DOWN WITH THE PRIMARIES

...a vote against Carter, however, would require supporting a liberal, whose policies he opposed...

...And the media do not serve the electorate much better when they interpret the "meaning" of primaries, especially given die complexities of primary voting...

...The rapid increase in the number of primaries, combined with the inability of party organizations to control local elections, has created a nominating process that is extremely costly, time-consuming and dependent on the mass media...

...If I prefer Jackson among the announced candidates, it may be vital that I like Humphrey better, that I would rather have Carter than Frank Church, and so on...

...The primaries also finished George Wallace's career as a political bogeyman...

...Humphrey probably would have won in most industrial states, and Ted Kennedy probably would have defeated Carter almost everywhere outside the South...

...At the simplest level, critics assert that there are too many primaries...

...With proper guarantees of easy access at the precinct or sub-precinct level, an ascending series of local meetings culminating in a state convention (Iowa is something of a model here) offers a number of small, face-to-face meetings in which genuine deliberation is possible...

...The discussion of regional and national primaries, moreover, tends to obscure the central problems of primary voting...

...In the first place, it should be clear that the electorate in primary elections is peculiar...

...Consider the Democratic voter in New Hampshire: if he was a liberal, did he vote for the liberal candidate most likely to defeat Carter...

...Outsider" candidates seem to do as well with such systems as they do at present...

...To vote for Carter would injure the chances of the candidate he favored...

...There were not many primaries, and even less delegates were bound by primary results...

...At the national level, however, the movement faltered, and while primaries were an important part of the nominating process, they were only that...

...It need not exclude anyone, though hi practice systems of this sort tend to give greater weight to highly committed voters...

...But administrative difficulties aside, such proposals would limit one of the undeniable advantages of the present system: the ability of a less-known candidate to build a national following gradually, concentrating limited resources on one campaign at a time...

...Media, money, maddening complexity: despite it all, the voters struggled this year to make sense out of it all, and to perform their office as electors with some concern for the public good...

...And it may not be wholly hopeless to suggest that we give voters a primary system cut to human scale, slow-moving, wordy and indirect, but for all its faults, a vital part of any polity devoted to the consent of the governed...

...A primary is a contest within a private association...

...The campaign becomes exhausting, and the problems are accentuated by the lunatic diversity of state election codes which dictate a different set of electoral tactics for almost every state...

...Volets in the complex world of primary elections are unusually dependent on the media, and the media are more than usually inadequate...

...moreover, regional primaries might suggest that a candidate like Carter is a "Southern" candidate, obscuring his broad base of support in states and regions where he might not finish first...

...I need to discuss, deliberate, make clear my own preferences and formulate alternative strategies...

...And both national and regional primaries increase the significance of the mass media, already hopelessly part of the problem...

...Party organizations had, in any case, been growing weaker over the years, afflicted by all the forces in American society making for estrangement, instability and limited loyalty...

...Proposals for national and regional primaries approach the voter's difficulty by attempting to reduce the importance of the impact of his vote on the future...

...They developed as adaptations to a mass democracy which die Farmers would have detested and which the Constitution was designed to prevent...

...The new reforms have been enough to tip the balance...

...And where Republican leaders, left to themselves, would have renominated President Ford with only a few dissenting votes, the primaries gave them a close race and the prospect of a bitter convention, politically ruinous whatever the outcome...

...There were too many candidates...

...The Democratic Convention of 1968 changed all that...

...Voters were often frustrated, denied a chance to vote for a candidate they really favored...

...And if 1976 is an example, the new system seems to annoy and frustrate an extraordinary range of candidates and voters...

...It is only a small fraction of all registered voters (in New Jersey, about 20-25 percent is common...

...Parties and primaries make a hash of the distinction between "public" and "private" spheres that is fundamental to American constitutionalism, and it is no surprise that public policy in relation to the nominating process should have been hesitant, pragmatic and unsystematic...

...if the citizens calls himself "Independent," he cannot vote in a primary at all...

...breaking that chain of intermediaries, they gave us a "direct" system in which candidates confront multitudes, with the only link provided by the flat images of the mass media, colored by the mercenaries of public relations firms...

...The Progressives feared "intermediaries" because they distrusted groups and interpersonal bonds...

...State laws, in fact, sometimes emphasize this...

...It is even more important that it is extremely hard for voters to make sense out of voting in a primary election...

...The moderate or conservative Democrat in New Hampshire who favored Jackson or Wallace (neither of whom was in the race), faced an even more serious problem...

...It seems to me that a convention system, firmly based on the grass roots, offers more genuine democracy and participation of higher quality than any direct primaries can ever do...

...Bat voters tried to make those calculations, which partly explains the obsessive concern of the mass media with predictions, expectations and speculations about probable and possible results and impacts, and their comparative lack of concern with discussion of the "issues...

...The Progressive movement, which popularized the Direct Primary, at least had a goal...

...he did not, as in 1968, hope for a convention verdict at odds with the primaries...

...I tend to agree with the quasi-official view that in 1976, voters preferred "outsiders" and were disenchanted With Washington...

...Had New Hampshire liberals done so, Carter might easily have been defeated...

...The Chicago disaster led to the McGovern Commission reforms, and those reforms in turn have affected the Republicans...

