Illustration By Jeffrey Smith
"The Presidential
Nomination Process Reconsidered: The End of Momentum?"
Political science professor William Mayer's speech to
the university, February 21, 2000
Over the last several weeks, the speech that I'm going to give today
has gone through what are probably best described as several major mood
swings. When Chris first approached me several months ago about giving
the Presidents' Day Address, I thought it would be a good opportunity to
bring together some thoughts I have had about how the presidential selection
system has changed in recent years and how those changes may force us to
revise some of the things we thought we knew about presidential politics.
And then, just as this speech was taking shape, along came John McCain.
When McCain clobbered George Bush so badly in the New Hampshire primary,
he not only derailed the Republican front-runner and sharply energized
his own campaign; he also threatened, in a number of ways, to give the
lie to much of what I was planning to say today.
In response, I drafted a considerably more cautious, even apologetic
speech-only to have George Bush post a substantial win in the South Carolina
primary just two days ago. So I'm now back to being my usual reckless,
obstreperous self.
Actually, I've long believed, for a complex variety of reasons, that
generalizations in the social sciences will never have the rigid, lawlike
quality of those in physics or chemistry. In that sense, no one presidential
nomination race can provide a final, definitive test of the ideas and theories
I'll be presenting here. This caveat stated upfront, what I hope to do
over the next 40 minutes is to lay out a general view of how the American
presidential nomination process has evolved over the last thirty years
and how it operates in most cases. I will then, in my concluding remarks,
talk specifically about the 2000 race and how it might illustrate, qualify,
or disprove my theory.
The take-off point for my analysis is with the presidential campaign
of 1976-more precisely, with the Democratic nomination race of that year.
1976 is an apt starting point for several reasons. As most of you probably
know, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the basic rules of the presidential
nomination process were almost entirely rewritten. The first wave of changes
originated in the Democratic Party. In response to the very bitter and
chaotic Democratic national convention of 1968, the Democrats created a
special commission to re-examine their party's rules: the Commission on
Party Structure and Delegate Selection, more commonly known as the McGovern-Fraser
Commission, after the two men who served as its chairmen. That commission
had a rather vague mandate, and there is abundant evidence that many of
the people who voted to create it had no clear idea as to exactly what
it was they were authorizing. But that scarcely seems to have troubled
the commission. In just four years, the McGovern-Fraser Commission managed
to put together a comprehensive set of recommendations that entirely recast
the rules for selecting delegates, and then compelled fifty different state
parties to abide by their provisions. The result has been described by
one political scientist as "the greatest systematic change in presidential
nomination procedures in all of American history."
Indeed, there is evidence that the work of the McGovern-Fraser Commission
also had an important effect on the operations of the Republican Party.
This came about partly because the Democratic party reformers helped promulgate
new standards of openness and participation that the Republicans felt compelled
to emulate, partly because when Democratic state legislatures changed their
laws to correspond to the Democrats' new national rules, they usually applied
the new provisions to the Republicans as well. Whatever the precise reasons,
the Republican nomination process also changed quite dramatically during
these years. As the number of presidential primaries increased, for example,
it rose just as fast in the Republican party as in the Democratic.
The ink was barely dry on the McGovern-Fraser Commission's final report
when the nomination process was rocked by a second major set of changes.
In 1974, in response to the Watergate scandals, Congress passed a law-technically,
a set of amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971-that completely
restructured the ways that candidates could raise and spend money while
running for president. This law, with only a few modifications, is still
in effect. It has lots of critics; but no one I know of denies that it
is an important landmark in American electoral history.
The first election cycle to which both sets of rules applied was, of
course, 1976. And though both parties had contested nomination races that
year, it was the Democratic race that received most of the attention afterward
and that did most to shape the view of the new nomination process that
came to be held by practitioners, journalists, and scholars alike.
The story of the 1976 Democratic nomination race is a long and complicated
one. I won't be able to do it full justice here, but in order to appreciate
its impact, a certain amount of detail is essential. When the 1976 campaign
began, Jimmy Carter was an extraordinary long-shot to win his party's nomination.
His previous political experience consisted of four years in the Georgia
state senate and a single, four-year term as Georgia's governor. While
not an obvious failure in that position, neither was he a conspicuous success.
