Those Who Nominate Dictate

Those who nominate dictate.

I learned this firsthand when I decided to run for Congress as a reform candidate in the Democratic primary for New York’s 21st Congressional District in 2018.

I quickly discovered that what a candidate believed or advocated was beside the point. The primary electorate was a preselected group of party loyalists, highly engaged and committed to long-standing party beliefs, like a religion or even a cult.

One candidate in our race had been part of the local Democratic establishment for years. The sense was that this person had earned it—that it was their turn.

Then there were three or four of us on the outside vying for the position.

I was competitive among the challengers. I also admired Patrick Nelson and Katherine Wilson, whom I thought were excellent candidates. We had different ideas and offered voters a real choice. But what any of us said or proposed did not matter.

The party had already decided who it was going to select. The primary went forward, and the process delivered the result the establishment had settled on.

That experience showed me where the power was. It was not in the ideas candidates brought to voters. It was in the process that determined which candidates voters would be allowed to choose from.

The statistical research I have reviewed describes three broad classes of voters.

Class A voters are hyper-engaged, highly ideological and often extreme. They represent about 10 percent of voters on the left and 10 percent on the right. They are the people who show up, organize, volunteer, donate early, attend party meetings and drive the nomination process.

Class B voters are the next 10-15 percent on each side: deeply engaged and largely extreme. Class A organizes and selects candidates, then brings Class B into the effort to support them.

Class C is everyone else: voters who are moderately interested or disengaged from both parties. Class C is the largest voter block in the country by far—the broad majority of Americans. Yet Class C has no say in candidate selection.

That is the system’s central imbalance. Class A drives the selection of candidates. Class B is enrolled to support those choices. Class C is excluded from the process, then asked to choose between nominees in no way represent its concerns. The result is alienation.

Many Class C voters disengage; others vote for the candidate they dislike less.

This is not unique to my race. In a two-party system, all the practical power over who gets a chance to govern is concentrated in the nomination process.

The general election can only offer the candidates the parties have already put forward. When the organizers and the most ideological voters control that process, they control the choices presented to the entire country.

County party meetings make this power structure visible. The people who attend are often the most committed members of their party. They help decide which candidates are recruited, which campaigns receive support and which voices are heard. The same pattern runs through endorsements, donor networks and primary contests: a small, organized group decides who gets to compete.

We spend enormous energy arguing about candidates after they have been chosen. The more basic question is who gets to choose them in the first place.

The vital center cannot reclaim American politics by waiting for better candidates to appear. It has to organize an overwhelimg anticorruption wave outside the system.

Boss Tweed put the point plainly at New York’s Tammany Hall years ago: voters can vote for whoever they want, as long as I get to choose the candidates.

Those who nominate dictate. If we want different choices on the ballot, we will have to change who gets to shape them.