Why isn’t there a way for party leaders to get together—in a back room, ideally somewhere dark and smokey—and just give Biden the boot? As it turns out, that’s the way things used to get done. Max and Tre’vell explain how back room dealings originated and why they fell out of favor. Why did the Vietnam War force Democrats to change the process? Did the switch make political parties more extreme? Were there benefits to having a cabal? Listen to this week’s How We Got Here to find out.

TRANSCRIPT

Tre’vell Anderson: So, Max, there’s this question I keep getting from people about Joe Biden. 

Max Fisher: Oh, they’re asking for skincare tips, right? How do you get that youthful glow? 

Tre’vell Anderson: You know not quite. [laughter] Not quite. Okay. Folks around me keep wondering what’s going on with his campaign and why the Democrats won’t just push him off the ticket and choose somebody else. 

Max Fisher: Yeah, I hear that a lot, too. People seem to have this sense that, like, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Democratic Party headquarters, there’s this back room where the party leaders all meet to make big decisions. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes, the room where it happens. Okay. Because technically, right, Biden isn’t the nominee yet. The party decides that at the Democratic National Convention next month. 

Max Fisher: Right. So why not just decide to give the presidential nomination to someone else? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Now, what you and I know is that there is no back room deep in the Democratic headquarters. There is no cabal of party leaders who can pick another nominee. 

Max Fisher: Right. But here’s the thing. And I think a lot of people don’t know this. There actually did used to be that back room. There used to be that cabal who could decide to just pull a problematic nominee off the ticket like that. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay, so how long ago are we talking? Wooden teeth and dusty wigs? The advent of color television? What are we doing? 

Max Fisher: Actually, pretty recent like, reason enough that it existed within Biden’s career. But the party has decided to dismantle those backrooms. They dissolved the cabals. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay, well, we got to call them back. Okay, get the cabals on the phone and tell them they got work to do. [music break]

Max Fisher: I’m Max Fisher. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson filling in for Erin Ryan. 

Max Fisher: This is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week’s headlines and tell a story that answers that question. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Our question this week, why is the Democratic Party powerless to pick its own nominees for office? 

Max Fisher: And by that, of course, we only mean that the party doesn’t have the formal power to decide whether or not Biden will be on the ballot in November. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. Democrats do have some leverage here, like publicly pressuring Biden. 

Max Fisher: Mm hmm. But we’ve seen how effective that’s been so far. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] I’m getting so frustrated by the elites. I’m not talking about you guys, but by the elites in the party who they know so much more. But if any of these guys– 

[clip of Morning Joe host] Yeah. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] –don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead announce announce for president. Challenge me at the convention. 

Max Fisher: That was Biden calling into Morning Joe earlier this week. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Now, this is giving me a bit of déja vu Max. Feels like it’s 2016, and a bunch of party leaders say they don’t want Trump to be the Republican nominee. But just like now, no back room, no cabal. So on to the ticket he went. 

Max Fisher: Yeah, our story this week is about what happened to the back room, why America’s political parties gave up their power to pick nominees. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. You’re talking about primaries. The idea that voters pick the party nominee. 

Max Fisher: So I have to say, when I first learned this history, I was shocked at how recently this has happened and how unusual it is. Very, very few democracies in the world do it this way. And this story, I feel, overturns so many assumptions that I had about the way that democracy is, quote unquote, “supposed to work.”

Tre’vell Anderson: Well does it work? 

Max Fisher: Well, that’s the question. This system we have here, it’s very new, it’s very unusual. And there are a lot of good reasons that we adopted it. But we are starting to learn that it comes with some downsides. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Like getting stuck with an incumbent who a lot of the party seems to think is going to lose them the election. 

Max Fisher: Here to help us tell this story is a Johns Hopkins political scientist named Daniel Schlozman. Daniel literally wrote the book on this story, along with his coauthor Sam Rosenfeld. It’s called The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay, timely title. 

Max Fisher: Here’s part of my conversation with Daniel where he describes how all this came about. Could you talk about the way that this process used to work before the change of the 1970s? How were party nominees selected? 

