Nominating 101
With one month until the first caucus and primary in Iowa and New Hampshire, Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program and director of the Management and Leadership Initiative at Brookings and the author of Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates (Brookings Institution Press; second edition edition, 2015), answers your questions about how the nominating process works.
Why is New Hampshire such an influential player?
It started out as a tradition, and back in the days when primaries weren't very important it didn't really matter that New Hampshire was the first in the nation to vote in the early primary. But once we switched from a convention to a primary system, a win in New Hampshire gave a candidate an enormous amount of momentum going into the rest of the states. Since then, Hew Hampshire has "fought tooth and nail" to make sure they continue to have first status, says Kamarck.
Why did we switch from a convention system to a primary system? What skills are tested by each?
We switched from a closed-door convention system to a primary nominating process sometime between 1972 and 1976. Kamarck explains the convention system was barely made public and mostly took place among several thousand party officials. It tested a candidate's ability to get along with big city bosses and state party leaders, and the ability to operate within a system of divided power.
By comparison, today's primary system gives somebody like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton (whom Kamarck calls "fantastic communicators") a leg up, because it's all about the ability to communicate with the public.
How do both parties decide on debate dates and rules?
Each party makes its own decisions about how many primary debates they want to have. Kamarck thinks the Democratic party, when it was setting debates, did not anticipate the need for many debates because there weren't many candidates in the race (though she thinks they could have used a few more). "It's been very useful on the Republican side" because it's allowing voters to learn more about a very big field of candidates, she says.
