Following the Chicago convention and Humphrey’s close loss to Republican Richard Nixon in the general election that fall, Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, a rising young star in the Democratic Party, launched a surreptitious plan to revamp the nominating system that had caused such disarray. Harris’s scheme—carried forward by South Dakota Senator George McGovern and Minnesota Congressman Don Fraser—would transform participation in the Presidential nomination process and shunt aside the national and state party establishment and their allies.
The path forward, according to the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection’s report, Mandate for Reform, was to “democratize” the Party’s internal operations. The aim, it vowed, was to “strengthen our Party and American democracy” and “regenerat[e] the Democratic Party as a more responsive and dynamic servant of the American people.”
The practical effect of these lofty aims was the adoption of Presidential primaries by Democratic state parties in 1972, with the Republican Party generally following along afterward. (The GOP was not driven by the elite divisions and ambition that propelled Democrats. Instead, state laws passed by mostly Democratic legislatures and the lure of media coverage, which favored Democratic candidates battling in the 1972 primary races, compelled the GOP to shift.)
The number of Presidential primaries rose rapidly from 15 in 1968 to 27 in 1976 and 37 in 1980, where it has hovered, moving a bit higher or lower depending on the competitiveness of Presidential nominations. Because of the adoption of primaries to replace party control, the proportion of delegates chosen by primary elections to both party conventions more than doubled—from about 40% in 1968 to 94% by 2020.
Though this may sound more democratic in principle than party members negotiating at a convention for the best ticket, the drawbacks of “more democracy” have been in display over the past few weeks: due to the limited power of party officials, the organized party leadership had no real way to manage the crisis over whether Biden had the capacity to win reelection. Delegates pledged to Biden from every state—who were selected in the largely uncontested Democratic Presidential primaries since January—will vote in the nomination process. But there is no avenue for the kind of high-stakes negotiation that would have easily induced Biden to step aside and coalesced around a replacement.
Biden’s 3,896 pledged delegates were essentially handed to him on a silver platter in a process once billed as advancing democracy. The development of that process rendered the practice of party officials running their party—a concept widely accepted in other representative systems that would prove useful today— undemocratic.