If you had made a list in the early 1970s of governors who were particularly
well-regarded by their peers or by those national political reporters who
paid attention to such matters, Carter's name would probably not have been
on that list.
Partly as a consequence, Carter was very little known outside of his
home state. When national Democratic party identifiers were asked whom
they preferred for their party's nomination, throughout 1975, only 1 or
2 percent named Carter. Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Carter's
national obscurity during this period came when he appeared on a nationally
televised game show called "What's My Line?" For those of you
who are unfamiliar with this particular milestone in American culture,
the contestants on "What's My Line?" were typically people with
obscure or unusual occupations. A panel of celebrities was allowed to ask
a certain number of yes-and-no questions of each contestant, with the object
being to guess what it was that he or she actually did. In late 1974, Jimmy
Carter actually appeared as a contestant on this show-and none of the panelists
was able to figure out who he was!
Nor did Carter have much support among Democratic party leaders or Democratically-aligned
interest groups. As the first Georgia governor who officially opposed segregation,
Carter did have strong ties to an important set of civil rights leaders,
including Martin Luther King, Sr., and Andrew Young. But with that notable
exception, the major power centers in the Democratic Party did not show
much enthusiasm for Carter until after he had already won a long string
of primaries and become the clear front-runner. Senators, governors, state
party chairs, labor unions, feminists, environmentalists, liberal intellectuals-none
of these groups were strong early supporters of Jimmy Carter's presidential
bid.
By early 1976, Carter had begun to attract a certain amount of attention
among hard-core political junkies-national political reporters and commentators,
political consultants, and so forth-but was still almost entirely unknown
to the general American public. In the final Gallup poll taken before the
Iowa caucuses, just 4 percent of the nation's Democrats supported Carter
as their party's presidential candidate.
But Carter did have at least two important assets in his quest for the
White House: he had plenty of time to campaign (having left the Georgia
governship in 1974, he was effectively unemployed); and he had a very prescient,
well-devised campaign strategy. The Carter strategy-most of it actually
came out of a remarkable memo written by a young Carter aide named Hamilton
Jordan-was based on four major premises:
First, the Carter campaign understood from the very beginning that not
all primaries and caucuses are created equal. The events at the very start
of the nomination calendar-the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary-would
receive substantially more attention from the press and, thus, from both
political elites and the mass public.
Second, the campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire was, to a great extent,
separate from the national campaign. In particular, given the small number
of voters who were likely to participate in these events, it was possible
for a candidate to spend a great deal of time personally campaigning in
these states and gradually build up a substantial base of support, even
though his ratings in the national polls were stagnant.
Third, given the necessity of doing a lot of personal campaigning in
Iowa and New Hampshire, Carter had to announce early. In fact, he formally
entered the race on December 12, 1974.
Finally, Carter hoped that strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire
would provide his campaign with additional money, publicity, and support-in
short, with momentum-and thus make him a formidable contender in later
primaries.
So that was the Carter strategy-and remarkably enough, it actually worked.
Carter began the 1976 nomination season by winning both Iowa and New Hampshire.
He won Iowa largely because he had spent a lot of time campaigning there-and
because none of the other major candidates recognized until quite late
in the game that Iowa would be an important contest. He won New Hampshire
partly because he had campaigned a lot there as well, partly because of
his victory in Iowa, and partly because he was the only conservative running
against a field of four liberals.
And then it was off to the races. Carter's victory in New Hampshire
put him on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. His support in the national
polls immediately jumped from 4 percent to 16 percent. Two weeks after
New Hampshire, Carter faced his next major test: He needed to show that
he could beat George Wallace in the South. For a variety of reasons, including
the fact that Florida is, in many ways, an atypical southern state, Carter
did win that primary, 34 percent to 30 percent. Several days later, according
to Gallup, 26 percent of the nation's Democrats wanted him as their presidential
candidate.
With momentum clearly behind him, from mid-March through early May,
Carter won an almost uninterrupted string of primaries all across the country.
