Such predictability was not always the case. In fact, three-quarters of a century ago, the City of Brotherly Love played host to a very different convention—one whose outcome was so unexpected it became known as the “Miracle in Philadelphia.”

This was before the age of modern primaries, when the convention was less of an award ceremony, and more the actual contest. When the 1940 Republican National Convention opened, just 300 of the 1,000 delegates were pledged to a candidate. The contenders included such heavyweights as former President Herbert Hoover (attempting a comeback), Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of South Dakota, and three U.S. senators, among them Michigan’s Arthur H. Vandenberg and Ohio’s Robert A. Taft.

And then there was Wendell L. Willkie, the boisterous head of the New York City-based Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest energy holding company. Willkie’s previous foray into the political realm was as a delegate at the 1924 and 1932 National Conventions—as a Democrat.

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority to compete with private utilities, Willkie soured on the Democrats and became a leading spokesman for the business sector against New Deal policies. Willkie nonetheless described himself as a “liberal” with an ironclad commitment to civil rights and individual liberties. He said that if elected he planned to desegregate the government, the armed forces, and Washington, D.C.

Still, it was quite a leap to go from Democratic National Convention delegate to Republican presidential candidate. Willkie had not even bothered to mount a formal campaign, having declared his “availability” for nomination just 48 days before the convention’s first gavel fell. He had no campaign funds and no campaign manager or hired spokesman. A Gallup poll six weeks prior to the convention reflected Willkie’s minimal efforts, showing 67 percent support among Republican voters for Dewey, 14 percent for Vandenberg, 12 percent for Taft, and 3 percent for Willkie.

Yet it was Willkie who, to the astonishment of everyone except himself, somehow managed to walk away with the nomination. How did an industrialist from Indiana—sometimes known as the “Barefoot Wall Street Lawyer” for the folksy Indiana ways he brought to the big city—manage to best his far better-known, better-connected and better-moneyed rivals?

The answer is both simple and complex. Only a month earlier, Hitler’s Nazi troops had stormed through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. More than 350,000 British and French troops, in full retreat, had staged a daring escape across the English Channel from Dunkirk. On the first evening of the convention, at a special session at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall broadcast via radio coast to coast, Republican National Chairman John Hamilton of Kansas addressed the country’s mounting fears. “The world is witnessing a terrible demonstration of how quickly the hard-earned rights of man can be destroyed,” Hamilton declared. “Individual liberty and opportunity are gone in much of the world; the rights of man, slowly built up over a thousand years, have vanished.” His speech concluded with a descendent of Benjamin Franklin ringing the Liberty Bell.

For the 1940 Republican presidential hopefuls, this state of affairs created a problem. All of the leading candidates were well-known isolationists, while Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, had been engaged globally for almost two terms. Indeed, the official Republican platform issued that week declared the party “firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign war.” But it added, “The zero hour is here. America must prepare if it wants to defend our shores, our homes, our lives, and our most cherished ideals.”

Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, was the conservative leader of the U.S. Senate and the Republican establishment’s pick. Vandenberg, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was leader of the Senate’s isolationist block and an early frontrunner, subsequently knocked out by Dewey in the primaries. Dewey, the impeccably dressed, 38-year-old, gang-busting U.S. Attorney had narrowly lost the New York governor’s race in 1938. But he won nine out of 10 presidential primaries and came to the convention as the strong favorite.

Willkie, 48, was the sole internationalist—and the only contender with experience running a large organization. In 1929 he was hired as corporate counsel at Commonwealth & Southern and quickly rose through the ranks. Four years later, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, he was made president. Willkie rebuilt the company, increasing business assets to more than $1 billion, employing 25,000 workers and bringing electricity for the first time to millions of people in 10 states.

In the run-up to the convention, as global tensions mounted, Willkie captured the imagination of the public and the media. U.S. News, Time, Life, Look, Fortune, and The Saturday Evening Post ran feature stories, and 10,000 “Willkie for President” clubs sprang up across the nation. By convention week, a Gallup poll suggested that Willkie had carved a big chunk out of Dewey’s lead. Dewey was still far ahead, at 47 percent. But Willkie was now in second position, at 29 percent, with the other contenders relegated to single digits.

