View / Why Democrats prefer their own messy primaries

Some of this is typical stuff for a party in the political wilderness, but another factor here is the long tail of the 2016 presidential primary. According to MAGA mythology, the president took on and humiliated the old GOP establishment, replacing it with a more populist party (though Trump has not governed like a populist).

The story of the Democrats’ leadership vacuum is more complicated, partially written by the losers. The left saw the presidential race as “rigged” for Hillary Clinton, who got more votes and delegates than Bernie Sanders but got help from “superdelegates.” In 2020, after the party stopped superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, liberals complained that the presidential race was “rigged” again to consolidate the anti-Sanders vote.

Plenty of other Democrats defend those primaries and outcomes. Sanders got a one-on-one showdown with Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries and got creamed. It’s harder for them to explain 2024, and how the party protected the former president from primary challengers, ending with the break-glass nomination of the vice president by Biden’s elected delegates.

This led to popular, damaging folklore about the Democratic Party — that it has not, in Joe Rogan’s words, “had a real primary since 2012,” and that it has no real credibility to accuse the top-down GOP of threatening democracy.

“I would not say the Democratic Party’s end-run around competitive primaries in 2024 worked in our favor,” said Jesse Lehrich, a veteran party strategist and co-host of the Nobody’s Listening podcast.

The irony: Democrats have overcorrected to fix their “anti-democratic” image. The DNC spent half of last year fighting over David Hogg’s vice chair position because party chair Ken Martin was trying to institute, then enforce, rules that prevented any DNC member from intervening in primaries. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is more hesitant than Trump about endorsing candidates because when it does, the candidates it’s not endorsing run to microphones, denouncing the “meddling.”

“Voters, not the DCCC, should pick Democratic nominees,” the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC told Axios after the committee put a set of swing-seat candidates on its Red to Blue list. The CPC PAC also endorses candidates, of course, but it’s not a party organ.

And the argument goes, for many Democrats, that official party organs should never tell voters who to support in a primary.

The choice to forgo leadership that can tell their voters who to support isn’t one many Democrats regret, as Tanden explained to me. They believe theirs is superior to the regal model perfected by the GOP. Barack Obama, the party’s most popular retired statesman, will campaign for candidates in general elections, but refuses to intervene in partisan primaries.

It looks messy, sure, but Democrats genuinely would not embrace Republicans’ boss politics. In fact, they think Trump is screwing up a few key races. When they defend their own refusal to pick primary winners, they think of Trump rewarding loyalty over electability, giving them Senate opportunities in Texas and Georgia —and maybe a few other states — if the GOP primary electorate keeps doing what an unpopular president says.

Earlier this month, I asked Sen. Elissa Slotkin why she was sticking to the tradition of Michigan’s senators not endorsing in open primaries, even though Democrats in DC worry that the primary for her state’s other Senate seat will cost them.

She did what comes easy to Michiganders. She made fun of Ohio.

“I don’t like that system,” she said. “What’s going on in Ohio right now? Talk to the average Ohioan — I don’t think they’re thrilled that Trump just came in, pushed out all their up-and-coming Ohio politicians, and put in Vivek Ramaswamy.”