Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Is replacing Biden as his party’s nominee an attack on democracy? Hardly.

Joe Biden leaving Marine One
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

Alas, the coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee is complete.


Democrats are surprisingly ecstatic with the decision, and Republicans, or at least the Trump campaign, is very cross about it, complaining that democracy has been subverted. This is something of a reversal, given that Republicans argued Biden was too infirm to be president, and Democrats prior to last month’s disastrous debate contended he was the only candidate to beat Trump. Democrats then, and Republicans now, claim ignoring the will of primary voters is an affront to democracy.

But let’s put the partisan spinning aside and ask a very basic question: What’s wrong with a party ignoring, or even abolishing, primaries?

Most defenses of the primary election process fall into three broad categories: the lazy, the idealistic and the practical.

The lazy answers boil down to the idea that primaries are the way we’ve always chosen the parties’ nominees. I’ve been amazed by how many people responded to the idea of the Democratic convention choosing Biden’s replacement by saying, “We’ve never done this before.” The truth is that brokered conventions were how we always did it until 1972, when the primary system was adopted. Until then, political scientists regarded democracy as the stuff that happens between political parties, not within them.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The idealistic defense of the primaries is basically that we are a democracy, so the parties must be democratic. Taken seriously, this would mean we weren’t a democracy until the 1970s. It would also mean that nearly all the countries we call democracies aren’t, because the vast majority don’t rely on primaries the way we do to select party nominees.

When I argue that the parties should be less democratic, people often look at me as if I have hooves. “Don’t you like democracy?” they demand. “Isn’t democracy a good thing?” My answer to these questions is an emphatic “Yes, but.”

For starters, lots of institutions that are essential to democracy are not internally democratic. The free press is indispensable to democracy, but no newspaper, network or magazine puts editorial decisions up for a vote of the whole staff. The whole point of having editors is to impose sound judgment on an often chaotic process.

When you think about it, no major American institution other than legislatures is internally democratic the way our major parties now are — and even Congress has checks on its internal democracy. No one thinks hospitals, the Catholic Church or the Marine Corps should put their leaders or major decisions up for a vote. “Colonel, we asked for a show of hands, and we’ve decided not to take that hill.”

One of the main drivers of political polarization today is that the parties have been captured by the most extreme and uncompromising voters, and responsible leaders have precious few mechanisms for restraining them. The result is that primaries yield general election candidates who are less representative and more beholden to extremists.

The third, practical defense of primaries is rooted in their history as a uniquely American invention. Primaries were first deployed in the Progressive Era as a way to counter the corrupt dysfunction of party machines. But they were conceived as one tool among many. Until 1972, the year Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate, nobody thought primaries should be the only means of picking candidates.

Primaries do have benefits. They can help vet general election candidates by giving the media and political rivals opportunities to expose their weaknesses before it’s too late. One reason many Democratic insiders are worried about the prospect of nominating Harris is that she hasn’t won a truly competitive election in recent years. Others say she’s the best choice partly because she was tested (with mixed results) in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign.

But I have yet to meet an informed Democratic insider who thinks Harris is the best candidate to run against Donald Trump. She might be the best possible candidate given the calendar, campaign finance rules and political considerations, but that’s a different argument. Given that Biden and Harris are the most unpopular president and vice president in the history of modern polling, party elders might have chosen to deny both of them the nominations if they could have.

Indeed, for all the claims that Biden’s political defenestration was the work of party elites overruling voters, the truth is that voters had been telling pollsters they didn’t think Biden should run again for years. In a sense, the party will be more responsive to the will of voters by ignoring Biden’s primary victories.

Beyond the minimal legal, constitutional, patriotic and moral constraints all parties are supposed to respect, they really have one job: winning general elections.

Given that Democrats believe — with good reason — that the Republican nominee does not care about any of those constraints, their only concern should be defeating him. If democracy for the whole country is on the ballot, nominating a winning candidate should be the party’s overriding goal.

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read More

Guatemalan workers farming tomatoes using tools provided by the UVG Climate Smart Agriculture Project.

Guatemalan workers farming tomatoes using tools provided by the UVG Climate Smart Agriculture Project.

Rolando Cifuentes Velásquez.

Seeds of Abandonment: How USAID Cuts Left Thousands of Farmers in Guatemala Struggling

Maria Lopez was thriving.

Her tomato farm in rural Guatemala was flourishing since a worker from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) came in to show her climate-smart agricultural practices in her drought-stricken community.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kathy Placencia is the director of elections for Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg M. Amore.

Kathy Placencia is the director of elections for Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg M. Amore.

Issue One.

Meet the Faces of Democracy: Kathy Placencia

More than 10,000 officials across the country run U.S. elections. This interview is part of a series highlighting the election heroes who are the faces of democracy.

Kathy Placencia is the director of elections for Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg M. Amore. Before joining the Department of State, Placencia served as the administrator of elections for the City of Providence for 17 years.

Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a bilateral lunch with Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in the Cabinet Room at the White House on April 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a bilateral lunch with Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store in the Cabinet Room at the White House on April 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla

Project 2025: Dramatic Changes In The State Department

Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term has started, Part 2 of the series has commenced.

Few would argue that the changes in the State Department of the United States under the Trump administration have been dramatic and some of the biggest changes in the last 50 years. However, this is not the first time the State Department has undergone major transformations and it probably will not be the last.

Keep ReadingShow less
Gen Z and the Dangerous Allure of Political Violence

The American Flag on pavement with a hole in the center.

Getty Images, Vlad Yushinov

Gen Z and the Dangerous Allure of Political Violence

A 17-year-old Wisconsin teenager wanted to kill the president, overthrow the United States government, and kickstart a revolution – so he shot dead his mother and stepfather. This weekend, the FBI revealed that Nikita Casap lived for weeks with their decomposing bodies and stole $14,000 to “obtain the financial means” to assassinate President Trump, the first domino in his far-right extremist plan.

This is not the first time we’ve seen a young man use violence for political ends. Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO, citing criticisms of the U.S. healthcare system as justification for the murder. Dylann Roof hoped to incite a race war when he walked into a Black church and gunned down nine people. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to a Black Lives Matter protest with an AR-15-style weapon and fatally shot two people.

Keep ReadingShow less