Daniel Schlozman: So let’s start off in the beginnings of the national convention, which is that starting in 1832, parties have chosen their nominees, as they still formally do at national conventions. And national conventions are places where each state and territory has delegates, and those delegates vote until a nominee gets a majority of the delegates, and then that person is the nominee for president. Up until 1936, the Democrats required two thirds majority for delegates, which turns out to have had important implications for a long time as a bulwark of Jim Crow in Southern power. Delegates still formally choose the nomination. Now, how are those delegates chosen? They were for a long time chosen by and representatives of state party organizations and not chosen by the public, but by the state parties themselves. And the state parties themselves might have been formally elected, but that’s a was a very, very indirect process. Very little direct popular participation. Starting in 1912, as part of the reforms of the Progressive era, in which a lot of traditional bulwarks of party power of that age, when the parties printed tickets before the secret ballot, you get the first presidential primary. And so from 1912 to 1968, you have what is referred to as the mixed system, in which there are some presidential primaries that choose delegates in which voters’ preferences are translated into delegates, some presidential primaries in which candidate’s names appear on the ballot, and those are informational for the party delegates who are actually making the choice chosen by state parties at the behest of senators and governors and big city mayors, but not actually important for choosing delegates. These were referred to it at the time as, quote, “beauty contests” in the sexist parlance of the day. And then most delegates are ultimately still the creation of state parties. So you have some kind of popular input. 

Max Fisher: Okay. So this leads us up to the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, which is the big turning point, the moment when all this changes. And of course, we all know the story of, you know, there were riots, there were cops in the aisles beating people. The reason that all of that happened, or the main reason the big like trigger for that, was that the party delegates, who remember for 100 years were the people who were just like party leads, like state party leaders. They were the people who picked the nominee, not voters. The party delegates had chosen Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic candidate for president in that year’s election. And that was very controversial because Hubert Humphrey was pro the Vietnam War. And there was another guy, George McGovern, who was arguably more popular with Democratic voters, the people who would have picked him if they’d had primaries who got shut out. And this is one of the things that led to the protests and the riots that [?] feel this feeling that like, hey, the party has reached over its own voters and picked someone who we, the Democratic voters, don’t like. Leads to all of these protests. But let’s Tre’vell, let’s talk about the old system. Like, what are your kind of thoughts like what are your reactions to this way that we used to do it? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well, it sounds bad. It sounds not good for people who look and live and love like me. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: You know what I mean? 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: You know? 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: When you have a very specific set of people who are making all of the decisions based on their interests, right? And not necessarily the interests of, you know, the broader population. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And even in the interview. Right, he spoke about how, right, there’s a racist history here, a sexist history here. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So we know that not all perspectives, right, were even represented with this group of people who were said to be representatives, right, of the community. And so–

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: My initial reaction is that, okay, maybe making the shift was, you know. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: A good thing. 

Max Fisher: Right. And I think that that racist history of the way that we used to pick uh party nominees is especially pronounced in the Democratic Party. Because the Southern Democrats, they were all invested in Jim Crow. Right? This was the racist white Southern Democratic Party that kept Black voters out specifically by only the party would only pick white candidates and would only pick white candidates who were in favor of maintaining Jim Crow. So this old system was, like, very much a crucial part of upholding Jim Crow in America and upholding racism. So you said it’s not always representative because it’s just like, what do the party elites–

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: –want the party to be? And it was used to enforce ideological limits. And that that also we will come back to this in a minute. Like that also turned out to be a good thing in some ways, but it was meant to be like, let’s have a like a nice centrist, moderate consensus among the two parties. And because the parties get to pick who the candidates are, they can say, like, we’re not going to have socialists, we’re not going to have people on the far right. We’re just–

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: –gonna have people who are kind of in this like comfortable middle. So I asked Daniel Schlozman to explain why we had this system because, like you, my initial reaction was like, well, it seems like there’s a lot of very obvious downsides to this, especially when you see they pick the pro-war candidate, because that’s what the party elite wanted. Beyond the fact that this was just how things were done. Were there important benefits from this system? And our conversation eventually led into why this system ended and what it was replaced with so listen along. What were seen as the upsides or the goals of party leaders in picking on their own accord who was going to go on the ballot or not go on on the ballot?