His record was somewhat less impressive after that: between mid-May and
early June, Carter actually lost more primaries than he won. But for his
opponents, it was too little too late. By the night of June 8, when the
final set of primaries had concluded, Carter was close to having clinched
a majority of the delegates and most of his opponents were withdrawing
from the race. In the space of just six months, Carter had gone from non-entity
to all-but-certain nominee.
Besides elevating Carter to the White House, the 1976 campaign had a
number of important, long-term effects on American presidential politics.
Simply put, the 1976 Carter campaign strategy became the prototype, the
template, for almost every subsequent presidential campaign. How do you
win a presidential nomination? Almost every candidate since 1976 has felt
compelled to emulate the four major premises of the Carter campaign: announce
early, target Iowa and New Hampshire, do a lot of personal campaigning
in those states, and then try to ride a wave of momentum to the nomination.
As one Democratic strategist would comment in 1986, "Now there is
only one strategy. It doesn't matter whether you are a Walter Mondale with
deep ties to the party or whether you are a newcomer-you both do the same
things."
Equally important for our purposes, the 1976 campaign had an enormous
impact on the way that political commentators and political scientists
viewed the presidential selection process. In the first place, it was the
1976 race that first established "momentum" as the great buzzword,
the crucial concept, in understanding and interpreting a presidential nomination
race. No election since then has run its course without a host of articles
and reports speculating about which candidate has the momentum and how
that may change in response to the most recent set of primary or caucus
results.
What exactly is momentum? A good working definition is that momentum
is the effect of previous primary and caucus results on subsequent primaries
and caucuses. Put another way, momentum points out the most important way
that presidential primaries differ from almost every other type of election.
Other elections-in particular, the general elections that are held every
second November-are held at the same time on a single day. We all go into
voting booth with roughly the same set of facts and expectations, the same
reading of the national political situation. But presidential primaries
occur sequentially, spread out over a period of several months. When the
voters in Massachusetts go to the polls on March 7, for example, they will
know about the verdicts already rendered by the voters in Iowa, New Hampshire,
South Carolina, and Michigan. And, not surprisingly, these early results
may have a great effect on how Massachusetts residents think about the
race and, especially, on how they actually cast their votes.
On a second level, the 1976 results seemed to indicate that the United
States had somehow created a presidential selection system that was unusually
favorable to outsider and long-shot candidates. As a result of changes
in the Democratic and Republican party rules, state and local party leaders
were stripped of whatever formal powers they had had over the selection
of national convention delegates. Almost all delegates were now chosen
in caucuses and primaries that were open to essentially any voter who wanted
to participate. No longer, in short, did a presidential candidate require
the support or permission of the established party leadership.
And if the Carter strategy was the way to win the White House, that
only made matters worse. By requiring an early announcement date and large
quantities of personal campaign time, the new system seemed to give a distinct
advantage to candidates who were currently unemployed or, at least, not
tied down by significant governing responsibilities. As an aide to one
of Carter's leading rivals would later declare, "I've learned something.
You can't do your job in Congress and run for President." Put another
way, the presidential nomination process appeared to disadvantage a party's
major congressional leaders and its incumbent, big-state governors, who
were likely to be too busy to run for president.
The prominence of Iowa and New Hampshire further leveled the playing
field. New Hampshire is one of the smallest states in the union, both geographically
and in terms of population. Iowa is somewhat larger, but because it uses
a caucus system to select its delegates, turnout rarely exceeds 10 or 15
percent of the electorate. In both states, then, candidates are playing
before what must be considered, in presidential terms, a remarkably small
audience. Breakthrough victories can be (and have been) achieved with 30,000
or 40,000 votes. All of which effectively neutralized many of the advantages-such
as money and name recognition-that front-runners might have enjoyed if
the process had started out in a larger venue.
To summarize the argument so far: Between 1969 and 1974, the basic rules
of the American presidential nomination process were almost entirely rewritten.
What was the new system like? How did it work? The experience of 1976,
particularly on the Democratic side, suggested two important conclusions.
First, the system appeared to be unusually favorable to long-shot and outsider
candidates, and notably antagonistic to the ambitions of established party
leaders and front-runners. Second, most of the nomination season seemed
to be dominated by the search for an elusive quality known as momentum.
To a remarkable (and distressing) extent, one of the best predictors of
how well a candidate would fare in any particular primary was how well
he had done in past primaries.
