Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Fifty years ago, Republican Party elites would’ve stopped Trump long before the choice collapsed into the binary of him or Clinton. Up until the 1970s, party nominations were controlled by party officials. The only way to win a presidential nomination was to win the delegates at the national convention. That meant convincing party bosses who cared more for their own power than ideology and who prioritized, above all, being able to work with whoever took office. The horse-trading to win a nomination could be intense, particularly when no candidate entered with a commanding majority of delegates: in 1924, Democratic delegates went through more than a hundred ballots before nominating John W. Davis. It’s from brokered conventions like these that we get the modern metaphor of smoke-filled back rooms. Both parties have since turned their presidential nomination processes over to party primaries, which means that the measure of a candidate isn’t whether he or she can win over party bosses but whether he or she can win over the intense minority of party supporters who turn out to vote in primaries (in 2016, for instance, less than 30 percent of eligible voters participated in primaries—and that was unusually high). This has made parties weaker, partisans stronger, and the American political system more vulnerable to demagogues.