Let's Rethink the Primary Process for 2028

Time sometimes moves so slowly during Donald Trump’s agonizing second term that it may come as a surprise to learn that we are only about a year away from when Democrats have traditionally held their first televised presidential primary debate, and likely mere months away from the first flurry of announcement videos from what is likely to be a preposterously crowded field of aspirants. Yet with the party’s focus understandably elsewhere, and given the roiling crisis of Ken Martin’s tenure atop the Democratic National Committee, little attention has been paid to how the party plans to conduct its presidential nominating process in an election whose stakes could not possibly be more existential.

Since Democrats pioneered the binding primary process in 1972, the two most contentious issues have been in which order the states should conduct their contests and whether party elites should have any role beyond certifying the verdict of the voters at the party convention. The second question was answered decisively following the bruising 2016 primary when so-called “superdelegates” were dramatically decreased in number and stripped of the ability to vote on the first ballot, meaning they could only weigh in if there was an unprecedented and highly unlikely brokered convention without a clear winner. And while the party can’t mandate it, their preferences are no longer reported as part of candidate delegate tallies, in an effort to address one of the 2016 Sanders’ campaign’s persistent complaints. 

As for the order of the states, party leaders deserve some credit for successfully and quietly performing an end-run around self-appointed bellwethers Iowa and New Hampshire. After the state’s embarrassing 2020 debacle, an increasingly red-leaning Iowa and its antiquated caucuses were stripped of their once-pivotal role in the process. And the party finally told New Hampshire and its ridiculous law mandating that the state hold the first primary in the nation to go pound sand, electing to foreground states whose demographics better represent the Democrats’ emerging coalition.  It certainly helped (from a process standpoint, not from an outcome standpoint!) that there was no serious challenger to President Biden in 2024 and thus no particular reason for everyone to continue fuming at one another.

While there will no doubt be another tussle with New Hampshire prior to 2028, and while a national primary day or a short series of Super Tuesday-like mega-contests would be preferable to the strange system we currently employ, this moment of national crisis is probably not the time to think about such a major structural reform. For now, Democrats should consider these longstanding problems mostly resolved and pivot to ones that are much more likely to cause them headaches starting next summer. To be blunt, the party needs to regain some measure of control and influence over the nomination process that it theoretically oversees—not to return to smoke-filled rooms or to deprive voters of their decisive role in the voting process, but to adapt to the realities of the attention economy and the vulnerabilities created by a system so obviously capable of getting hijacked by bad actors. 

Party leaders have always struggled to balance the influence of party elites with the desires of the party’s primary electorate, which has come to expect a much more open, almost open source, process over time, increasingly regarding interventions from influential members or institutions of the party as unfair. Yet given that presidential nominees assume effective control of the national party apparatus and the Democratic agenda when they secure their nomination, it is not surprising that the shape of the nominating contests has been heavily influenced by incumbent presidents either seeking a glide path to re-election or attempting to steer voters toward their preferred successor. This dynamic nearly tore the party apart in 2016 when President Obama’s hand-picked successor, Hillary Clinton, was granted seemingly preferential treatment from the national party as she fended off a surprisingly spirited challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. 

In 2019–2020, the party over-corrected for the 2016 disaster with a well-intentioned but overly permissive set of debate inclusion rules that allowed virtually anyone with a passing interest in the party’s nomination to participate. You could get yourself into the first debate by splashing a mere 1% in three different polls. No one in a position of power in the party even tried to put guardrails around these rules, believing that exercising any quality control or discretion would land poorly with the party’s still-aggrieved and seemingly ascendant left flank. Among many other things, that meant that voters just tuning into politics for the first time in years were greeted with the perception that a strange woman exuding unmistakable cult leader vibes, Marianne Williamson, was someone who represented the party, its values and its direction. And while the nominee should not be chosen behind the scenes by party elites with limited input from voters, as was the case until the earthquake of 1968, it should also not be possible for any random celebrity or bored oligarch to simply will a candidacy into existence in the absence of any credible evidence that the person has support from voters.

