Let’s Talk About How We Pick Presidents
Was it unconstitutional for Democrats to replace Joe Biden? And what did the Founders think about presidential elections?
Presidential Nominations. What’s in the Constitution, Anyway?
As Kamala Harris prepares for her introduction as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump has suggested it may have been “unconstitutional” for Democrats to replace President Joe Biden on this year’s ticket. He’s posted about it multiple times on Truth Social and mentioned the topic in press conferences. So is there anything to the idea? Was it in any way unconstitutional or illegal for Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket?
Pretty simply, the answer is no. Biden wasn’t ever the official Democratic nominee, only the presumptive nominee after winning his primaries. There wasn’t anything legally stopping Democrats from abandoning Biden for another candidate. The fact that he stepped aside voluntarily and was replaced by his own running mate just made the process of replacing Biden simpler.
As far as the Constitution goes, it’s apparently a surprise to some that there is nothing in the document about how political parties should select presidential candidates. And there’s a pretty good reason for this … namely, that political parties didn’t exist in 1787, when the Constitution was written.
Most Founders, in fact, were opposed to the very idea of parties, with James Madison writing that they were “more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”1 Yup, Democrats and Republicans, vexing and oppressing each other. Sounds about right.
If that’s the case, however, then how did we get here? Why do we have the system that now exists for selecting presidential candidates? Who created it? And when?
If you’ve ever wondered about that, here are four key moments (with three more coming tomorrow) that show how the presidential nomination system has evolved over the years.
1. First, there was this thing called the Electoral College (sort of)
We’re all familiar with the Electoral College, right? It’s how presidents today are elected in America -- by collecting electoral votes from each state in a race for 270. But if you look at the Constitution, not only are political parties not mentioned, but neither is the Electoral College. Rather, the Constitution simply directs “electors” from each state to cast a ballot for president. Whomever wins a majority is elected president – and if no one receives a majority then Congress is empowered to choose the president from among the top vote-getters.
When delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in the summer of 1787, most of them assumed that an American president would have to be chosen by Congress. This idea never made it into the Constitution because of the fear that a president elected this way wouldn’t be all that independent from the legislature. At the same time, though, most delegates also weren’t thrilled with the idea of having the people elect the president directly. Democracy was in its infancy and it was thought best to have a buffer between the people and the actual election of a president.
So the Founders were perplexed. If election by Congress and the people were both off the table, there weren’t too many other great ideas floating around for how to select a president.
Finally, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, worn down by “fatigue and impatience,” as Madison noted, they forged a compromise.2 Each state legislature would choose a set of electors and this group would be empowered to vote for a president. The thinking was that future candidates (other than George Washington) would rarely gain a majority from these state electors, so the electoral vote would mostly just narrow the field to a few contenders and then Congress would be left to make the final decision.
In effect, the electors from each state were responsible for nominating presidential candidates. If enough of them agreed on a top choice, well, that person would be elected; if not, Congress would take over the decision after the field had been whittled down.
So, yes, the Electoral College was the original nominating system for presidential candidates!
2. 1796 to 1820: Congress Takes Over the Nominating Process
That was all well and good for a system founded on the idealistic belief that nonpartisan electors in each state would somehow choose the best, most qualified candidates to serve as president. But then political parties arrived on the scene!
To be fair, this isn’t a bad thing – we now know that democracies without a robust history of party competition tend to become corrupt and autocratic. Functioning political parties are actually important to a democracy. Still, this was a development the Founders hadn’t counted on. So when Washington retired after two terms, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans began battling each other over the future direction of the country.
For the next two decades, presidential nominations were made by each party’s Congressional delegation. In a system known as King Caucus, members of Congress had sole power to vote on their party’s presidential candidates, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1796.
But when the Democratic-Republicans won six consecutive elections between 1800 and 1820, the Federalists disintegrated as a political movement and the U.S. was a one-party country during James Monroe’s presidency. It seemed for a few years that political parties might actually fade away.
3. 1824 and 1828: Rules? What Rules?
But nope. When Monroe retired from the presidency and it came time to choose a candidate for the 1824 election, everyone soon discovered that the absence of organized political parties didn’t mean an absence of political factions. Faster than you can say “Era of Good Feelings,” the King Caucus system crumbled into chaos.
In part, this was because many Americans saw the caucus system as too elitist for a nation that was becoming increasingly democratic. Some Congressmen skipped the 1824 nominating caucus for this reason. And the Democratic-Republican Congressmen who did vote inexplicably gave the nomination to Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford of Georgia.
I say inexplicably because Crawford had recently been incapacitated by a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Supporters of other candidates weren’t sure that Crawford was even capable of serving as president, so they disregarded his nomination. But with no other system in place for nominating candidates, the 1824 presidential race turned into a free-for-all.
Three other contenders emerged: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky. Jackson finished with most votes but was short of a majority. So the election was thrown into Congress, which then voted for Adams.
Four years later, in 1828, there was still no official nominating process in place, but Adams and Jackson engaged in a rematch. During the course of this campaign, new political parties formed, which would serve as the foundation for a new nominating system in the future.
Jackson decisively defeated Adams in 1828 and, in the process, founded the new Democratic Party. Adams and Clay, meanwhile, helped formed the National Republican Party (later known as the Whigs). Ever since this time, the United States has had two major political parties, first the Democrats and Whigs, and later the Democrats and Republicans.
4. 1832: Birth of the National Political Convention
OK, so we had two political parties again, who would soon be responsible for choosing their own presidential candidates. And then someone also had the bright idea of staging a national political party convention, as a way to bring together party loyalists, select a presidential candidate, approve a platform, and unite for the fall campaign. Ironically, the idea came from the Anti-Masonic Party, the country’s first third-party movement. But the Democrats and Whigs were soon on board.
Today, 192 years later, the country’s political parties still hold national party conventions. The conventions look different today, but the fact that parties have been choosing candidates at conventions for almost two centuries now brings up an important point: It’s the political parties themselves who are responsible for choosing presidential candidates, via any process they choose. Voters are more involved in the process now than they were in the 19th century, but even that is a decision that was made by the parties.
So in a second piece, coming tomorrow, we’ll take a brief look at how the convention system evolved and how the nominating process came to involve voters as well as party loyalists.
TOMORROW: Part Two: Why do voters choose presidential nominees, anyway?
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
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James Madison, Federalist No. 10, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 78-79.
James Madison to George Hay, 23 August 1823, retrieved from the Library of Congress, The James Madison Papers, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mjm.20_0530_0532/?st=text
I appreciate these two part posts/articles. I rarely have the time to fully read and think about the long articles in any format. But this allows me to read, consider what you are saying, and then come back to it with part 2.