It used to be that when we went to elect a candidates to run for president, the public wasn’t really all that involved.
Today, we’re used to watching debate after debate, on a stage crowded with candidates and going to the polls to vote in our party’s primary months before Election Day in November.
But prior to 1972, the system was a little different. Delegates were elected to the convention in a closed party process. They weren’t bound by the results of the primary, and most states didn’t even have a primary.
Then between 1968 and 1972, Democrats went through a reform process, because those in the anti-Vietnam War movement felt they had been cut out of the 1968 Democratic Convention. They rioted in the streets outside of the convention hall that year.
So after this latest election, Elaine Kamarck thinks that we might want to revisit the way we used to do things. She’s a senior fellow at the Brooking Institution, and The Show’s Lauren Gilger spoke with her about a new paper she wrote that suggests we should re-insert the peer-review process into the presidential nomination process.