The first two debates in the summer of 2019, featuring 20 candidates spread across two nights, felt unserious and amateurish and turned several people, including Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard, into household names and then prominent party-switchers who used the influence they built during their campaigns to attack the party when it was no longer convenient for them to use it as a vessel for their ambitions. The fact that Gabbard, a Democratic candidate for president in 2020, went on to become a MAGA quisling willing to serve as Trump’s second-term CIA director is a bottom-tier outcome that really should not be repeated if at all possible.

The cattle call debate format also seized precious airtime from serious candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and redistributed them to non-entities like former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Smarmy former Rep. Eric Swalwell used the subsequent boost in name recognition to position himself as the frontrunner in this year’s California gubernatorial primary before last-minute revelations that he is a predatory scumbag broke containment. None of these people were polling higher than the very low single digits in June 2019 and didn’t belong anywhere near that stage. It wasn’t until the third debate that the debate field was whittled to a still-unmanageable ten candidates.

This problem is already emerging for the 2028 cycle. On May 26, the New York Times ran a puff piece on the washed-up former Mayor of Chicago, 66-year-old Rahm Emanuel, and his plan for higher education reform. The details of the proposal are a snooze, but that isn’t what was striking about the piece. The notoriously foulmouthed Emanuel isn’t some goofy outsider like Williamson—he led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, when Democrats gained 30 seats and recaptured the House for the first time since the 1994 GOP wave swept them out of power—but he hasn’t been elected to anything since 2015, holds no current position of importance, isn’t remembered particularly fondly in Chicago and struggles to hit 1% when his name is included in public opinion surveys of the race. The fact that his name is in those polls at all is an incredible triumph for his PR team. The number of people who are genuinely excited about Rahm Emanuel, presidential candidate, could probably fit into a single conference room at the Searchlight Institute. And there is no rule that says that Democrats must allow anyone to anoint themselves as a serious presidential contender, especially someone like Emanuel, who represents a long-vanished ideological consensus in the party.

There is no easy answer to this problem. But at minimum, the polling threshold should be at least 5%, because 1% thresholds do not really serve any function at all—just ask the Dutch parliament, which hosts 3 representatives from something called the Party for the Animals. At the moment, that threshold would yield some mix of former vice president Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Public Figure Without Portfolio Pete Buttigieg, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Mark Kelly and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, with Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker lurking at 4% in multiple polls, a number that would surely go up if he announces a bid. Even eight candidates will strain the capacity of anyone to say anything meaningful with their time. Any number higher than eight is a joke designed to boost cable news ratings rather than an opportunity for Democratic primary voters to learn anything about the field.

But polling guardrails aren’t enough. What if ESPN provocateur Stephen A. Smith is at 7%? What if someone like Maureen Galindo, an unhinged sex therapist who nearly captured the Democratic nomination for a winnable House seat in Texas last month, qualifies for the debates? Most accusations of anti-semitism against Democrats are either pure projection from Republican Nazis or cynical efforts to muzzle dissent against Israeli war crimes, but there is no sense in denying that some justifiable anger about Gaza is being used as cover to push hatred of Jews in certain corners of the far left. Having yielded all control of the state results to voters, and lacking a mechanism to deny ballot access to specific lunatics, Democrats need to use the only lever they have to at least keep them out of party-sponsored, nationally-televised debates—their judgement and discretion. The DNC could cobble together a small committee of respected figures from different redoubts of the party’s ideological map with the power to block truly odious candidates likely to harm to Democratic election prospects in 2026 and shape the contours of these debates.

The second biggest problem with the early debates in 2019 was turning over such a crucial process to journalists whose incentives were unquestionably to rake the candidates over the coals, to produce gotcha moments and to highlight the party’s internal divisions for a curious national audience. Nearly every debate in the cycle began with some variation of a moderator asking the candidates how they would pay for their health care plans or trying to pin them down on the radicalism of the party’s left flank. 

