Those "Undemocratic" Party Conventions Were More Democratic Than You Think

With it looking more and more likely that the choice for the Democratic nominee for President this year will be made by a small group of party elites called superdelegates, and not by the party rank and file through popular primary elections, critics have been lining up to criticize the Democrats for the persistence of this patently antidemocratic element in their presidential selection process.

To many critics the superdelegates are anathema to the ideals of representative government and democratic choice. They are relics of the period before the adoption of the primary system in the 1970s when unaccountable and self serving party bosses met behind closed doors to bargain over the selection of presidential candidates without regard to the wishes of party members.

But was the previous presidential nomination system as unrepresentative as critics contend? Were the so-called closed conventions of the past really so dismissive of the popular will?

A consideration of the relationship between public opinion polls and the selection of presidential candidates under the former nomination system suggests that the closed convention was not so closed after all.

Before the current primary system enabled party members to vote for their preferred presidential candidate, the peoples’ preferences were transmitted to party elites through public opinion polls.

Since 1936, the Gallup Poll has conducted polls throughout the pre-nomination period of presidential elections to determine the presidential preferences of party members. These party preference polls ask self-identified party members to indicate their choice for the party’s presidential nominee among a list of likely nominees.

Between 1936 and 1968, the last year in which most of the delegates to the presidential nominating conventions were not bound by primaries, Democratic and Republican party leaders almost always nominated the most popular candidate among the party rank and file to be the party’s presidential candidate.

17 out of the 18 presidential nominees for the 9 presidential elections that took place between 1936 and 1968 were the preferred candidates of the party rank and file as indicated in the last Gallup party preference poll before the convention. Some of these were uncontested nominations. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, 1940, 1944, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964 ran for re-election with little or no active opposition. In one instance there was no clear favorite among the rank and file. In 1964, the final pre-convention Gallup Poll on the Republican side showed both Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who was not an active candidate, to be the preferred nominees of 22% of Republicans, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., 21%, and William Scranton 20%. Conservatives, having seized control of the party machinery, pushed through their man Goldwater, who went on to lose big to Johnson in the general election.

Nevertheless, there was only one instance when party leaders from either party failed to nominate the most popular candidate during this period. In 1952, Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson even though the final pre-convention Gallup Poll showed him running a distant third (12%) behind Estes Kefauver (45%) and Alben Barkley (18%) among Democratic voters. Stevenson lost to Dwight Eisenhower in the general election.

This record suggests that party preference polls served to inform and constrain the choices made by party elites during this period. Polls instructed the party leadership and membership alike about who the most popular candidate was. It simply made no sense for party leaders to nominate presidential candidates who were not popular among the party faithful. Party leaders want to win elections and they know that if they select an unpopular candidate they risk alienating party members, who then might sit out the general election--or worse still, vote for a candidate from another party.

Although the party rank and file had no direct role in the selection of their party’s presidential candidate under the old boss-controlled nomination system, the popular will, expressed through public opinion polls, snuck in to the convention hall through a backdoor and exerted a powerful, though subtle, influence over the decision making process of political leaders.

There is every reason to believe that the polls will regulate the choice of the superdelegates in a similar fashion. While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are busy wooing the superdelegates at the Democratic convention, you can bet that the polls will insure that the backdoor to the convention hall remains open.