The History of "Canceling Democracy to Save Democracy" (and how to actually save it!)
With Trump and Biden set to be the vastly unpopular nominees of the only two viable parties, both of them claiming the other will destroy democracy, and multiple primaries being canceled, many say...
With Trump and Biden set to be
the vastly unpopular nominees of the only two viable parties,
both of them claiming the other will destroy democracy,
and multiple primaries being canceled,
many say the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are “Cancelling Democracy to Save Democracy”.
Rigging the Primary?
Quite a few prominent Democrats and Republicans have both complained about the limited role presidential primaries and caucuses are seeming to play in the upcoming 2024 election. The stakes have seemingly never been higher as the likely Democratic Party nominee is calling the likely Republican Party nominee a major existential threat to the country. In early December, President Biden gave a warning about the election, saying, “Let's be clear about what's at stake in 2020 ... Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican determined to destroy American democracy.” In March, Trump made similar comments about President Biden, declaring, “Put me back in the White House and America will be a free nation once again. Because if we don’t win this next election, 2024, I truly believe our country is doomed.”
In rhetoric, both candidates seem laser-focused on securing and ensuring democracy and freedom for Americans, yet their actions have spoken louder. Neither candidate has agreed to debate their primary opponents and both candidates have worked to change the structure of the elections to favor their candidacy. This was seen in Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in multiple battleground states and Biden’s unsuccessful efforts to frontload his primary and put South Carolina first (a state he won with outstanding support in 2020). However, New Hampshire’s statute, stating that they will be the first primary in the nation, overpowered the DNC’s move to replace them with South Carolina in the Democratic Primary Calendar. Notably, the 2020 Democratic Primary was the first Democratic primary in which the candidate that won the first three states, Sen. Sanders, did not go on to win the nomination (with the possible exception of Edmund Muskie in the 1972 Iowa Caucus, in which he received the second most votes after “unpledged”). This might add to Biden’s desire to add a state he polled well in to the start of the primary season.
The debacle in New Hampshire has left President Biden off the primary ballot and has required him to hold a write-in campaign to remain competitive in the nation’s first primary. His competitors, Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips have continued to argue that the DNC process is favoring Biden, while blocking them from ballot access; a similar complaint the Sanders campaign made of the DNC in 2016 in regards to their favoring of Clinton.
The 2016 case was attempted to be settled in a class-action lawsuit, Wilding v. DNC Services Corp, in which the DNC attorney Bruce Spiva argued, “here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.”. This quote reveals the weak foundation in which Democratic Party presidential primaries stand on. With Mr. Spiva’s quote, the basis for how Democratic Party presidential candidates are chosen, was thrown into question.
The Beginnings of American Democracy
However, the basis for a fair election process has always been shaky. The founders created our system of democracy in the United States with the electoral college electing the executive branch, not the citizens. While the founders were trying to create a system of government that was not as anti-democratic as the British Monarch, they did not feel they could trust the people and thus created a large and intentional roadblock to democratic expression. Additionally, the constitution does not mention or guarantee any kind of primary process, as the Founders were looking to avoid partisan politics, a practice that ended after Washington stepped down as president. This led to the first contested Presidential election in 1796. Notably, President Washington won with 100% of the popular vote in both the 1788 and 1792 elections. Additionally, the 3/5s compromise of 1787 allowed the amount of votes in the electoral college to include ⅗ of every slave, giving Southern slave-states an electoral advantage. The electoral process also was created with a winner-take-all system that gives the candidate who gets the majority of the votes in a state, all of its electoral votes.
During this era in American politics, most Americans were disenfranchised from voting (only White Men who owned property could vote), counting the popular vote was difficult, and the elections after 1792 were competitive between the electors in each state or district. Since the 12th amendment had not been passed yet, each elector in the electoral college was to vote for two candidates and the two candidates that received the most votes were to become the nation’s president and vice-president, respectively. This created the first strategic electoral voting in which members of the same party tried to vote for different candidates as a method of perfectly balancing out their party’s choice for president and vice-president; a strategy that only worked sometimes.
Growing Partisanship
In the 1800 election, the two major parties, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists worked to change the election process to benefit their party. Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania all switched from holding popular votes to elect their state’s electors to having the state legislatures choose instead. Partisan state legislatures were given power over their state’s election policies, allowing for practices like Gerrymandering (the redrawing of electoral districts to benefit the party in power) that gave partisan state legislatures outsized influence on the districts in which electors were chosen from, and setting election standards that worked to benefit the party in power. Only six states even held popular votes to elect electors; Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia. This election also featured a 36-ballot contingent election in which the original electoral college vote tied, forcing the House to cast votes for the President and Vice-President until Hamilton famously broke the tie in favor of Jefferson (contingent elections are held when no candidate reaches a majority of the electoral votes required to win the election). In 1804, the 12th amendment was passed, requiring the electoral college to cast distinct votes for President and Vice-President, preventing the issue in 1800 from reoccurring. The amendment also required a contingent vote of the Vice-President to be held in the Senate. The election of 1804 saw 11 states use some form of popular vote to choose their electors and 6 states use a state-legislature vote.