Daniel Schlozman: That this is a system more or less of peer review, that politicians who had seen other politicians in action would try to find the nominee who would best serve their collective political purposes. And they had seen governors, senators, occasionally a representative, seen how they had played politically, had a sense of how they would do as president, and had a sense of how they would, electorally raise or lower the party’s fortunes. And this is not a system in which the goal is intraparty democracy. The goal is winning in November and [?] the goals. They’ve got policy preferences. But the the point is what the criterion was not. And that was uh, to reflect faithfully any kind of will of voters in the process that voters decide in November from the choices the parties give them, rather than that party leaders look to their own voters. 

Max Fisher: So tell me if I have this right. A kind of consequence of this system is that if you want to win elected office in America, whether it’s president or something else, part of your constituencies are the voters, because you have to win their vote in the general election, but also part of your constituency and arguably, in a sense, kind of your bosses are the party bureaucracy who you have to convince that you are going to represent their interests and do what they want to do. If you’re going to get on the ballot in the first place. So you kind of have to coordinate between those two groups. 

Daniel Schlozman: That and those, those party leaders, and whether we can say bureaucracy or not, I don’t that’s not quite the right word. They themselves are looking to the voters because in each state they are trying to figure out what kind of ticket do they want? How can they assuage all of their constituents? And so everybody is looking ultimately to the voters, but they are looking to the voters in relation to one another rather than looking to the voters directly. 

Max Fisher: So in 1968, as you said, is kind of the moment where this system becomes untenable. And a lot of that has to do with the particulars of how that Democratic National Convention played out. But am I right that it is also a little bit of a backlash among Democrats against the old system in a larger sense, maybe because they feel that the elite party leadership is out of step with the Democratic base on for example race, or for example on Vietnam?

Daniel Schlozman: Vietnam is the great dividing line in 1968, where Humphrey, after all, is the racial [?] The irony of the 68 convention that Hubert Humphrey was this liberal reformer 20 years earlier, a convention insurgent backing a minority plank that’s strong on civil rights, then becomes the candidate who was elected by the the South. So it’s Vietnam. And what happens is that a sort of long standing anti-party the founders didn’t like party tradition rolls in with a hatred for the establishment that is inflected with some of the New Left in the streets and liberal disenchantment with um a Democratic establishment that they viewed as having gotten them into the Vietnam War. 

Max Fisher: So 1968 leads to the vehicle for change in how we pick party nominees, the McGovern Fraser Commission. And I kind of feel like this is a document that should be taught in our high school civic classes, alongside the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, because it is so important for understanding how our system works. Can you talk about how this came about, what it led to, and the kind of thinking behind it? 

Daniel Schlozman: As a result of the ’68 convention came the Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure, known by its successive chairs, George McGovern of South Dakota, who then left to run for president, and Don Fraser of Minnesota, and what it called for was open and meaningful popular participation in the selection of delegates from each state, and what the reformers meant by this was a wide variety of different possibilities, none of which were state parties leading delegations in the ways they had evolved, and that in turn, the delegates themselves would have much more ability to cast individual votes. So they got rid of things like the unit rule, which meant an entire delegation needed to vote with the majority of that state. All these old rules cast aside. What they actually got was as states began to implement procedures that would meet the McGovern Fraser rules, was party primaries. Sort of by accident. Don Fraser calls primaries awful things at one point. And that’s because states are just looking to have, we need a [?] with open popular participation, there are primary elections to elect members of the House and every other election. Therefore, we’re going to create presidential primaries. And on the Republican side, if you’re creating a Democratic primary to meet these new Democratic rules, let’s just do the same thing on the Republican side. And so you get primaries for Republicans who don’t really have a reform process in the same way. And so in very short order, you have a really different system epitomized four years later, McGovern’s the Democratic nominee and Mayor Daley of Chicago isn’t seated in Miami Beach. The the the epitome of old party power is ejected by the credentials committee because they hadn’t followed the rules. 

Max Fisher: Wow. I didn’t know that. That’s–

Daniel Schlozman: Yeah. 

Max Fisher: –pretty pretty on the nose symbolism. I thought this was so wild to learn that nobody actually intended to create party primaries. They just wanted to end the old system and had this, like, general goal of having kind of more participation and give activist groups a weigh in. And that we ended up by mistake, kind of with this system where every state holds a primary, where you vote for the candidate who you want, and that’s who’s going to be the nominee. [AD BREAK]

[AD BREAK]

Max Fisher: So we ended up with this system. It’s what we have, replaced the old primaries. Now people vote for their nominees. What do you think? What are the pros of this system? 