It was particularly infuriating to watch because these debates were Democrats’ first opportunity since the 2016 general election debates to take their policy platforms, ideas and emerging stars directly to the electorate, and instead of carefully stage-managing this rollout, they allowed it to be co-opted by media elites who are implacably hostile to the social democratic project of the progressive left. The very first question of the very first debate in Miami on June 26th, 2019 was NBC’s Savannah Guthrie turning to Elizabeth Warren, contemptuously listing some of her policy ideas and then asking, “What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?” On the second night, Guthrie’s first victim was Bernie Sanders, who was asked, “will taxes go up for the middle class in a Sanders administration? And if so, how do you sell that to voters?” With the fullness of hindsight, I say fuck all the way off with this nonsense.

That these debates were ultimately an embarrassing fiasco that still haunts the party is an understatement. The problem is not that they led candidates like then-Sen. Kamala Harris to adopt positions on immigration and trans rights that were later used against them. The idea that Harris was done in by Trump’s “they/them” ad is a piece of pure Beltway lore without a single shred of empirical support, and is mostly based on the self-interested claims of a single Harris SuperPAC—and also had nothing to do with the debates themselves anyway. The real problem with turning the party’s fortunes and reputation over to network morning show hosts is that it led to absurd theater like when Guthrie asked ten serious presidential candidates to raise their hands if they supported covering undocumented immigrants in their healthcare proposals, as if we were watching leaked video of a high school civics class. Who should be setting the agenda in the 2028 primaries, when the very existence of democracy is at stake in the general election? Savannah Guthrie? Or should it perhaps be someone with a vested interest in a Democrat winning that election?

This moment in particular is used, to this day, by the party’s center-right flank to bludgeon the progressive left and to accuse progressive politicians and allied organizations of saddling the national party with unworkable policy positions. But the problem was not the particular position they adopted, it was the way that Guthrie and her colleagues flattened the debate on contentious issues and deprived the most plausible candidates of the opportunity to make the case for why undocumented immigrants should be included in any healthcare system. The delicate details of how to approach a wedge issue like this simply shouldn’t be worked out in public during high-stakes debates with millions of viewers supervised by journalists with clear economic incentives to make the candidates look bad.

The answer to this problem is laughably simple. Rather than turning over this bounty of free advertising and reputation management to hostile media elites, Democrats should stage manage their debates much more carefully. Moderators should be selected with great care, and should be charismatic figures who want the proceedings to go well for Democrats rather than for CNN or NBC. Legacy media figures will briefly retreat to fainting couches at the audacity of Democrats stripping them of their agenda-setting role, and they should be paid no mind whatsoever. If they won’t turn over their airtime to the DNC without having their vacuous talking heads front and center, Democrats should simply produce their own show and stream it on Youtube. No one under the age of 45 watches cable news anyway and very large numbers of Democratic primary voters have never heard of legacy media figures like Guthrie.

Leading Democrats have become understandably reluctant to play any role in shaping the party’s nominating process, which has more or less removed the primary system from the landscape of intraparty debate. In some ways this represents success in settling several of the most contentious problems with a system that, according to Elaine Kamarck, the leading chronicler of its evolution, is “unlike that of any other major democracy in the world,” and one that many political scientists believe has resulted in the world’s weakest major political parties—weak in terms of capacity to manage the party’s direction, platform and candidates, that is, not in terms of election results. No other democracy fully turns over the process of selecting the party nominees for executive office to voters quite the way we do in the United States, nor is any other government so deeply embedded in the primary system itself by financing and operating those primary elections.

But for better or worse, presidential primaries are now an inextricable part of American political culture, and any effort to claw back power from voters would be met with shock, derision and party-wrecking pushback. But that doesn’t mean the national party should forsake any effort whatsoever to shape the primary field itself, or that Democrats are obligated to give cable news journalists such a leading role in selecting the party’s nominee. Indeed, ensuring that Democrats themselves are making the most important decisions about how to present the party, its ideas and platform to the public over the next year is just as important as whoever ends up capturing the nomination. And the time to address these problems is now, before candidates start cluttering the field with their campaign launches. If Democrats lose the truly existential 2028 election, it will allow MAGA Republicans to consolidate the nascent authoritarian regime that they have been busily, clumsily and loudly erecting for the past 18 months, and at that point, all of these debates would be beside the point anyway. 

Featured image is "Democratic Primary Debate Participants June 27, 2019," CC BY-SA 2.0 DonkeyHotey 2019.