How the Democratic Party Gave Away Its Ability to Simply Pick a New Nominee
On July 20, 2024, President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was ending his campaign for reelection and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him.
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00:00At the state and city level, they were known as political machines.
00:19They would trade jobs and government contracts, and they would fight over who the nominee
00:23was going to be at the national level.
00:30Those party organizations begin to lose strength as you go through the 20th century.
00:36You hear a lot of talk about reform, and attention starts to focus on, well, could voters really
00:42have a say in nominating the candidates?
00:45It doesn't really go anywhere, except in the South, where the primary becomes the tool
00:51used by the white supremacists to make sure that the whites wouldn't be splitting their
00:56votes and a black candidate winning.
00:59You move up into the 60s, and the primaries are still there, but they're not dominant.
01:06It's still kind of the party machine, party organizations at state, national level that
01:11are making those choices.
01:12So you move into 1968, Lyndon Johnson was running for president, but he is weak because
01:18of the Vietnam War.
01:19He has a very close election win in the state of New Hampshire.
01:23As a result of that, and seeing that it was going to be a slog for Johnson to win the
01:28party's nomination, he surprisingly pulls out.
01:32I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as
01:41your president.
01:42As vice president, Hubert Humphrey jumps into the race, and Humphrey is organizing that
01:48state and national party apparatus that Johnson had behind him, so that by the time you roll
01:54around to the convention in Chicago, Humphrey's already, in effect, won the nomination, even
01:59though he did not run in a single primary.
02:02Now that is the old party structure.
02:05But parallel to it, you had folks like Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy running in the primaries,
02:13and they were winning.
02:14I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose equality.
02:21Kennedy, of course, is killed by an assassin.
02:24Eugene McCarthy rolls into Chicago, and him and his supporters are outraged that Humphrey's
02:30going to be nominated, even though he has not won even a majority of the delegates through
02:35the primary system.
02:37Humphrey's playing by the rules of the game.
02:38They've just, they've lost credibility over the decades.
02:45Chicago was an extraordinary moment in 1968.
02:48You've got mass protests over the Vietnam War, and also great resistance to the economic
02:54inequality, racial injustice in the country.
02:58The Chicago political structure is controlled by Mayor Daley, who is outraged by these signs
03:05of protest, and as later reports would conclude, there was a police riot.
03:14The police just went crazy, and they were beating up the protesters outside the Democratic
03:19Convention.
03:21This is on the streets, is mayhem.
03:24Well, they all have different points of view, and there are some powerful leaders.
03:28So they get down to a convention, and you can expect to have something happen.
03:32We have one factor that seems to heal, to cause a healing process to speed up, and that
03:37is the Republican opposition.
03:40But as the convention is coming to a close, you've got this rebellion within the convention
03:46hall, and the critics in the party are saying this is not democratic.
03:49Meanwhile, on the streets, you've got the students, and the socialists, and other protesters
03:55saying that the party is not democratic, that America is not democratic, and it is a real
04:01crisis.
04:05One of the last acts of the convention, 68, was a referendum to start an investigation
04:14to look into how the party nominates its candidates.
04:17One of the results is the adoption around the country of direct primary elections to
04:23select the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.
04:27I accept your nomination with a full and grateful heart.
04:381972, this process we're talking about, is why there is no political party to step in
04:44and say, Mr. Joe Biden, thank you for your career, but you're not going to be the candidate.
04:49If you were in Germany, France, or England, you would have had the party leadership ushering
04:54them off the stage.
04:56There would have been some kind of intervention.
04:59My vision for America's future, all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come
05:07in the way of saving our democracy.
05:10That includes personal ambition.
05:11I'd like to thank our great Vice President Kamala Harris, she's experienced, she's tough,
05:17she's capable.
05:18She's been an incredible partner to me, and a leader for our country.
05:22In America, there is no power, there is no party there who is going to move the candidate
05:28out.
05:29The candidate controls their own destiny.
05:31I knew you were still there.
05:33You're not going anywhere, Joe.
05:35Oh, I'm watching you, kid.
05:37I'm watching you, kid.
05:38I love you.
05:39I love you, Joe.
05:41The purpose for the primaries back to 68 was more democracy, get people involved.
05:47This needs to be about participation.
05:50What we found over the decades is the proportion of people turning out to vote in the primary
05:56was very small, 15, 20, sometimes very competitive election, possibly 30%.
06:02And the people who are turning out were not representative.
06:05They tend to be more liberal, and especially on the conservative side, very conservative
06:11libertarian.
06:12And it helps to explain why Donald Trump, you know, has locked up the nomination, even
06:16though there are plenty of Republicans who have doubts about him.
06:20The people who show up at the primary are making the decision about the nomination.
06:25Now we're looking at a situation with Kamala Harris being endorsed by Joe Biden and other
06:30leaders, and we're going to have kind of off-road sort of political maneuvering.
06:36There's going to be a lot of coming discussion about whether this is democratic, whether
06:40there ought to be an open convention to decide it, whether having the delegates vote virtually
06:46without any kind of public debate is really a violation of democratic procedure.
06:53And my point here is, go back to the beginning.
06:56The way this was set up in 1972 and how it's evolved into really a process of relatively
07:03small numbers, more extreme elements of our political process participating, has guaranteed
07:09this was not going to be democratic.