This system of some state legislatures choosing their electors, and ignoring the popular opinion of the people in their state, was used until 1828 when a party-splitting election caused partisan leaders to realize that deciding their party’s preferred candidates ahead of the electoral vote was a more strategic way of securing power. In preparation for the 1832 elections, three major parties held national conventions; The Anti-Masonic, The Democratic, and The National Republican parties. The Anti-Masonic party also began using conventions in 1832 as they could not use the legislature-based caucus because they had no elected legislators.
National party conventions continued the common pattern of powerful and wealthy political leaders getting preferential treatment in presidential nominations, but the more competitive decision-making occurred at these conventions where there were no popular votes to allow citizens to make any impact on the vote until the major parties had selected their nominees. Despite the growing number of states that allowed for popular votes in Presidential elections, national party conventions became an additional roadblock to Democracy. Political party bosses were given much greater power in the nomination process (as they typically controlled most of the convention’s voting delegates) and political parties were given much greater influence in elections.
This system stood through the civil war until the early 1900s when states began choosing delegates for the party conventions through popular votes called primaries. During this time, the passage of the 15th amendment allowed the suffrage of all African Americans. While this ended direct voter discrimination by race and ethnicity, it did not prevent later indirect forms of voter discrimination like poll taxes and voting-based literacy tests mainly used to discriminate against the African American community during the Jim Crow era. By 1912, there were twelve states who held primaries, used a preferential primary system, or had a combination of the two. The passage of the 19th amendment in 1919, expanded suffrage to all genders, primarily women.
Modern-Day Primary System
It wasn’t until after the 1968 Presidential election, in which President Humphrey won the general election without winning a single primary, that primaries became a more binding part of Presidential elections. The current system is split between winner-take-all primaries and caucuses, in which the candidate who wins a state wins all of the state’s delegates (most commonly found in Republican Party primaries), and proportionality primaries or caucuses in which the delegates are given proportionally to the candidates in each state (most commonly found in Democratic Party primaries). The outsized political power given to political parties since 1832 only grew, making ballot-access, voter registration, and campaigning more difficult for candidates not running in the two major parties. This birthed the Corporate Duopoly, the system of two major corporate-backed political parties working jointly to maintain the current corrupted, anti-democratic, two party system. Growing partisanship forced more competition in fundraising. In 1943, Political Action Committees were created to fundraise for political campaigns and from there, the importance of money in elections continued to grow more. By 1979, the FEC began allowing unlimited donations from corporations and unions at the federal level in the form of “soft money” and during the 1996 Clinton-reelection campaign, the use of “soft money” exploded, leading to major donations from corporations and other wealthy donors to the Democratic Party. In 2010, the Citizens United Supreme Court case lifted many remaining limitations on campaign contributions from corporations, leading to the most expensive Presidential election in United States history, featuring President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. This current iteration of money in politics has further continued the presence of wealthy and powerful people achieving the nomination for president.
Seemingly, when limitations on democratic free expression are taken away, new ones are also added on. Roadblocks to democratic free expression are not new and continue to change and develop. The use of superdelegates in the Democratic party (15% of delegates are disconnected from any popular vote), the existence of the electoral college, the use of Congress to settle contingent elections, the winner-take-all electoral system, limitations for third parties, the massive role of money in elections, and gerrymandering are just some of the modern-day roadblocks that still exist.
Rigging the Primary?
The arguments that the DNC is rigging the primary for Biden are likely true, but the practice isn’t uncommon and is completely legal —of course, that doesn’t make it right. Since the creation of a more democratic primary system in 1972, the Democratic Party, state parties, and the DNC have essentially canceled large amounts of state primaries twice in 1996, during Bill Clinton’s reelection and in 2012, during Barack Obama’s reelection. The Republican Party has also effectively canceled elections in the modern era in 1984 for Reagan’s reelection, in 2004 for Bush’s reelection, and in 2020 for Trump’s reelection campaign (despite not winning).
To claim that the elections were wholly canceled is unfair and untrue, but what is certain is that the system in place requires candidates to raise massive amounts of money, gives state legislatures the power to create the rules of the election to benefit their party’s preferred choice in both the primary and general elections, and gives party bosses and their donors a large amount of influence in candidate choice. This system has not been welcoming to non-incumbent, anti-corporate, and protest candidates who run against the party’s preferred candidate, especially when it’s an incumbent. This system has many democratic elements, but largely prevents the democratic, free-expression that both President Biden and President Trump have claimed is so essential to our country. Neither candidate has any plans to reform the undemocratic elements in these systems.
This coming Presidential election is going to feature a large number of prominent third party and independent candidates. Many of them will struggle to meet the hefty legal requirements for ballot-access set by state legislatures as well as the fundraising requirements needed to reach a large audience and enter the general debate stage (a minimum of 15% polling). A recent Quinnipiac poll found that in a five-way race between President Biden, President Trump, Independent Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Independent Candidate Cornel West, and Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, no candidate would receive anywhere close to a majority of the votes, setting the stage for a potential contingent election vote decided by the Republican-majority House of Representatives.