As was the norm—before convention rule changes that went into effect in 1972—most delegates of both parties were either uncommitted or committed to a “Favorite Son” candidate from their state. All the 1940 candidates thought that if they could hold off Dewey on the first ballot they had a chance. But Willkie had momentum. During the convention, the Willkie for President clubs inundated the convention with more than a million pro-Willkie telegrams and letters, which were dumped at the delegates’ feet, while the balconies were stacked with supporters screaming, “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

Where did such enthusiastic support come from for this non-establishment candidate? Initially the clubs did emerge from the establishment, spurred by Republican strategist and Willkie supporter Oren Root. But that was just the beginning. The clubs—fueled by the barrage of national publicity and Willkie’s homespun personality—resonated with the public and spread rapidly and spontaneously across the nation, culminating in this moment of frenzied support.

On the first ballot, Dewey took the lead, with 360 of the 501 votes required to win. Taft, known as “Mr. Republican” and favored by uncommitted party-insider delegates, trailed with 189 votes, while Willkie started in third place with 105. But Dewey made a tactical error in not holding reserve votes for the second ballot, which would have helped create the impression of momentum. Instead he dropped to 338 while both Taft and Willkie gained ground. By the end of the fourth ballot Dewey’s support had collapsed to 250. Taft gained momentum with 254, while Willkie surged forward with 306. The relentless chanting from the balcony continued: “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

On the crucial sixth ballot, state delegations stampeded to Willkie. The darkest dark horse since the days of Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield won the prize. Afterwards in his small hotel room, the nominee laughingly told the press, “I guess the first thing I’ll have to do is change my registration from Democrat to Republican.”

George Gallup called Willkie’s charge to the nomination “the most astonishing” in the brief history of polling. Journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “I am convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person.”

The campaign was almost as exciting. Roosevelt later said that despite his victory—amassing 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million, the most secured by any Republican presidential candidate to date—the “liberal” Republican known for carrying his own bags hit him with the toughest fight of his political career. Roosevelt so respected Willkie that soon after his inauguration he sent his former political foe traveling throughout Europe and Asia as his personal diplomatic representative during World War II. Willkie’s resulting book, One World, was a bestseller. In 1944, Willkie briefly mounted a fresh campaign for president, but dropped out after he was defeated by party conservatives in the Wisconsin primary. He died soon after, at age 52, from a series of heart attacks.

Though Willkie never realized his presidential dream, his spectacular performance at the 1940 convention stands as one of the all-time greatest presidential convention upsets. And Willkie’s strong showing against FDR in the general election ensured him—and his ideas—a seat at the table. In 2016, when many American voters across the ideological spectrum have again demonstrated their frustrations with the limitations of political insiders, history reminds us that our democratic institutions can, indeed, accommodate the demands of sudden popular change.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Before Donald Trump, Wendell L. Willkie Upended the GOP Primary in 1940 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is a clear pattern, a back and forth, that my co-authors and I identified in researching for our book, The Party Decides. While rule changes may give the upper hand to voters for a few presidential cycles, elites will always try to find ways to stage this voting process in their favor.

At this summer’s conventions, both parties are reconsidering the rules of the presidential selection process, after Donald Trump’s divisive triumph on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders’ strong Democratic challenge raised questions about the fairness of procedures. But no matter what reforms to the selection process that parties may pursue, the back-and-forth struggle between elites and the voters will likely continue.

Today, the nominating process is itself the product of reforms that didn’t alter this dynamic. Presidential elections now consist of both primaries—where residents simply cast their ballots in the area designated to them based off their address—and caucuses—where voters gather openly to decide which candidate to support.

This mix of primaries and caucuses is relatively new to American politics.

In the early decades of the Republic, members of Congress got together to decide presidential nominations. The rest of the nation was totally frozen out of the process. In the early 19th century, reforms designed to make the process more representative led to national party conventions. These gatherings enabled leaders from across the country to take part in the momentous decision of nominating a potential president. The convention system lasted for more than a century until there was a reform movement put in place to increase participation even further.

The modern presidential nominating process wasn’t born until 1968. The Democratic Party—like the rest of the country—was deeply and sharply divided over the war in Vietnam, when party leaders meeting at the convention in Chicago decided to select the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to take on Richard Nixon in November. There was rioting in the streets and shouting in the convention hall. The problem was not just that Humphrey was intimately associated with the Johnson administration’s hawkish military policies in Southeast Asia. What drew the ire of many was that Humphrey had failed to compete in any of the primaries and caucuses that nominating season. He was plucked from the wings and foisted upon the party in a very undemocratic fashion.

In 1968, this type of political movement could occur because primaries and caucuses were not binding. In the aftermath of that bitter convention, Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to democratize the nominating process. They decided that, starting in 1972, candidates who won the most votes in each contest would receive the most delegates from that state, conferring significantly more importance on the primaries and caucuses. Additionally, the candidate who amassed a majority of delegates—2,383 for Democrats and 1,237 for Republicans—would automatically become the party’s nominee. While McGovern-Fraser was a Democratic Party committee, Republicans followed suit and the two parties had in place extremely similar procedures by 1976.

The goal was to wrest the power to nominate away from the party bosses and give it to the people—and that is exactly what the McGovern-Fraser reforms succeeded in doing. Candidates for president were now essentially required to submit themselves to the voters in order to be crowned their party’s nominee. Democratic Party elites, seeing things slipping away, in 1982 convened the Hunt Commission to reform the process yet again. This time they sought to regain some of their influence by mandating that 20 percent of the delegates would not be bound by voter preferences and therefore would be able to choose whomever they wanted to support come convention time. These superdelegates only exist on one side of the party divide however, as the Republicans did not choose to emulate the Democrats this time.

One irony of this back and forth is that America’s presidential nominating process is among the most open and democratic in the world. Most other political parties worldwide do not have any sort of primaries, and many that do limit rank-and-file participation in a variety of ways. Also, some parties screen candidates and, without elite support, one cannot even run for the nomination.

But still, the litany of complaints about our system is long: The primary process goes on forever. It is too expensive for non-elite candidates. Iowa and New Hampshire, two relatively unrepresentative states that lead off the proceedings, have disproportionate influence on the final outcome. The votes of many citizens essentially don’t count because in most instances the contest has been wrapped up before their states’ scheduled primaries and caucuses.

Of course, if your preferred candidate is ultimately victorious, the complaints tend to be muted. But supporters of the losing candidates are often quite vocal in their disparagement of the system—and 2016 was no different in this regard.

If you look at the Democratic race, it was clearly a case of the party deciding for Hillary Clinton before the voting began. Clinton quickly locked in virtually all of the elite endorsements, making her the strongest frontrunner the modern system has ever witnessed. Clinton also benefited from the overwhelming support of those infamous superdelegates. And finally, the Democratic National Committee initially scheduled a relatively small number of debates and broadcasted most of them on Saturday nights, minimizing the potential damage to a Clinton campaign that had huge systematic advantages. Despite running under a legal and ethical cloud for most of her campaign, and facing a powerful insurgency led by a surprisingly charismatic challenger, Clinton prevailed in the end and became the first woman ever to be nominated by a major political party for president.

On the Republican side, the lead-up to the primaries and caucuses as well as the ultimate outcome could not have been more different. Party elites clearly would not or could not decide on a preferred candidate during the invisible primary period, splitting their support among several broadly acceptable aspirants including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. This opened the door for Donald Trump to capitalize on a populist anger simmering among the Republican primary electorate. Trump won his party’s nomination without any elite support going into the primaries and caucuses and prevailed despite most party elites preferring anybody but him.

One can already see countervailing pressures on the two major parties resulting from the drama of 2016. Sanders supporters are calling to abolish superdelegates and change states’ primary processes to make them more accessible. And Republican leaders will seek to gain a firmer grip on their nominating process to avoid the debacle that has been Donald Trump’s unlikely candidacy. In fact, we saw this play out earlier this week as anti-Trump forces in Cleveland tried to force various procedural roll call votes as a way of, if not stopping Trump, embarrassing him and his supporters.

No matter the reforms, the struggle between elites and voters will go on.

The post Americans Have Been Fed Up With the Presidential Nomination Process for More Than 200 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of Roosevelt’s most enduring impacts was his crucial role in the rise of state-based primary elections, explained Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, professor at the University of Southern California, and author of the new book Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary. He shared lessons from his research with an overflow crowd at a Zócalo event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. on Friday.

“If the parties today still selected nominees the way they did [before] Roosevelt created these primaries, I think it’s pretty likely that everything would be dominated by party insiders,” Cowan said. “Jeb Bush would probably be the Republican party frontrunner, and Donald Trump wouldn’t be taken seriously. I don’t think Bernie Sanders would be taken seriously on the other side if there were not a chance for the public to participate directly in these decisions.”

Roosevelt had already served two terms as president from the Republican Party when he decided to throw his hat into the ring again in late 1911. Party bosses decided the nominee in the smoke-filled backrooms of political conventions. Roosevelt thought that his familiarity with these men would win him the nomination.

But within months it became clear that his chief opponent William Howard Taft, the incumbent president who had been Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, had locked up the bosses.

So Roosevelt decided that primaries had to be the centerpiece of his campaign. “Let the people rule” became his slogan. He lost the first three primaries in American history in 1912, including one in his home state of New York.

“Humiliated and furious,” Roosevelt started campaigning on the road with vigor, Cowan said. He took a train to Chicago, found enormous success with an “anti-establishment message of reform,” and won the Illinois primary in a rout. “It was the first primary in American history to change a campaign’s momentum,” Cowan said.

By June, he had won nine primaries and thought he had a path to victory. But of course, primaries weren’t the dominant way of choosing a party’s nominee in 1912. Roosevelt still was a long shot—Taft’s men controlled the nomination process and the delegates at the national party convention.

Roosevelt’s supporters set about trying to turn delegates to Roosevelt’s side. Perhaps a large number of African-American delegates from the South might be convinced to switch teams.

Unfortunately, Roosevelt couldn’t capture enough of them. So he went across the street from the convention and announced that he would start his own party: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” he famously told the crowd.

In one of the more disappointing twists of history, Cowan said, this new party wouldn’t seat any of the black delegates from the Deep South who had switched teams for Roosevelt or the biracial delegations they came with to the Bull Moose convention, opting instead to seat the all-white delegations from those states.

Cowan said he struggled with why Roosevelt made such a decision. Perhaps Roosevelt thought this move would win him some southern states. Perhaps he thought he’d get credit for seating black delegates from the North even if the ones from the Deep South weren’t seated. Perhaps he planned to help blacks once he was in power.

In any case, Cowan said, he considers Roosevelt’s decision to exclude southern blacks as a “stain on his reputation,” and a “disgraceful” example of self-interest and racism.

A half-century after Roosevelt, Cowan himself got involved in primary reform. It was 1968, and Cowan saw a great unfairness remaining in this “mixed” system of primaries and backroom dealings.

In a clip from a black-and-white </a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=298X18RnYIQ>ABC news report played for the audience, the newscaster Howard K. Smith talked about how a Yale student named Geoffrey Cowan put together a pamphlet that described how the methods for choosing 600 delegates at the Democratic nominating convention were not even open to the public. That set in motion a string of events, including U.S. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota leading a commission to write new rules and convince the states to accept them. Eventually the states agreed to a more open process and the newscaster pronounced Cowan as someone “who did more to change Democratic conventions than anybody since Andrew Jackson first started them.”

During the Zócalo event’s question-and-answer session, audience members asked Cowan his opinion on a variety of issues in the presidential nominating process. How does he feel about caucuses? What does he think of a primary decided by national voting rather than going state by state? What does he think about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which has made it much easier for money to flow into campaigns? What does he think of the media’s role in elections?

Cowan found much fault with the current system: When people caucus, their bosses could be in the room and sway their opinions. He disagreed with Citizens United that money was the same as speech and both should bear few restrictions. But he also dismissed common reform ideas; a national primary, he said, would benefit those with the most money and the most name recognition.

Cowan left one of his most pointed criticisms for the media. “The press has been almost entirely wrong this season and yet I don’t think the press has a lot of humility about that,” he said.

But Cowan wasn’t sure there were many viable alternatives. “There are problems with every system,” he said.

The post Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Should Thank Theodore Roosevelt appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But today, with a new campaign season upon us, our presidential primaries don’t seem to meet anyone’s standards for popular rule. Tiny, unrepresentative states have outsized power. Billionaires and their money are often the most important factors in the contests. Media coverage rewards extremist rhetoric and partisanship, and only a tiny fraction of American voters end up having a say in the presidential nomination process.

In advance of a January 15 Zócalo event, “Do Primaries Really Make Presidential Elections More Democratic?,” we asked scholars, pundits, and political practitioners: How should we improve the presidential nominating process?

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