Tre’vell Anderson: What we’ve seen is that it has allowed, you know, minority folks, you know, LGBTQ communities, folks, you know, from historically excluded communities to have a voice, right, to be able to platform, whether it’s advocates, whether it’s outsiders, right, that represent their perspectives. You know, it’s one of the reasons why we keep hearing about the Latino vote and the Black vote right now, you know. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Because it’s it’s become right, an important part of this political process, at least on the Democratic side of things. I also think about how it sort of allows the broader populace to have some sort of accountability right. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Of their leaders as well. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: You don’t like how somebody, you know, did something. Vote them out, the next go around. 

Max Fisher: Mm hmm. Yeah you’re right. It breaks us out of this binary choice between. It’s like well here’s who the Democrat and the Republican Party gave us. And we have to choose between them. And I think it’s not for nothing that it was partly was motivated by a revolt against the political establishment’s agreement between the two parties to perpetuate the Vietnam War. And it was also a reaction against the fact that the Democratic Party had used primaries to enforce racist Jim Crow policies in the South, and opening up primaries is part of how you get so many lawmakers, candidates of color in the South specifically. It’s how their parties have to become more responsive in issues of foreign policy. I mean, I think someone like AOC kind of perfectly encapsulates a system. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. 

Daniel Schlozman: Not just because, like, we happen to like her and her politics, but because she was able to rise in a primary by challenging specifically the political establishment in her seat. She is someone who moved the party left. And that’s something that the primaries have done, is that they have, like people who win in primaries challenging the establishment party candidate. And there’s been like research done on this consistently are further to the left in the Democratic Party. Now, the flip side of that is in the Republican Party, they are consistently more to the right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Ugh yes. 

Max Fisher: So it is also like helped to pull the Republican Party to the right, which speaks to maybe the cons of this system, which we’ll get to. But I do think that it’s really important that it it does it democratizes this part of the process where formerly you had been forced between someone in the backroom choosing for you, and that’s no longer the case. So part of the cons of this, I mentioned what I think is one of the big ones, which is that I think it’s good the primaries have pulled the Democratic Party to the left. It has also pulled it to the right. And that’s because primary voters are not representative of the general electorate. They tend to be people who are more engaged. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes. 

Max Fisher: More ideological, more committed, which can be great, but it can also be maybe not great. You know, like Ronald Reagan is considered like the first big case of someone who elevated in the primary system because he was someone who was challenging the Republican Party from the right. Primaries had really just started around then, around the end of the ’70s, when they were really picking up. And so he kind of encapsulates another version of that. But what what to your mind are some of the other downsides? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well. 

Max Fisher: Of this system.

Tre’vell Anderson: I think that primaries, right, in this current system, they also at least present the opportunity for more like friction and fraction right. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Within the party. 

Max Fisher: Factionalism. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

Tre’vell Anderson: There’s, there’s, there’s often not a consensus per se. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: In, in how the party should be moving forward. And so I think that manifests as, you know, a lot of the infighting we see. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right now between the more progressive and the more centrist or moderate, you know, folks in the party, right? Folks at the top of leadership and folks, you know, maybe newer into, you know, that particular space. You know, there is no clear, you know, one perspective on what the party should be doing right now. 

Max Fisher: I think that’s a really important point that we we have gotten rid of those kind of guardrails that the party used to set around what positions you’re allowed to take. Because it used to be, if you were a House member, a presidential candidate, a Senate candidate, or a member of the Senate or the House, you needed the party’s approval in order to run for reelection. They could just pull you off the ticket. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Max Fisher: And so you had to toe the party line, and the party was able to enforce a lot of ideological uh consensus. And that is no longer the case. And I think that’s good in some ways. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Max Fisher: Like, I’m really glad that the left wing flank of the Democratic Party is able to challenge the party’s position on Israel and Gaza. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. 

Max Fisher: But at the same time, we see in the Republican Party that factionalism, which I think really started with the Tea Party storming the Republican Party in 2012, they all of these insurgent candidates who felt that the Republican Party was too, quote unquote, “moderate,” which, okay, and then ran in all these primaries, unseated all of them, pulled the party to the right, and then the Republican Party, even though they had control of the House. They couldn’t pass anything. And then [?] saw the same thing, even when Trump was president and they had all of this control of Congress, they could not get anything passed because there was so much factionalism in the party. There’s all these different. You’ve got the, you know, QAnon people in it. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Oh my lord. 

Max Fisher: You’ve got the Tea Party people. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes. 

Max Fisher: You’ve got the kind of Republican stalwarts. And I think that that is a big part of the dysfunction that we see in our system now. At the same time, I also think about there’s like basically one other case of a big democracy adopting primaries like we have, because the ver– the thing that we came up with is very new and very unusual. The UK started copying it in um, they started adopting it gradually in the 2000s. And then around like 2010, they had kind of started adopting primaries more widely because they looked at they were like, look, America has more democracy in their parties. This is great. We should do it. But immediately what happened when they started having primaries is that within the Conservative Party, all of these people who were in favor of Brexit, who wanted to leave the European Union, who the Tories had been able to keep out of power because they could just not pick them. All of a sudden they were winning primaries. They now had all these seats in Parliament. They were able to force the referendum to say, are we going to leave the European Union and it was primaries that allowed that to happen. Um. I think a lot about this quote from uh, a woman, a political scientist at George Mason University named Jennifer Victor. Um. She said this in 2018, which I feel like was kind of when we started to have this question about like, wait, are primaries actually good? Do they have some downsides? I really like the way she put this. She said, quote, “it’s counterintuitive, but democratizing parties will ultimately harm democracy. Democracy requires institutional forces of coordination to enforce collective action, comes in many forms. All of them can be called leadership. Without them, we’re all jus in lord of the flies.” I don’t know if I 100% agree with that, but I think it’s a very interesting way to put it. 

Tre’vell Anderson: It is super interesting, which leads me to wanting to understand a bit more about what all of this means for what we’re seeing unfold right now. And so I called up political commentator and author Keith Boykin, who also worked in the White House under former president Bill Clinton. Here’s part of my conversation with him in which he basically says that we should respect voter primaries. My question to you is the various efforts that we see some Democrats trying to undergo, right, to try and get Biden to not be the party nominee, to try to get some sort of consensus around that. Do you think it’ll be successful? Because, you know, Biden, I feel like is, you know, putting his heels in. He’s he’s daring people to challenge him at the convention. Do you think this effort is going to be successful? 

Keith Boykin: No. I mean, he’s the only person who can decide not to run. And so there is no possibility. He will be the nominee unless he decides he’s not going to be the nominee. I don’t care how rich the donors are. I don’t care how influential or powerful the politicians are. I don’t care what the media says. None of them get to vote. The people who get to vote on the nominee are the delegates. And those delegates are pledged to vote for Joe Biden unless he releases them, which he has not done, he will be the nominee. There’s I don’t understand how people don’t understand. That’s the process. You know, that’s the way this works. Next week, on Monday of next week, there will be a Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. And, you know, Donald Trump will have his own vice presidential nominee there, whoever that will be. And um, and that will be the subject for an entire week. And at that point, where Donald Trump will become the official Republican presidential candidate nominee, even though he’s a twice impeached, convicted felon. And then a month after that, Joe Biden will have his convention in Chicago and he will become the official nominee. There is no there is there is no drama about this. You know, the media when I back in the day, I remember the media used to cover the conventions because there was drama at the conventions. There would be who knows who knew what was going to happen. There was always going to be potenatial chaos at conventions. But since we have these modern reforms, we know pretty much exactly what’s going to happen. You know, Donald Trump is going to be nominated, and we know that um, that Joe Biden is going to be nominated because they have the pledged delegates. Now, if you go back in time, you go back to 1968, which I think is what a lot of people are using as a precursor for what this election could be. At the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, that was a disaster. That was part of the reason why the Democrats lost, because Lyndon Johnson, who had done a lot in terms of the civil rights and and the war on poverty and the the Great Society he championed in the domestic area, but he failed in the sense that he championed the war uh in Vietnam. And because of that, there was a lot of dissension in his own party. And Lyndon Johnson belatedly decided he wasn’t going to run, he wasn’t going to seek office. And so they ended up nominating Hubert Humphrey instead, who lost. He lost to Richard Nixon, who ended up being another potentially convicted criminal. Uh. So we could be on the verge of repeating the mistake of 1968. The Democrats are having their convention in Chicago again, and we have a president who has accomplished some things domestically, but has, has, is in some way bogged down by an unpopular war in a different country. Uh. And we also have the potential for uh, chaos at the convention because people are questioning whether he should be the nominee or not. But there is a huge risk either way, I think. And that’s what people don’t understand. People say, oh, it’s risky to stay with Joe Biden. You know what? I’ve been following politics my entire life, and I can tell you this, what people don’t understand is there is a power inincumbency, and the moment the Democrats give that up by nominating someone else, then all bets are off. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So, as Keith noted, there is a huge risk in even having the conversation at this point about Biden not being the Democratic nominee. But I think we should talk through a couple of those scenarios being floated out there because, you know, you never know. Okay. We’ve been living in a lot of unprecedented times lately. We might continue. You know?

