The way I see it is that we can go two ways with the nominating process. We can decide that the two major parties aren’t really parties. They are just brands. People stand for nomination, but the general electorate decides who wins by voting in an open primary process. Or we can treat the parties as actual parties with members. Those members will elect delegates to conventions (local, state, and/or national) who will choose the nominee. In this latter case, the delegates would be elected at a very local (small) level so that they all well-known and trusted by the people voting for them. And the delegates would not be bound by any electoral preferences.
But people probably don’t want to give-up their vote in the nominating process to some delegate, so this last idea isn’t likely to be embraced. Because of that, it seems to me that we ought to just get rid of delegates completely. Assign each state a point total, and whoever gets the most points, gets the nomination.
All I know is that the current situation is a joke. People think that their vote counts, but it doesn’t. They assume that whomever wins a caucus will win the most delegates, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will win any delegates. There were caucuses in both Maine and Iowa where none of the votes were even transmitted to the state party. Missouri held a primary that doesn’t count. The votes are insecure largely because they don’t really matter. Some primaries are open to everyone and others are only open to party members.
There are two ideas that make sense, but we use neither of them. One idea is that political parties are controlled by their members, who should participate in some way. And those parties can elect officers who will represent the interests of the party (or factions within the party) at conventions where important decisions are made.
The other idea is that the political parties are just loose confederations, open to anyone, incapable of restricting decisions to their members, and more interested in attracting the widest (yet, shallowest) participation.
Overall, for reasons both of practical politics and voter expectations, it is the latter idea that is more popular in this country. But that’s really only an artifact of our winner-take-all elections which make parties somewhat meaningless.
In any case, in the nominating process, whether we have primaries or caucuses or both, the elections should be real or they should be ditched. What’s going on now is a fraud.