...But even on the Republican side, where this seems most evident (and where voters have been hating Washington ever since 1933), it is hard to decide how much is due to President Ford's defects as a campaigner...

...Moved by a combination of middle-class individualism and a Protestant distrust of "intermediaries," Progressives intended the direct primary to destroy party organizations, an aim which it virtually achieved in states like California...

...For Republicans this year, the choice was relatively simple...

...Voters as well as candidates sometimes suffer from these local idiosyncrasies: in New Jersey, the ballot was so confusing that delegates pledged to George Wallace-who had a favorable "line" on the ballot-nearly won Newark's Central Ward, which is overwhelmingly Black...

...In Oregon, a conscientious citizen who registers early is bound by that early "declaration" of party...

...Jimmy Carter, barely a national figure when the primaries began, has emerged as the de facto Democratic nominee and the safest bet to win the Presidency since the reelection of James Monroe...

...Political parties, however, are evidently very "public" private associations, and this private contest is not only regulated but conducted by the state...

...And among Democrats, it is clear to me that Jimmy Carter would not have defeated the Washington "establishment...

...But this does not mean that primary voters are restricted to the highly informed and the deeply committed: primary electorates emphasize the half-committed and the half-informed, a spectacular advantage for Governor Reagan this year, although he is hardly the only beneficiary...

...Yet Kennedy and Humphrey are symbols of the Washington liberal establishment, which makes it difficult to say what the voters wanted...

...in 1972 and 1976, there has been a decisive shift in power from the conventions to the primaries and, more important, a radical decline in the influence of party organizations...

...Differences of opinion ate subtle, often matters of affect as much as intellect, and not well suited to presentation in a minute and half "spot" on TV news...

...In the first place, the discussion of issues within a party rarely involves sharp distinctions and confrontations...

...It is a sort of testimonial for democracy that they attempted the impossible task...

...This year, Hubert Humphrey hoped for a primary deadlock that would make his nomination possible and inevitable...

...But the citizen who shows up to register and vote on primary day can vote in any primary he chooses, a spectacular reward for bad citizenship which fortunately is not the rule...

...Jimmy Carter, as David Broder writes, "began by saying he was seeking an intimate, personal relationship with the the voters" and "ended his campaign by deciding the best way to reach them was to buy five minutes of simultaneous tune on all three networks...

...These are complex calculations, often contradictory...

...Primaries influenced decisions, but the decisions themselves were made by party leaders at national conventions...

...Regional" primaries might be only marginally better...

...There, I need to do more than register a vote...

...That sort of "indirect primary" is subject to all the personal pressures and irrationalities that the Progressives feared...

...Conventions in the future will act within the terms set by the primaries...

...In fact, candidates without much money are even less excluded by a system based on precinct conventions, since such a system tends to decrease the power of the mass media and to emphasize commitment, organization and personal contact...

...Taken as a whole, the primary season may have effected a minor revolution in American politics...

...If you adored Ford or Reagan, you voted for your passion...

...Modernity tends to simplify and centralize, displacing locality and variety, and it is no surprise that many candidates, headed by President Ford, have expressed support for some sort of national primary or, at least, a series of "regional" primaries held over a relatively short period...

...Until the end of World War II, Southern Democratic parties were able to justify the "white primary" on the ground that primaries were matters of private concern...

...Accolades to the wisdom of the Founders are in fashion this Bicentennial year, but the great institutions of a presidential election-primaries, political parties, national conventions and campaigns-are unmentioned in the Constitution...

...He did eliminate Senator Jackson, a campaigner almost as inept as the President, though he also managed to lose to Jackson twice...

...appeals to loyalty and love, to the patriotism of neighborhood and the "spirit of faction" would almost certainly be strong...

...Pitted against better-financed, better-known candidates in a "once-and-for-all" contest, it seems unlikely that any of them would have emerged as serious, let alone as successful candidates...

...It took time and many contests for Eugene McCarthy in '68, George McGovern in '72 and Jimmy Carter this year to acquire national exposure and credibility...

...McGovern did well hi convention states in '72, and Carter ran well in the "first round" in Iowa long before his primary victories...

...at the same time, not all the candidates ran in all the primaries and some, like Humphrey, did not run at all...

...It does not work where there are third alternates and second choices...

...The direct primary, like the Initiative and Referendum, is successful where questions can be formulated in "Yes" or "No" terms...

...But Carter surely would not have defeated Humphrey hi the crucial Pennsylvania primary...

...At the same time, the would-be rational voter, especially in the crucial early primaries, was forced to calculate the probable result of his vote on the local primary (a difficult enough task Where there were many candidates) and, at the same time, the impact of the local result on future primaries...

...They seek to simplify the voter's choice, not to increase his effectiveness in dealing with broad alternatives...

...The apparatus of parties and primaries is an anomly in the Constitutional system...

...But if he preferred Shriver to Udall, by voting for Udall, while he increased the chance of defeating Carter, he also added to the risk that Shriver would be forced out of the race...

...if you had mixed feelings, you made some choice about "the lesser of two evils," and it was clear that in voting for Reagan, you were voting against Ford, and vice versa...

...All of these problems reflect the defect of the direct primary itself when dealing with situations where more than two candidates ate in contention...

...But the more normal rule in primaries is that there will be more than two candidates, which enormously increases the difficulty of a rational vote...