Max Fisher: And I, I take his point that he it feels very it feels very scary to think about, even just for a one-off, even just under extraordinary circumstances where the president’s health might preclude him from running again to think about changing our system mid process because it’s our democracy and it feels like there’s something very sacred about that, very important about having this participation. The two scenarios that I feel like I have heard floated the most are one is that Joe Biden just directs the delegates that have been pledged to him, because we didn’t have those primaries over the summer. He won all of them. So he has all the delegates that he tells them, go vote for Kamala instead, so she will be the nominee. And presumably he would do that with kind of the informal signoff from everybody in the party. The other is that he says, okay, it’s a contested convention. I release my delegates and a bunch of people are just going to go to Chicago and they’re going to do a lot of politicking. We’re going to reopen the back room, and you’re going to go into the back room, and you’re going to try to argue to the delegates your case for why that you should be picked. So how do you feel about those? Because I take Keith’s point that they feel scary. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, both very scary. I think a contested convention in particular. It gives messiness, it gives chaos, it gives, you know, and I don’t think any of us want that. You know, I think at this stage, everyone would prefer that this just go off without a hitch as smooth as possible. Whatever, you know, decision we go with. On the other hand, the Kamala idea, I know of a lot of folks who are just like, well, she’s the vice president. She if he’s gonna give up the office to anybody. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: It should be to her in theory, because we also kind of cosigned her. 

Max Fisher: Right. Yeah.

Tre’vell Anderson: When we voted him in. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: You know?

Max Fisher: On the chain of succession. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Max Fisher: She’s already been there. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And then on the flip side, right. Is it undemocratic because, you know, voters didn’t have the opportunity in this moment, right, to say, we want her to be our candidate? 

Max Fisher: Right. So a point that a lot of people have made who were arguing against Joe Biden dropping out is that it would be anti-democratic because Biden already won the 2024 Democratic primaries. But I want to challenge that a little bit, because, yes, it is true that that happened in the sense that there was a ballot box and you could go over the course of the summer if you were a Democrat and you could vote for Joe Biden or for somebody else. But I don’t know how much of a Democratic contest that really was, in the sense that the party elite actually did play a very big role there in clearing the field to ensure–

Tre’vell Anderson: Sure. 

Max Fisher: –that there was no viable challengers on the ticket. And there were like moments where it was like, well, Bernie run. And it’s like, no, no. Everyone understands that the party is going to coordinate to ensure that this is an anointing rather than a genuine democratic process. So I think it was kind of like more technically democratic than genuinely democratic. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, that that I, I think you’re right there. But let me bring Keith Boykin back in here because he’s actually very certain that this idea, right, of pushing Biden off the ticket would be a step backward for democracy. 

