If Parties Just Said "Suck It: Here's the Nominee", Would That Be Good?
And might it be better if they omitted the "suck it" part?
Trump scored a big win in the Iowa caucus, and it’s looking like Biden might withstand the Dean Phillips juggernaut. A Biden-Trump rematch is a lot like an Ally McBeal reboot: It looks like it’s going to happen even though nobody seems to want it.
Why is this happening? Matt Yglesias offers an answer to that question (with regards to Biden-Trump, not Ally McBeal) in a recent Slow Boring article called Why the Parties Can’t Decide. In that article, Yglesias summarizes the argument made in an upcoming book about party politics and notes that the parties simply don’t choose nominees anymore. They used to do that, but these days, voters pick the candidates through a series of primaries. Yglesias argues that this contributes to unappealing candidates, since the people who could vet a deep roster of candidates and make a strategic choice — that is, political parties — can’t and don’t do that. Which raises the question: Would it be good if we ditched presidential primaries and just had the parties pick the nominees?