The Informal Influence of Parties in Candidate Selection

    Leading up to Super Tuesday on March 3^rd, five presidential candidates were all polling with over ten percentof the Democratic vote share. Candidates Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg had successfully splintered the moderate Democrat vote while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren battled for a base that leaned further left. Faced with a difficult November election against Republican incumbent Donald Trump, it was well known that the Democratic party supported a Biden run as his name recognition, alignment with the popular Democratic party platform, and ability to gain the support of potential swing voters made him an attractive and feasible candidate. Thus, despite performing well in previous primaries, Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race on March 1^st and fellow moderate Amy Klobuchar followed suit on the second. Both candidates endorsed former rival, Joe Biden, on Super Tuesday. Within just a day of Buttigieg and Klobuchar’s absence, Joe Biden’s polling numbers increased by approximately seven percentage points as moderate voters turned to him before the critical Tuesday vote. On March 4^th, Bloomberg followed the example of other candidates and dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, further boosting Biden’s already climbing support. Interestingly, Elizabeth Warren, Sander’s most similar competition, remained in the race until after Super Tuesday, arguably to further divide the more extreme leftist vote and cripple Sander’s support, helping to propel Biden to victory in multiple states. Warren finally dropped out on March 5^th. Each of these perfectly timed dropouts benefited Biden, and similarly benefited the Democratic party’s preferences. The strategic and coordinated timings of these dropouts arguably indicate party interference in the candidate nomination process. 

 

    Pomper argues that one of the main goals of all political parties is to win elections. Thus, because Democrats believe their best chance of winning the upcoming election is with Joe Biden as their nominee, they exerted their influence during the candidate nomination process in order to ensure their ideal outcome. Hazan and Rahat’s theory of candidate selection is based on theories of party selectorates, various groups of people that select party candidates. The United States is often considered one of the most inclusive selectorates as they rely primarily on voting systems. Whether presidential primaries are closed or open, or the caucus system is employed, the party selectorate is primarily made up of average citizens, not party elites or party leaders. However, such democratization of the candidate selection process has many potential drawbacks including underqualified candidates, uninformed selectorates, limited coordination within the party and among voters, and candidate divergence from the party platform. Each of these problems was evident throughout the Democratic primaries as candidates with little political background such as Yang, Steyer, and Williamson entered the race. Meanwhile, the average general election voter is typically uninformed and thus has the potential to vote for a candidate who is not the best option for the party, country, or voter. Throughout the primaries, the Democrats severely struggled with coordination problems as twenty-seven Democrats entered the presidential race. The high volume of candidates split party elites and voters alike as both groups struggled to centralize around a single candidate. Each of these twenty-seven candidates professed different policies on critical liberal issues, and leftist candidates Sanders and Warren greatly threatened the party’s platform and scarred away moderate and swing voters. 

 

    The setbacks created by an inclusive selectorate resulted in what Preece refers to as the party’s use of “informal powers” to influence the candidate selection process. By compelling other candidates to drop out of the race when they did, the party was able to ensure a Biden majority in the primaries. Such a majority would provide solutions to the problems created by a democratic selection process as the majority allowed for the nomination of a legitimate candidate who would hold the party line, attract moderate and swing voters, and remove coordination problems from the voting equation. Thus, though voters are the ones who get to vote for the candidates, evidence from the 2020 Democratic primaries indicates that the party can exert its influence behind the scenes by encouraging, or even demanding, that certain candidates drop out of the race in favor of the party’s ideal candidate, in this case, Joe Biden.