Keith Boykin: You know, the backroom deals of the past. That goes back to the 1950s and ’60s, when people would get in the room and make those decisions. But since the early 1970s, there have been reforms instituted, including the primary process, uh that has made it more democratized so that everyday people get to get to decide who the nominee will be. That’s why we have contests all across the country, and people in every state get to vote on whether they want to support one candidate or another. And those delegates who are selected, they’re committed to vote for the candidate that they were, that they were chosen to represent by the people. So there was a process in place, and you can’t just have somebody come in because just because you’re an elder in the Democratic Party, I don’t care who you are or whether you’re Barack Obama or or Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or a rich donor. You don’t have the authority to come in and undermine the the votes of millions of people who cast their ballots in this primary process. That’s just the way the system works. Uh. And it’s a system that has evolved over time. You know, the reason why there is democracy in the Democratic Party is because of Black voters, Black people, Black elected officials, and Black civil rights leaders. Going back to Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party urging to be seated when a lot of the Mississippi white delegation didn’t want her to be seated. Or people like Shirley Chisholm running in 1972 as a Black woman, the first Black woman running for president, or Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Those are the people who helped to make the party the what it is right now. To institute those reforms, including the primary process. So it wasn’t a bunch of old white guys in a smoke filled room with cigars making those decisions for us. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Now, Max, that seems like a very convincing, you know, point from Keith there. Do you think he’s right that ignoring the votes of millions of people who voted for, you know, President Biden to be the nominee yet again. 

Max Fisher: Right. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Is a rollback in a way, of this democratic process that we say we’re trying to have here?

Max Fisher: I get his point. And there is something that feels very important about, like democracy should only move in one direction, right? Things should only become more democratic, and then we should never roll it backwards. And I do get that. I do think that the primary around an incumbent president is like, not particularly Democratic. And I think the way that the party–

Tre’vell Anderson: Sure. 

Max Fisher: –cleared the field, and I think there’s also there’s nothing sacred about the way that we specifically run primaries now. I think it’s not for nothing that they’re new. They’re very unusual in the world. Um. [laugh] One thing I forgot to mention is one of the only other countries that has tried primaries was France, which tried it in 2017, so very recently. And they did it exactly once. And every party that ran a primary immediately the primary elevated, like someone who was kind of a wing nut and all of those parties collapsed. And it’s why the only major parties now, right now in France are Macron and the far right is because the establishment left and right wing party collapsed when they had primaries. It’s just to say that we have tinkered with party primaries for as long as they have existed. There has never been a consistent set of two or three elections where they always operated the same. Like do you remember superdelegates?

Tre’vell Anderson: Mmm mmm. Superdelegates. 

Max Fisher: This was something that happened as recently as 2008, where the Democratic Party–

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Keith Boykin: –had party leaders who had a really big share in the convention, and that was something that happened, you know, 15 years ago. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. 

Max Fisher: So, I think that it is important for us to think practically about what is going to achieve the best outcomes for our democracy, what’s going to be the most representative and the most democratic. And I think that we are not tied to primaries exactly, specifically as we have them now. And I think we’ve learned with things like, you know, Donald Trump running away with the Republican Party nomination in 2016, despite everybody in his party knowing that was a terrible idea and trying so hard to stop him. I think we’ve learned that a system without guardrails is a really risky one. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, all I know, Max, is that, you know, I can’t do Trump again. [laughter] Okay, so I’m gonna need the Democratic Party to get it together. We’re going to have to figure something out. Okay? 

Max Fisher: Yeah yeah, I as well. You’re not alone. The polls show that I’ve pretty much everybody agrees with you. Um. All right, let’s go out with a clip from Dean Phillips. If you are not familiar with Dean Phillips, he was the top challenger to Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary. So it’s telling you don’t know him. He came in third after Biden and quote unquote “uncommitted.” Listen to his NBC interview amid that campaign, and you can decide for yourself how Democratic that primary was. 

[clip of Kirsten Welker] Do you have any major policy critiques about the Biden administration? 

[clip of Dean Phillips] Well, Kirsten, I admire the president. I’m not running against Joe Biden. I’m not running against President Biden. I’m running for the future. 

[clip of Kirsten Welker] Congressman, respectfully, you are literally running against President Biden. So can you tell voters what is your major point of difference with President Biden? 

[clip of Dean Phillips] I’m not running against President Biden. I’m running for the majority of Americans who want somebody different.

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and by Erin Ryan. 

Erin Ryan: It’s produced by Emma Illick-Frank.

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Max Fisher: Production support from Adriene Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf.

Erin Ryan: And a special thank you to What a Day’s talented hosts Tre’vell Anderson, Priyanka Aribindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. [music break]

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