Uncontested Primaries Are a Losing Strategy for Democrats
U.S. major party primaries are long, expensive, and exhausting. But as Democrats are learning in the wake of their resounding 2024 presidential election defeat, they may be essential. This loss invites reflection on its parallels with the party’s other recent presidential failure: 2016. Both elections weren’t just defeats for the Democrats—they were also contests in which the party’s nominee went virtually uncontested for the nomination. For a Democratic Party that desperately needs to figure out what went wrong in this election, one solution may be fully within their control: holding a serious primary election.
The 2024 Democratic autopsy should start where most postmortems of this election inevitably begin–with a stubborn 80-year-old man. Going into the 2024 election season, President Biden showed no willingness to consider stepping aside, despite evidence that voters were concerned about his fitness for the role, a stark contrast from the signals he sent before his 2020 nomination, which indicated he intended to serve only one term. Administration officials and party leaders adopted a strategy dubbed operation “Bubble Wrap” to protect the octogenarian president from public scrutiny over signs of his aging. Though former Congressman Dean Phillips, writer and activist Marianne Williamson, and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran unsuccessful campaigns on the premise that Biden was too old, the party stood behind him and effectively prevented any serious candidate from gaining momentum to challenge his grip on the nomination. Biden’s presumed shoo-in primaries had low turnout and unenthusiastic voters, and though an “uncommitted” voter movement emerged to protest the Biden administration’s policy toward the ongoing Israel–Hamas war proved stronger than expected, the party establishment prevailed.
After a disastrous debate performance showed President Biden’s weakness against Trump and led to his sudden departure from the presidential race just 4 months before election day, uncertainty about who would take the helm was short-lived. Within a few hours, Biden had endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris. A week later, no major figures had shown interest in challenging her, with Democrats hopeful that Harris would be more popular than her 2020 flameout. Legal challenges to Biden’s exit from the ticket were wholly unsuccessful, and at the Democratic National Convention, Harris became the first major-party candidate in 50 years to be nominated for president without a primary.
Ex post, party bigwigs like Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have asserted that Harris’s swift, primary-less nomination was a mistake, but it’s not clear that the party has internalized that message. Leaders of the Democratic National Committee and campaign insiders have largely sidestepped the issue, arguing that an open primary to replace Biden would have been “impossible” in such a short time frame rather than addressing their failure to replace the unpopular, ailing president in the first place.
Democrats’ 2024 preempted primary had echoes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Though Clinton did formally run in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, her victory seemed preordained; The Economist described the race as a “coronation,” and the Daily Beast called it a “cakewalk.” From the onset of her primary campaign, Clinton appeared to face little serious competition from inside the party and benefited from favorability among party leaders who made up the superdelegates necessary to secure the nomination. It was only when Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a party outsider, outperformed expectations in early states and pulled off a shocking upset in Michigan that Democrats and the media began to acknowledge that Clinton wasn’t the only serious contender in the race. Contrary to prior expectations, Sanders came within two points of Clinton in Democratic primary polling at the height of his campaign, with national polls in January 2016 showing him outperforming Clinton against Donald Trump.
Sanders revealed a series of issues with Clinton as a candidate, primarily her elite status in the party she was trying to position herself as a changemaker within. Yet, the full weight of the party apparatus was behind her. Despite the fact that the 2016 primary exposed Clinton’s weaknesses, ex ante, party leaders believed that avoiding a potentially bruising contest would leave her better positioned for the general election. Similar logic seems to have guided their strategy with both Biden and Harris in 2024.
Nobody knows for certain what might have happened with competitive Democratic primaries in 2016 and 2024. However, the outcomes of Republican contests during the Trump era and Democrats’ own 2020 primary election might provide clues. In 2016, Donald Trump was a politically untested candidate in a stacked field against 16 republican mainstays including Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former Governors Jeb Bush (R-FL), John Kasich (R-OH), and Scott Walker (R-WI). What began as a race without a clear Republican frontrunner became a blowout for Trump, as Republican voters confirmed his popularity in state after state. Though Trump still loomed large in the Republican Party in 2024, he again faced a crowded field of qualified competitors in the primaries. As he maintained a staggering lead in polls throughout the race, surviving a competitive primary process demonstrated that Trump was, in fact, the strongest Republican to head the ticket.
It’s not that Democrats don’t have recent experience holding serious primaries. President Biden’s 2020 win came after a tumultuous Democratic primary with nearly thirty candidates vying to become the new face of the party. Though Biden led the polls for much of the race and was described as the “putative front-runner,” it wasn’t a coronation in the way that the 2016 primary was for Clinton. Biden never dominated in polling––he rarely averaged over 30%––and had an embarrassing fourth place finish in the often-kingmaking Iowa caucuses. On the night of the New Hampshire primaries, in which Biden finished fifth, he fled the state and his own election party as the media began seriously questioning the viability of his campaign. Beyond the ballot box, winning the nomination required political maneuvering: Biden was forced to cut deals with rivals Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg to get them to drop out of the race ahead of Super Tuesday. A dominant performance in South Carolina secured the nomination for Biden, but he had to prove himself to get there. Biden’s path to the nomination featured genuine competition—an opportunity that Clinton and Harris were largely denied, ultimately leaving them untested and ill-prepared for the general election.
In the political zeitgeist, Clinton and Harris’ losses to Donald Trump may haunt them, but ultimately, the Democratic Party may have set them up to fail. By forgoing an opportunity to vet their candidates with party voters, Democrats ended up with nominees who couldn't compete against a charismatic, media-savvy competitor like Trump. Moving forward, the party needs to recognize the opportunity that competitive primaries provide to test candidates before a general election, or they risk repeating 2016 and 2024.