The two major political parties both entered this year wanting to win the White House quite badly, but they took radically different paths to the general election.
Democrats followed a significantly less small-d democratic process to arrive at Vice President Kamala Harris as their nominee than the Republicans did in nominating former President Donald Trump for the third consecutive election. This is despite the fact that Democrats have often framed the 2024 presidential race as a defense of democracy against a GOP they widely regard as supporting minoritarian rule of the country even apart from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and attempts to discredit the election results from four years ago.
While the manner in which Harris was selected was unprecedented in the modern political era, this disconnect has arguably occurred over the last few election cycles. It raises important questions about whether political parties as private organizations should see their mission as fielding nominees who can win in November or whether they should follow the will of their votes through democratic primary elections regardless of what may happen in the general.
President Joe Biden was shielded from primary competition this year. That is not necessarily unusual for an incumbent. Trump faced only token opposition in 2020. But many Democrats had reservations about Biden running for a second term that would end when he was 86 years old. “The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times as far back as 2022.
PATHS TO VICTORY FOR HARRIS AND TRUMP IN 2024
When Biden, after some dithering, decided he was full speed ahead on an octogenarian reelection bid, Democrats largely circled the wagons around him and defended his fitness to serve — until the June 27 presidential debate laid bare that he was at a minimum seriously compromised as a communicator and messenger in a race he was not winning. Democrats then wanted a do-over.
“This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run,” Biden wrote in a letter to congressional Democrats when he initially spurned their entreaties to drop out of the race. “Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated.”
Biden was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who eventually abandoned his independent bid as well to endorse Trump, and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who proved an ineffectual challenger despite polling showing considerable concern among Democrats about Biden’s age. A New York Times-Siena College poll taken in 2022 showed that 94% of Democrats age 30 and under preferred a different nominee.
The president’s claim that it was an open process was technically true. But most big-name Democrats who had taken a look at the race, chief among them Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), passed in at least semicoordinated fashion.
By contrast, Trump faced at least eight candidates of some notoriety to win the Republican presidential nomination. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley were among the top GOP political talents in the country. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, also took a shot at the race, though he did not make it as far. Trump took every opportunity to marginalize his opponents, such as refusing to debate them and otherwise behaving as the incumbent, and largely succeeded. But the Republican National Committee treated it as a real competition, and DeSantis and Haley, in particular, both had their chances.
While Trump only had to contend with the lowly Bill Weld and Joe Walsh as a sitting president in 2020, he faced a murderer’s row of 16 major opponents to win the nomination for the first time in 2016. Again these were some of the bigger names in the party: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
The field was so large the rules for debate participation had to be tweaked to make such events manageable. Candidates who didn’t qualify to make the main stage got to participate in “undercard” debates. Even these second-string debates featured senators and governors.
Biden’s party worried that a competitive primary would only weaken the incumbent further rather than lead to a different nominee. That is the recent history of when Gerald Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan in 1976, Jimmy Carter by Ted Kennedy in 1980, and George H.W. Bush by Pat Buchanan in 1992. All three won renomination but fell to the opposing party in November. The 1968 replacement of Lyndon Johnson by his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, also ended in defeat. Johnson withdrew following a weaker-than-expected performance in the New Hampshire primary.
There is a chicken or egg problem with this history. Did these presidents draw primary challengers because they were weak incumbents in the first place? At the same time, incumbents who did not face intraparty opposition had a decent reelection track record, including the previous two Democratic presidents.
Biden’s showing at his debate with Trump was so bad it couldn’t be spun even by the candidate himself. Concerns about his age that had just weeks prior been dismissed as partisan hackery, with videos of him looking lost dismissed by the White House as “cheap fakes,” became bipartisan. Democrats worried about his ability to beat Trump and his fitness for office for another term if he somehow did.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former President Barack Obama were among the Democratic leaders who applied pressure on Biden to end his reelection bid. The party’s nominating convention hadn’t taken place yet and formally ratified the president as Democrats’ choice for the 2024 presidential election despite the 14 million votes Biden won in the primaries. While this awarded Biden more than 90% of the delegates, the rules technically said these delegates were unbound.
By the time Biden withdrew less than a month after the botched debate, he was trailing Trump nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling average by 3.1 points. Private polling was said to be even worse, setting up the possibility of a landslide Democratic defeat, at least by post-2000 polarization standards.
Against the man Democrats have labeled the foremost threat to democracy’s survival, that simply would not do. But when Biden exited, he threw his support behind Harris rather than advocate an open convention. Other Democrats quickly fell in line.
There were several advantages to sticking with Harris. She could inherit all the money Biden had raised without surrendering any control of it to Democratic super PACs. In a truncated general election campaign, every single strategic decision about how to spend those dollars takes on added importance.
Trying to muscle out two incumbent constitutional officeholders, at least one of whom would have to remain in office afterward to avoid House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) becoming next in line for the presidency, seemed like a tall order. There were also identity politics and Democratic electoral coalition concerns: Harris was the first black, Asian, and woman vice president. Passing her over for a white man could elicit backlash, and Biden was already underperforming with minority voters.
The trouble obviously was that Harris had never won any primary votes. She ran for president herself during the 2020 cycle but dropped out before the first votes were cast. She had not been a terribly popular vice president or an effective campaigner. There was the option of nominating a Rust Belt governor or two for a new Democratic ticket.