Currently Republicans only have a four-vote majority over Democrats, leaving the result of this scenario to razor-thin margins. In the poll, Kennedy’s 16%, closely matches the most recently successful third party effort in which Ross Perot received 19% of the popular vote in 1992. In the 18-34 block of voters, the results are even more split, with 33% backing Biden, 20% backing Trump, 24% backing Kennedy Jr., 6% backing West, and 10% backing Stein. This block, in particular, has continued to shift away from Biden due to his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. To prevent a scenario in which the electoral college votes for the president and to prevent the general undemocratic effects that the electoral college brings, like the five occurrences in which the electoral college elected a candidate that lost the popular vote, a 105(c)(4) non-profit called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has successfully passed a law in 17 state legislatures that would count all of the state’s electoral votes for the candidate that wins the popular vote. These laws would be triggered when states containing a majority of the current 538 electoral votes pass this bill in their state legislatures. Only a few more states possessing at least 65 more electoral votes need to pass the bill until the National Popular Vote is enacted a majority of the electoral votes are automatically pledged to the popular vote, effectively making the electoral college a powerless and performative action. This would eliminate the possibility of a tie or the possibility of no candidates receiving a majority of electoral votes and prevent contingent elections.
While this project would profoundly improve the fairness of Presidential elections, it causes an additional problem also commonly found in many primary, legislative, and local elections which is the ability for a candidate to win an election without having received a majority of the votes (there were more people that didn’t want the winning candidate than did). This is only an issue in winner-take-all elections. To avoid this problem, a second democratic proposal should be enacted; STAR voting. STAR voting’s predecessor, Ranked Choice Voting is an alternative voting system that allows voters to rank their candidates in order to express the preference of the candidate. In this system, the vote goes to the candidate ranked first, and is only transferred to the next-ranked candidate when their candidate receives the least amount of votes. This process is conducted in rounds, with each round eliminating a candidate until there is a majority of votes for a single candidate. This system was enacted state-wide for both Maine and Alaska and will be used in upcoming New York City, Minneapolis, and San Francisco elections. RCV also allows for lesser known-candidates to receive more attention and counteracts the spoiler effect (risking the election of a less-preferred candidate by voting for a less-popular candidate, instead of voting for the less-preferred candidate’s main opponent). However, this system also doesn’t fully prevent the spoiler effect, is still biased in favor of richer and better-known candidates, causes many ballots to be thrown out, and is very complicated to conduct. STAR voting combats this issue by allowing voters to give every candidate a ranking from 0 to 5. The totals are counted up in a single round. In an automatically triggered runoff, the candidate with the most votes wins. This system allows for an equal opportunity for all registered voters to impact the result of the vote, something the United States has never been able to promise to its people. It also significantly decreases the risk of the spoiler-effect or vote splitting, is very simple to conduct and understand, and prevents many ballots from being thrown away! Democracy can actually get stronger with the enactment of the National Popular Vote and the use of STAR voting in elections, as well as the eventual overturning of Citizens United (but the only way to do that last one is to nominate more economically left-leaning Supreme Court Justices or reign-in greedy corporations with Workplace Democracy).
Work Place Democracy
The current Presidential Primary will be remembered for many reasons: There are a record number of people planning to vote independent, Both major candidates are claiming the other one is going to end democracy, and There are record-setting campaign contributions. Yet two phenomena that deserve more attention are the choices we have to support a strong workplace democracy through a strong NLRB and the choices we have to enact the NPV and STAR systems that would solve our country’s “dying democracy”. Before this current administration, unionization was at an all-time low and support for unionization was hitting record highs. Today, support has continued to increase and the Biden administration has heard at least some of those calls.
Work Place Democracy is the least focused on, but most necessary democratic reform of all. Focused on most-prominently by Labor leaders and Marxist thinkers, Work Place Democracy is a kind of communist organizational method that features wide spread Worker-Cooperatives (“Worker Co-Ops”), that restructure the current system of authoritarian boss-worker organization into a democratic worker system that gives workers an equal say over the company’s policies and decisions. Worker Cooperatives also tend to make for less greedy organizations, which works to limit campaign contributions and lobbying, but does not eliminate them.
Both President Trump and President Biden have failed to take any actions towards increasing electoral democracy in the United States. However, President Biden has taken small steps towards increasing work-place democracy with his strong, but temporary NLRB appointments, which have allowed for more union and worker co-ops to form and support worker’s rights. The recent increase in unionization features the rise of petitions to the NLRB, thousands of Starbucks unions, a successful Writer’s Guild strike, a successful strike from the big three automakers, and the first Amazon labor union.
The recent Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Union case put a worker’s right to strike in question and significantly undercut the progress the Biden administration made for unionizations. The decision allowed companies to seek legal action for damages incurred from striking. This will discourage worker’s from unionizing or striking for fear of legal ramifications.
Videos
Here are some videos helping to describe the proposals better than me: