Presidential Nominations

in this first section,

I'm going to talk about the history

of presidential nominations in the United States

with everything in the United States.

It all goes back to the Constitution,

and this is an area where the Constitution is absolutely silent.

The Constitution

didn't anticipate much of anything at all to deal with presidential elections.

In fact, the section on presidential elections is very vague.

The United States Constitution was written as if they

would never be a party system in the country.

So the idea that parties would need to nominate

candidates for a presidential election wasn't even considered.

As the parties formed in the early part of the American Constitutional Republic,

they had to figure this out all for themselves.

And in fact, the first few presidential elections

made the need for this really apparent.

The first two presidential elections were easy.

George Washington was unanimously elected by everybody who could cast a vote.

He was a national hero. Everybody knew he would be president.

But once he left office, things got really complicated.

In the first competitive presidential election,

the vice president of the United States, John Adams,

fought a bitter contest against Thomas Jefferson,

which he won.

But it was a very close election and was contested bitterly on all sides.

And one of the things they discovered

was that the presidential election system neglected

to figure out how we elect a vice president in a competent way.

So the runner up in this election, Thomas Jefferson, who hated John Adams,

became the vice president,

and people were worried about things like assassination attempts so quickly.

People scrambled and repaired that,

and it was decided that parties should have two

people running for president and vice president simultaneously.

Unfortunately, they didn't fix the problem.

So in the next election,

when Jefferson and Adams competed against each other again,

this time Jefferson one

and

he tied his own vice presidential nominee, Aaron Burr,

and there was no mechanism in place to figure out who should be president.

The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, and again

people realised that the system was fatally flawed.

The result was that the parties themselves created a nomination system,

and the original system of party nominations was that members of Congress,

federally elected officers would meet together

in their own party groups to decide who they

would nominate to run for public office for president.

That worked for a little while.

But after about 30 years, another problem developed,

and that was that the president became very popular,

and now the public wanted to say in who was going to become the president.

And as the public became interested,

the parties had to make these

nomination conventions

more open and accessible to the public.

Originally,

the way this was done was that the

nominating conventions were expanded beyond just the congressional delegation

to state level political leaders.

And annual or quadrennial

nominating conventions were developed

in which all the party leaders from around the country

would assemble together in one city and nominate who would represent the party

at the next presidential election.

This survived for about 75 years, But in the early 19 hundreds,

cracks in this system were clearly evident,

and the cracks were that the system had become fully corrupted,

as in many instances,

what had happened is that powerful elites known

as power brokers had begun dominating nominating conventions,

and there were two major types of power brokers.

One were political machines.

These were often groups of political

activists within cities who sometimes through corrupt

means would turn out massive numbers of voters to support a party.

These number of voters could be sufficient to win

an entire state in places like New York,

where the vote in New York City determined who would win a statewide election.

These power brokers would go to national nominating conventions,

and they would tell the rest of the party

that you would either nominate the candidate of their choice

or the machine would not turn out the vote.

This gave them an unfair advantage in selecting a nominee.

The other group who was really influential influential

were wealthy elites, people with lots of money who could pay potential candidates

to rescind their candidacy

in favour of whoever the wealthy elites wanted.

When word of things like this got out, the public became very disaffected.

And in the early 19 hundreds

there was a massive push to reform the nominating process in America,

and the result was that

the first presidential primaries were held in 1912

1912 is probably the most epic presidential election that's ever been held.

It had a sitting president campaigning

against a prior president for the nomination

for the Republican Party and they went on to

contest against who would become the future president.

Woodrow Wilson. 12 states decided to hold presidential primaries

in nine of those states.

The voters of the state chose to support

the Republican primary nomination of Theodore Roosevelt,

a previous US president.

Two of those states voted to support the sitting Republican president,

Howard Taft.

Two of those states chose a sitting U. S senator.

The clear favourite of the population seemed to be Theatre Roosevelt.

But that's not what the party went with.

The party was controlled by the sitting president,

and this came to explain the problem with the existing system.

The nomination process was held by political elites,

and it didn't really matter what the people wanted.

Even these early primaries were only informative.

They could tell political elites what the people wanted.

But the people in power didn't have to listen.

And that went on until the 19 sixties.

In 1968 there was another pivotal election in American history,

where a sitting president Lyndon Johnson,

who had first assumed office after the assassination of John F.

Kennedy,

decided he would not run for re election,

and he decided not to run for reelection because in

the first primary that was held in New Hampshire,

he didn't do so well.

He realised he would probably not win reelection, so he decided to stand down

this through the Democratic Party into turmoil because

it was split among two big factions.

One faction supported President Johnson,

and they supported the Vietnam War.

The other faction

had supported John F. Kennedy more than Lyndon Johnson,

and they were more based in the civil rights movement.

They wanted to see equality and democracy spread a lot faster across America.

When these two factions battled it out for control of the Democratic Party,

it didn't go well.

In 1968 the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago,

and it devolved into riots

the party elite contrived so that the nomination went to Johnson's vice president,

who was unpopular with a lot of Democratic voters.

The city fell into bloodshed,

and on national TV, people watched police beat peaceful protesters.

This forced the nation to really think

about how presidential nominations were made,

and immediately a commission was formed to discuss

how we can make a presidential primary system

that really worked for the people of the United States.

Six years later,

in 1976 the first really national primary system was incorporated and that

began the modern era of primaries and caucuses in the United States.