American Candidate Selection Is Stuck in the Worst of Both Worlds

How the United States selects its candidates for public office is stuck halfway between two legitimate alternatives, each with its own pros and cons. To improve the quality of candidates and our electoral system in general, we should either complete the process of democratizing our political parties or focus on creating a fair and competitive system while restoring the privatization of political parties. In its current state, the candidate selection process is absorbing many of the drawbacks of both, with little to show for it.

How We Used to Do It

For most of American history, parties selected their own candidates. From the 1790s through the early 1800s, congressional caucuses made nominations. In the 1830s, delegate conventions had become the preferred method. Party elites gathered, determined a platform, and produced candidates to defend it and the party brand.

This was the famed “smoke-filled rooms” approach, where elites dominated. In many places, this even devolved into political bossism, as in the notorious case of Tammany Hall in New York City, with powerbrokers choosing candidates on the basis of patronage, favors, and backroom deals. Nevertheless, the system had real virtues. Parties projected coherent messages and brands. Would-be populists and radicals could be checked by partisan institutions. Voters, though excluded from selecting the candidates, had genuine, meaningful choices between distinct political platforms. Parties functioned as they do in most parliamentary democracies today—as organizations with actual identities that candidates were selected to represent.

Progressive Democratization

By the late 19th century, reformers began pushing back on the corrupt and elitist nominating process. The Progressive movement, roughly spanning 1890 to 1920, pushed to take candidate selection out of the hands of party bosses and give it directly to voters. Progressive politicians appeared in both of the major parties as a grassroots movement spread across the country. Progressive Republicans oversaw one of the first primary elections in 1906; the system spread to most other states, especially for state and local offices. Still, it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that primaries, and those who vote in them, became truly dominant in determining most of the major parties’ candidates.

The results will not shock you: weaker parties, platforms that mean less, and candidates who owe their nominations to primary voters rather than to any coherent party organization. The primary system is legitimately more democratic than what preceded it and what exists in most other democracies; it pushes candidates to be more representative of primary voters and avoids political bosses dictating candidates. But it created a new set of problems that must be reckoned with.

The Worst of Both Worlds

American parties today are weak, and platforms are virtually meaningless, replaced by the talking points and campaign slogans of whoever happens to win a primary. Ideological coherence, as a result, can be slim. Yet attempts by parties to assert control frequently lead to exclusivity. Eight states still operate completely closed primaries where only registered party members can vote, with several others imposing various restrictions on participation. These restrictions remain despite the fact that virtually all primaries are funded by taxpayers, millions of whom end up ineligible to vote in them.

Even in states where primaries are open to broader participation, turnout is dramatically lower than in general elections. Primary electorates tend to be older and less representative of the general voting population. The candidates they produce reflect that. In a majority of elections, one party is dominant, meaning the general election is a mere formality and the primary elections are decisive. An estimated 90 percent of U.S. House seats and 80 percent of U.S. Senate races will lack a competitive general election in the upcoming 2026 midterms. Together, these conditions are often referred to as the “primary problem.”

The result is a system that is neither the party-driven model that produces strong, coherent organizations, nor a genuinely democratic model that produces broadly representative candidates. We have acquired the weaknesses of both without truly securing the strengths of either.

What Do We Do?

There are two potential paths out of this political quagmire.

The Democratization of Parties

The first option is to double down on the democratization of parties. If the goal is for voters to choose candidates who are representative of the underlying constituency, then there are a few clear solutions. First, all primaries should be open to all voters or, at the very least, should allow unaffiliated voters to participate in the primary of their choice. Next, lower barriers to getting on the ballot can expand the range of options available to voters. Finally, tools like mailed ballots, voter guides, standardized election dates, and voter education may drive up participation. Taken together, these reforms have the potential to dramatically increase the representativeness of candidates and increase the number of voters who cast a meaningful vote in the determinative election for the elected offices in their area.

The Privatization of Parties

Then there is the path “less travelled by,” the privatization of parties. Political parties today enjoy enormous public privileges, despite not being a constitutional institution of our elections. While the reality differs from state to state, in general, the parties have privileged access to the ballot, influence ballot design, and use publicly funded elections to select their candidates. Parties are inherently private organizations, yet they have been allowed to contort the public system to their benefit.

The famed economist Friedrich August von Hayek wrote that “for the Rule of Law to be effective it is more important that there should be a rule applied always without exceptions than what this rule is.” That maxim should most certainly apply here. If parties wish to be treated as private organizations—and they frequently argue in court that they should be—then let us treat them like private organizations. Let them choose their candidates however they wish, whether that be convention, primary, caucus, or cage match. But let it be done on their own time and their own dime, not the taxpayers’.

Next, standardize ballot access for everyone. Whether through fees or signature requirements, any candidate who wants to compete for public office should face the same threshold regardless of party affiliation or endorsement. On the ballot, candidates can describe themselves however they like—MAGA Republican, fiscal conservative, progressive Democrat, democratic socialist, or even carpenter/boxing coach. All state-recognized parties should have the opportunity, either on the ballot or through a state voter guide, to designate their endorsed candidate. Voters will thus know who the parties prefer. There is then a range of options for how states determine a winner from among this broader field, and state legislatures should choose what fits their own circumstances.

The resulting process will be fairer, more competitive, and ultimately more likely to result in voters being the decisive force at the general election.

Conclusion

The way we choose our candidates in the modern era of American politics results in weak and ideologically vague parties but has yet to produce popular and representative candidates. There are different directions we can go, but the worst thing we could do is nothing at all.