As anyone familar with the literature on this topic will testify, both
of these generalizations exerted an enormous and continuing influence on
the way that scholars and journalists view the presidential nomination
process. The problem is that neither generalization holds up as a description
of the way that the nomination process actually functioned after 1976.
Let us start with the second of these two propositions: Has the presidential
nomination process been favorable to outsiders and long-shots? Has it been
a graveyard for front-runners? In order to answer this question systematically,
we need some relatively objective way of determining who the front-runner
in each race was and who deserves to be classified as a long-shot. Two
indicators are, I think, especially well-suited to this purpose; and in
case my opening comments have smudged my credentials as a social scientist,
I've even brought some data along.
The first of these indicators is the candidates' relative standing in
national polls of party identifiers. As I've already suggested, for at
least a year before the first real delegates are chosen, pollsters ask
national samples of Democrats and Republicans whom they would like to see
nominated as their party's candidate for president. For every contested
presidential nomination race from 1980 through the present, the first page
of the handout shows how the candidates ranked in the last Gallup poll
conducted before the start of delegate selection activities: that is to
say, the last poll before the Iowa caucuses.
The point of these numbers should be clear: in seven out of the last
eight contested nomination races, the candidate who was ahead in the polls
when the process started went on to win the nomination. The only occasion
when the national polls didn't predict the winner was the Democratic nomination
race of 1988. As you may recall, Colorado Senator Gary Hart was the early
front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination-until the
Miami Herald reported, in May of 1987, that Hart had spent a night in his
Washington, D.C. townhouse with, as many reporters delicately put it, "a
woman not his wife." Several days after these revelations, Hart withdrew
from the contest-but then rejoined the field in December. This late re-entry
muddied the race at just the time when the competition was heating up and
the other candidates were trying to break out of the pack. The upshot,
I think it fair to say, is that, at least according to the survey evidence,
there was no clear front-runner for the 1988 Democratic nomination contest.
Hart was the leading candidate in the final Gallup poll before Iowa, but
he had the support of less than a quarter of the nation's Democrats, and
was only narrowly ahead of Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. At the time
these polls were released, moreover, I think it was widely recognized that
the results were misleading, that Hart's lead was the product of little
more than name recognition, and that this lead would evaporate as soon
as the primaries and caucuses began. So it is no exaggeration to say that,
every time since 1976 when there has been a clear front-runner in the national
polls, that candidate has gone on to win the nomination.
As the 1988 Democratic race suggests, however, national poll results,
taken in isolation, aren't always a perfect measure of how a particular
race is shaping up and who the front-runners and long-shots are. So let's
look at a second indicator: the candidates' relative success in raising
campaign money. As you probably know, since the passage of the Federal
Election Campaign Act Amendments in 1974, all presidential candidates have
been required to release periodic reports detailing how much money they
have raised and spent in seeking their party's nomination. The second table
in the handout shows the total amount of money that each candidate had
raised by the end of the year before the election. (The figures for 2000,
for example, report the candidates' fund-raising totals as of December
31, 1999.)
I do not present these data because I believe that money can buy a presidential
nomination: to the contrary, a close look at this table shows a number
of examples of candidates who were very good at raising money, but then
failed miserably once the primaries began. Instead, as I've already suggested,
I treat these fund-raising figures as another way of handicapping the race.
On the one hand, money clearly is a useful resource in a presidential campaign,
even if it doesn't completely determine the final outcome. Equally important,
the money chase provides valuable information about how other elites view
the race. People give money to presidential candidates for a variety of
reasons, but as a general rule, any aspirant to the White House who wants
to amass a sizable war chest must convince a quite large number of potential
contributors that he is a viable candidate, that he has at least some chance
of gaining the nomination.
Viewed in this light, the fund-raising totals shown here-and again I
stress that these figures show how the race was shaping up before a single
vote had been cast or a single delegate selected-turn out to be a very
accurate predictor of who eventually wins a presidential nomination race.
Specifically, they forecast the winner in seven of the eight contested
races since 1980.
So as a simple matter of historical description, the contemporary presidential
nomination race has not been a favorable arena for outsiders and long-shots.
