In picking a presidential nominee, voters have a voice, but parties have the power

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Democrats have nominated Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential candidate — even though voters chose someone else in all the party’s primaries. Can they just do that?

Sure. As it turns out, presidential primaries are something of an electoral illusion — and a rather convincing one.

When President Joe Biden withdrew his reelection bid shortly before he was set to officially receive the nomination at the convention, it prompted everyone to take a crash course in How Parties Select Presidential Nominees.

And as we’re seeing now, parties can actually select their presidential nominees however they want, even if there are many reasons to abide by the voters’ choice in the primaries.

People accustomed to thinking of primaries in the straightforward mode of other elections — a candidate wins by getting the most votes — might find them to be a strange sort of beast, neither fish nor fowl. Political scientists and historians can provide the context that helps make sense of this curious process.

“Our parties operate in a kind of fiction of being public democracies,” said Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.”

“At the same time,” he said, “the party itself retains some right of control.”

Most people probably think primary results are “more binding and durable” than they really are, Keyssar said.

The Democratic presidential primaries this year weren’t especially competitive . Biden, an incumbent president, faced fairly nominal opposition and won easily.

But remember that when people cast a presidential primary ballot, they’re not really voting for the candidate. They’re voting for a slate of delegates to the convention who pledge to support that candidate, at least on the first ballot. As candidates win more contests, they amass more convention delegates. And it’s those delegates who ultimately select the nominee with their vote.

At least in theory, if enough delegates don’t like the rules governing the process, they can just change them. “A majority of delegates can decide whatever they want,” points out Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Behrend.

But that might not be good politics.

Biden’s withdrawal created a scenario that was nearly unprecedented in modern times. The comparison many observers reached for was the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago — a contentious nomination process set against a backdrop of antiwar protests and a violent police response. The episode led to the creation of the modern primary system — and it explains a lot about why parties stick with it.

Before that point, different versions of primaries existed, but they didn’t matter as much. Not all candidates chose to participate in them, and some did so more as a political tactic than a requirement, experts say. For example, John F. Kennedy famously used the 1960 West Virginia primary to show that a Catholic candidate could win support in Protestant parts of the country. So candidates competed in primaries, but in the end, party bosses controlled the candidate selection process.

That became most evident at the 1968 convention. Then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, facing poor approval ratings and dwindling support, had decided not to run for reelection . Robert F. Kennedy, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, had been assassinated two months earlier, immediately after sweeping the California primary. Democrats were, as some like to say, in disarray. At the convention, delegates nominated the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey , who hadn’t competed in a single primary.

Humphrey went on to lose to Republican Richard Nixon, and Democrats decided there had to be a better way. They appointed a commission headed by then-Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota to come up with it. The commission was “the biggest single change for the process of presidential selection in American history,” said Byron Shafer , who wrote a book about it called “Quiet Revolution: Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics.”

The result was, more or less, the primary system we have today, putting more power in the hands of ordinary voters, and linking delegates more tightly to candidates and nominees more tightly to the results. Republicans eventually adopted a similar process, though there appear to have been at least some skeptics. A memo sent to Nixon in June 1972 and now in the collection of the National Archives crowed, “In the name of ‘reform’, the Democrats have allowed the control of their party to pass into the hands of an ultra liberal, activist minority which is unrepresentative of any of the former factions of the old coalition.”

The first Democratic presidential nominee produced under the new system was McGovern himself, who lost to Nixon resoundingly. But the process he brought about — using more robust primaries to democratize the selection of delegates, and shift power from party bosses and insiders to regular party members — has mostly stuck.

In 1980, a different commission created so-called superdelegates — typically party and elected officials with special voting power — as a check on the vagaries of the democratic process McGovern’s commission created.

But the voting public has been hostile to ceding this power, and any suggestion that they might not have the final say. For example, in 2008, when the upstart Barack Obama was edging past establishment candidate Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination, the idea that the superdelegates could tip the balance back to Clinton caused an uproar , and many of the superdelegates ended up switching their support to Obama. The issue came up again in 2016 , when Clinton faced a strong challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In the case of today’s presidential shakeup, Shafer and others say, the delegates who were pledged to Biden took his quick endorsement of Harris to heart. She was, after all, on the same ticket when primary voters cast their ballots.

Shafer, who taught in Britain for years, said the U.S. system was always hard to explain to students living in a country with strong parties. There are no primaries for prime minister.

But the system is unlikely to change now, he would tell them.

“Try taking a primary away from people once you give it to them.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org .