Yet Harris was the elected vice president, which conferred some degree of democratic legitimacy on the outcome. Ironically, it might have been harder to force Biden to stand down if he had beaten someone of note, such as Newsom, in the primaries. Democratic leaders were exhausted by the pressure campaign on Biden. They weren’t about to undertake a second one. And Harris did supply the message discipline and, initially at least, the enthusiasm that Biden now lacked.
Democrats have faced criticism from at least factions of their own voters that party leaders put a thumb on the scale to benefit their preferred candidates for the nomination for multiple election cycles. Nobody calls it “stolen,” but they do occasionally use the Trumpian word “rigged.” Republicans have similarly fretted about whether their more freewheeling primary fights elevate candidates who can reach beyond the base to win in November.
The most damaging thing for Hillary Clinton to come out of the 2016 WikiLeaks email dumps were revelations that the Democratic National Committee sought to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the heretofore independent socialist senator who became her main rival for the nomination.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Sanders in 2017 if the process was “rigged” against him, specifically using that word. “Look, [former interim DNC Chairwoman] Donna Brazile showed an enormous amount of courage in describing the truth as she saw it when she came into the leadership of the DNC,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any sane human being who doesn’t believe that my campaign was taking on the entire establishment, including the DNC.” But by that point, Sanders said he was ready to move forward to oppose Trump’s “right-wing agenda.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) gave a more succinct answer when the network’s Jake Tapper asked if the 2016 Democratic nomination contest was rigged. “Yes,” she replied in an interview the following year. “This is a real problem,” she continued. “But what we’ve got to do as Democrats now is hold this party accountable.”
Brazile’s 2017 book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House detailed what many progressives later found corrupt about the Clinton-Sanders race. In her telling, the Clinton campaign effectively controlled the DNC’s victory fund as far back as 2015, before any primaries or caucuses occurred. “Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music,” Brazile wrote of the day she broke this news to him. “I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.”
She painted a picture of a DNC that had been in dire straits financially when former Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt.” The DNC then became dependent on the Clinton fundraising machine.
During the Obama years, Democrats were pounded in downballot races. They hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats. This meant that after two terms in office, the Democratic bench was fairly shallow. That meant reaching back to Hillary Clinton to find a plausible nominee — Obama discouraged Biden, his vice president, from running in 2016 — and having the even older Sanders as her main opponent.
Things hadn’t improved much by 2020. This time, Biden did enter the race. By Election Day, he would be older than Reagan was when he left office. But the younger Democrats, including Harris, were mostly ideologues from deep-blue states or congressional districts. The few exceptions were relative political newcomers, such as first-time candidate Andrew Yang and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sanders, who is also older than Biden, was again the main alternative to the Democratic establishment.
Biden struggled out of the gate. He wasn’t impressive in the debates or on the stump. He finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, though he managed a distant second-place showing in Nevada. Sanders ran nearly 22 points ahead of him. Billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a late entry into the race.
Democratic leaders did not want to nominate Sanders, however, fearing he was the only candidate who could lose to Trump that year. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), a member of the House leadership team and an influential figure in South Carolina’s black community, made the crucial decision to throw his support behind Biden. It paid off handsomely. Biden took the Palmetto State by nearly 30 points.
One by one, the other Democrats with nontrivial pockets of support dropped out. The relative centrists and nonsocialist liberals consolidated their support behind Biden in a way that conservative alternatives to Trump in the 2016 or 2024 Republican primaries never could. Not since the raucous 2008 primary fight between Obama and Clinton has there been a real competition for the Democratic nomination. But it worked for Biden and the Democrats in 2020.
It is a paradox that a party whose most progressive members argue against the Electoral College, the filibuster, and even the Senate itself as undemocratic anachronisms would conduct itself in this manner. Some Clinton supporters argued in 2008 that she should be given the nomination despite winning fewer delegates than Obama because, by some metrics, she won the national popular vote. Sixteen years later, the Democrats cast aside their primary winner for a nonparticipant in the process.
Yet there is an argument for this approach. Republican primaries in downballot races have frequently produced candidates with minimal general-election appeal. The phrase “candidate quality” became a leading explanation for the Republicans’ failure to win the Senate in 2022. For similar reasons, it took Republicans until 2014 to capture the Senate during the Tea Party era under Obama, four years after winning the House majority.
Democrats still have a real party leadership, including former officials such as Pelosi and Obama. There are party bosses. That is much less true of Republicans, with the last pillar of the GOP establishment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), ready to step back into more of an elder statesman role next year. Trump has largely filled this leadership vacuum with his massive personality.
As we go to press, it is not clear whose method prevailed in this year’s general election. If Trump wins, there will be another competition in 2028 as he will be term-limited out of office. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) will presumably have a leg up, but Bush faced several prominent primary challengers when he sought to succeed Reagan in 1988.
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If Harris is proclaimed the winner by the time you read this, it could be until 2032 before Democrats have a competitive presidential primary. After Republican losses in 2018, 2020, and to a lesser extent 2022, Democrats finally do have a deeper candidate bench. Many of them, including governors and senators, may be past their expiration dates by the time they get a chance to run for president.
Yet based on what happened with Biden this year, it is likely that if Harris’s reelection prospects look shaky come 2027 or so, some ambitious Democrat will entertain a primary challenge.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