As these tables clearly indicate, over the last two decades presidential
nominations have almost always gone to the pre-nomination front-runner.
Nothing like the Carter candidacy of 1976 has occurred in any race since
then.
If front-runners always always win, that also suggests that momentum
is a much less important factor than is commonly supposed. To be more precise,
momentum, in my view, helps explain all of the secondary features of a
presidential nomination race. If you want to know why Gary Hart came in
second in the 1984 Democratic contest, if you want to know why all the
opposition to Bob Dole effectively collapsed right after his victory in
the 1996 South Carolina primary, if you want to know why John McCain's
standing in the polls took a dramatic leap upward immediately after he
won in New Hampshire, the best single explanation is clearly that all of
these represent the effects of momentum.
What momentum doesn't do much to explain, however, is the one fact we
all care most about: namely, who finally wins the nomination. On this score,
momentum may reasonably be compared to a roller-coaster ride: it provides
lots of exciting ups and downs, but when the ride finally ends, we usually
wind up exactly where we started out.
Why has this been the case? Why has a system that was once believed
to be favorable to long-shots and outsiders turned out to be so dominated
by established front-runners? There are, I believe, two major reasons why
the long-term tendencies of the contemporary nomination process have been
so different from what we initially expected. To begin with, candidates
and campaign strategists have simply learned a lot more about how the process
works. They have seen it in operation a number of times, they understand
its basic imperatives, and it is, therefore, much more difficult for one
candidate to gain a decisive strategic advantage over the rest of the field.
To appreciate the point I'm making here, it's important to remember
the historical context of the 1976 campaign. With the rules of the process
so completely rewritten, the 1976 election was held in an atmosphere of
great strategic uncertainty. It was by no means obvious how the system
would work in practice or what it would require the candidates to do. As
it turned out, Carter and his top aides did understand the basic dynamics
and necessities of the new system. In important ways, all of his major
opponents did not.
Consider two examples:
1. One important prong of Carter's strategy was to launch his campaign
early, to give the candidate ample time to campaign and organize intensively,
particularly in the early primary and caucus states. Today, early announcement
dates are taken as a fact of life in presidential politics-but this was
definitely not the case in 1976. Two of Carter's stronger potential opponents
didn't announce their campaigns until late in 1975; two others waited until
March of 1976, almost two months after the Iowa caucuses.
2. Another part of the Carter game plan was to give special attention
to New Hampshire, then as now the site of the nation's first primary. Today,
of course, most of us take such a step for granted-but it was not obvious
to everyone in 1976. Indeed, one of the major reasons why Carter won in
New Hampshire was that two of his strongest competitors, Henry Jackson
and George Wallace, both decided to skip the Granite State entirely.
But the kind of strategic advantage that Carter enjoyed in 1976 was
bound to be temporary. It might hold up for one or two runs through the
cycle, but after a while, the effects of the new rules would start to become
clearer, the strategy that worked the last time would be carefully studied
and copied, and a "conventional wisdom" about the nature of the
process would gradually begin to emerge. There has been, in short, a perceptible
convergence in candidate strategies. By 1980-1984 at the latest-almost
all candidates were using some variant of the basic Carter strategy from
1976.
Most significantly, the strategy was adopted by front-running candidates,
thus neutralizing one of the major advantages that the process supposedly
gave to outsider and long-shot candidates. Through most of the last twelve
months, Bill Bradley spent a great deal of time and money seeking support
in Iowa and New Hampshire. So why didn't he do better in either locale?
Because Al Gore, the Democratic front-runner, matched him dollar for dollar
and town meeting for town meeting. Similarly with George W. Bush. While
I will offer a number of criticisms of the Bush campaign later in this
speech, one cannot legitimately say that he ignored Iowa or New Hampshire:
To the contrary, he committed a lot of time and money to both states. And
the more that the front-runners target Iowa and New Hampshire, the harder
it becomes for a long-shot to do well there.
A second development that has worked to the advantage of front-runners
is the increasingly front-loaded nature of the primary and caucus calendar.
The basic dimensions of this trend are probably familiar to most of you.
When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, the schedule of primaries
and caucuses started up quite slowly. It began, as I've already said, with
the Iowa caucuses, which were held on January 19. The next major event
didn't take