Читать книгу Making Sense of the 2016 Elections - John A. Clark - Страница 10

Political parties select their presidential nominees through a lengthy and arduous process that begins with the so-called “invisible primary.” During the invisible primary, candidates maneuver to set themselves up for success in the actual primaries and caucuses held in the states during the first several months of an election year. Those primaries and caucuses are where candidates attempt to accumulate a majority of convention delegates in order to secure their party’s nomination. But success in the invisible primary generally comes by raising large sums of campaign funds from donors, performing well in the preelection polls, and lining up endorsements from party officials. A candidate who is able to accomplish these things should have sufficient name recognition and public support to perform well in early primaries and caucuses and the financial support necessary to sustain that early success over a long nomination campaign on his or her way to becoming the party’s nominee.

While candidates jockey for position during the invisible primary, the leaders of each party generally attempt to influence the nomination process to ensure that the strongest candidate will win the nomination and represent the party in the general election campaign. This theory about the role that party elites play in the nomination processes is generally called “The Party Decides,” after the name of the influential book that describes the theory.⁵ Essentially, the argument is that activists, politicians, and other central players in each party tend to line up their support behind the candidate who they think would run the strongest general election campaign. In past elections, when these party leaders rallied behind a favored candidate by endorsing that candidate during the invisible primary, the favored candidate has usually prevailed in winning the nomination. For Republicans, this pattern has held in every election at least as far back as 1980. A notable exception for Democrats was 2008, when Hillary Clinton held a wide lead in endorsements over Barack Obama before the contests began but ultimately lost the nomination to him. In 2016, it was on the Republican side where the theory would once again fall short.

Hillary Clinton’s success in the Democratic primaries was in many ways a textbook example of “The Party Decides” theory, but it was not without underlying tensions. Here, for example, delegates from the party’s left wing hold up signs critical of Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016: one of several protests against the frontrunner, who was widely seen as representative of the party’s “establishment” during a heavily antiestablishment election.

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