writer named "Q" proposed that primaries be reformed to elect candidates instead of convention delegates.
"I do not see why it is necessary for any Convention to come between the people, that is, the members of a party at large, and the direct expression of their wishes…It would be a much simpler method, and a more direct expression of the minds of the people, and would take away some opportunities afforded by the present system for bargaining and trickery, by which sometimes trading politicians obtain and perpetrate power and office…"
This proposal, of course, went nowhere.
The next day, the Trib printed another letter to the editor signed by A MEMBER OF THE [REPUBLICAN] COUNTY CONVENTION. They refer to "the evil of admitting Democrats to vote at the primary meeting of Republicans…" and suggest "a registration of voters" so that you'd know what party someone was from. Makes sense.
By the time of the Civil War, political parties were issuing dire warnings if their members didn’t vote in the primaries. (One thinks of today, where the presidential campaign is billed virtually every four years as the most important of our lifetime. And every four years, it feels like it is.)
After the war, Republicans continued to bang the drum for election reform. In the late 1860s, election officers in Chicago established poll books at polling places that contained the names of voters registered by party. Election inspectors at the poll would check a voter’s name against the poll book and mark them as voting.
At one point, a new party called The Citizens Ticket was proposed. A committee was got together to work on it. One of the committee members was Joseph Medill, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. He did not like the Republican choices offered in the primary elections in 1869, so he decided to form his own party. It didn’t work, but - fun fact - after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Medill and friends created the “Fire-Proof” party so he could run for Mayor that year. He won.
This was not the last - or even the first - time that Chicago politicians had tried to get around a system that wasn’t producing the candidates it wanted. It just…added more to the system. By the 1880s, primaries, and conventions had become so ingrained that no one questioned their utility anymore. But when they didn’t like the results, they just added more.
The race for Congress in Illinois’ Third District in 1884 was a particularly contentious one among Republicans. Popular State Senator William E. Mason was running for the seat against George R. Davis, who had been Congressman in the 2nd Congressional District until he was redistricted out. With George B. Swift, Davis was part of the first Republican political machine in Chicago and immediately pivoted to his new district, where the incumbent, Republican Charles B. Farwell, was declining to run again.
Perhaps sensing that he had an uphill climb in a district where many voters were unfamiliar with him, Davis decided to create a new Congressional committee to nominate him at their convention. The Mason men then held their convention with predictable results. There were now two Republican candidates for the same seat.
Davis proposed a compromise: Why not hold a primary between the two men? Evidently, the Mason men were wise to the trickery that could ensue in such a contest, and they asked for the Republican Executive Committee to decide. It finally did decide, in late October, that Mason was the proper nominee, but the head of steam could not be stopped. The Pro-Davis men were now the anti-Mason men, and they decided to hold a whole other convention in late October, which selected a friend and ally of Colonel Davis’s, General Charles Fitz-Simons.
The general election was a week and a half later, on November 5th.
Here was the Inter-Ocean’s headline on November 6:
You know which exception that was. The Democrat in the Third Congressional District, attorney James H. Ward, beat Mason by 4,000 votes and Fitz-Simons by 6,000 votes. Meanwhile, in the neighboring second Congressional District, Democrat Frank Lawler won George R. Davis’s seat by 2,600 votes. (I include a photo of Lawler here …because.)
Despite the newspapers’ avid and constant coverage of the dueling nominees over the past three months, the Trib didn’t even cover the election results. There were other concerns that week: Favorite Illinois son, U.S. Senator John A. Logan, was running for Vice President on the Republican Presidential ticket with James. G. Blaine of Maine against New York’s Democratic Governor Grover A. Cleveland and his running mate Thomas Hendricks. The election had turned out to be a nail-biter, with Republicans accusing New York State of “voting irregularities.”
The New York Times was, of course, only too happy to call the election the next day:
Republican papers refused to call the election. Two days later, the Chicago Tribune was still printing headlines like this:
I guess it’s understandable that the Trib was too distracted by more significant concerns that week to wrap up its narrative about the family feud in the Republican party.
Is there a lesson here for us today? Indeed, a lot of this sounds and feels all too familiar. What seems different to me is that, if you take that Republican contest in 1884 as an example, At least they were trying. Yes, they were subverting the system, but they were actively testing those fences. The primary system was tested, and it held. (In due time, William E. Mason was elected to the U.S. Senate, while George R. Davis became the Director General of the World’s Columbian Exposition. They came out fine.) Of course, by that logic, President Trump and his supporters were “trying” by creating slates of fake electors to overturn the actual election results in the 2020 election.
Why won’t we use the system we have to give the people better options? (And my apologies to those of you who are reading who are either members of the DNC or other political governing bodies! I’m just asking the question.) Or if the system has finally broken, why don’t we make some attempt to fix it? As a Democrat, I feel strongly that President Biden has done a great job, but didn’t he promise to step down after four years? Was he truly the best candidate this party could come up with this year?
I don’t think we do our democracy any favors by sitting out any of the (legitimate) options we have to push the system - and our candidates - to be better.
Next Week:
Back to October 1893. In which the race between George B. Swift and Martin Madden heats up.
Resources
http://conventions.cps.neu.edu/history/the-progressive-era-reforms-and-the-birth-of-the-primaries-1890-1960/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_primary
https://www.governing.com/context/why-does-america-have-primaries
The History of Voter Registration in the U.S. -FairVote.org
Terrific (as always, but it needs to be said!). I am particularly taken by the sound of your Voice, which is conversationally written and melodic. Thank you! #WriteOnSister
Jen, this is fascinating stuff you are unearthing. I was hoping you'd say more about the new parties that formed in Chicago to try to fight the big ones, and why that was possible back in the 1800s, because you are pointing straight at a solution to our current woes: reviving fusion voting. See https://centerforballotfreedom.org/fusion-in-american-history/ for starters.