REFERENCES

article derives from research to be reported more fully in a book by-the present writer and Donald R. Matthews, to be published by the BrookingsInstitution.

leader of the pre-primary polls is usually the same person as theleader of the final pre-convention poll. Exceptions are 1952, 1968 and1972 for the Democrats and 1940 and 1964 for the Republicans- SeelAlli^n H. Lucy, "Polls, Primaries and Presidential Ncaninations,"Journal of Polit ics. Vol. 35 (November 1973), pp. 830-48, and New YorkTimes, June 17, 1971.

Austin Ranney, "Turnout and Representation in Presidential PrimaryElections," American Political Science Review, Vol. 66 (March 1972),pp. 21-37, for a good discussion of a variety of related issues.

A CAVEAT ON THE EXPANDING USE OF PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIESMalcolm E. Jewell

University of Kentucky

The present method of nominating presidential candidatesis a confusing mixture of primaries, state conventions, polls,and exhausting campaigns from New Hampshire to California,culminating in a national convention that may be more disrup-tive than unifying. No rational political scientist orfounding father, starting from scratch, would have devised sucha system, but in recent years the conventional wisdom in polit-ical science has generally held that the system works as wellas any alternative. We are told that it tests the intellec-tual, physical, and political strength of candidates and thatit usually produces in each party the strongest availablenominee, that is the one with the best chance of winning thegeneral election. The nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964and of George McGovern in 1972, however, have raised seriousdoubts about that premise. Both men won convincing first-ballot victories in the national conventions, but both weredefeated in the November election by overwhelming margins.These large margins, if not the defeats themselves, resultedfrom the fact that these two candidates lost the support ofmillions of voters who normally voted for their parties. Inboth cases it seems certain that the party did not nominateits strongest candidate.

It would be misleading to draw too close a parallelbetween Goldwater's and McGovern's nominations. Both wereable to capture control of some state conventions from estab-lished party organizations, but McGovern's victory dependedmuch more heavily than Goldwater's on a series of victoriesin state primaries. In fact McGovern's overwhelming defeatin the general election raises much more serious questionsbecause his nomination was achieved principally through theprimaries in a year when there were more presidential prima-ries than ever in our history.

For many years the number of states using presidentialprimaries had hovered around 15, 16, or 17, although many ofthem were not contested by more than one serious candidate.

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Then, in the 1972 election, the number of states with presi-dential primaries suddenly increased to 23 (including theDistrict of Columbia). There is some evidence that the numberof states with presidential primaries will continue to grow.Such growth would create obvious problems of additional cam-paign duration and expense, greater confusion, and increasingimpact of state issues on national politics. For these reasonsthere is likely to be growing support in Congress for the estab-lishment of some form of national primary or a series of re-gional primaries, either culminating in a runoff or in theselection of delegates to a national convention for the finalchoice of a nominee.!

Before we take steps to expand the presidential primarysystem to all or most of the states, we ought to examine howthe system works at present, and we should recognize its weak-nesses, some of which would remain or become more serious ifthe primary system were expamded. The major purpose of thenominating process is to select the strongest vote-getteravailable in the party, and the most serious indictment of theprimary system is that it is poorly designed to accomplishthat purpose.

Those who advocate expansion of the presidential primarysystem assume that it is the best way of measuring popularpreferences among candidates and consequently it is betterdesigned than other methods to determine which candidate canwin the most votes. It is,, of course, true that primarycampaigns demonstrate something about the relative strengthsand weaknesses of various candidates at the polls. But thedemonstration may be deceptive, even as a measure of strengthin individual states. Goldwater defeated Rockefeller in the1964 California primary, but he lost the state by more than amillion votes in the November election. Kennedy was thoughtto have proven, by his West Virginia primary victory in 1960,that his Catholic religion would not be a heavy liability instrongly Protestant states, but in fact it was a liability insuch states in the November election. McGovern could neverhave won the 1972 nomination without demonstrating surprisingstrength in the primaries of a number of states, but he lostall of those states except Massachusetts in November and gota smaller proportion of the national two-party vote than anyother Democratic candidate in a century.

We need to examine the specific reasons why primariesmay provide a poor measure of candidates' potential votingstrength in the fall election. One obvious reason is that notall of the candidates enter every primary or campaign vigor-ously in every state. Although the candidates who stay out ofa primary are likely to be those with the least chance ofrunning well in the state, this process of selective filingand campaigning can weaken the primary system as an accuratemeasure of voter preferences. This is one imperfection thatcould be cured by a national primary law requiring candidatesto be on the ballot in every state having a primary.

A much more fundamental liability of the primary systemis that it only measures the first choices of voters in astate. No state primary law gives the voters an opportunityto rank order their choices. Voters in a primary are neverasked: Which of these candidates would you be willing to votefor if he were nominated, and which would you refuse to vote

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for? In other words, the primaury system does not measurethe breadth of support for various candidates, particularly ina plurality election with many candidates. Even a runoffsystem, if it were adopted in a state or at the national level,would not assure an accurate measure of breadth of support be-cause it would not guarantee that the candidate with thebroadest support would make the runoff. The 1972 primariesillustrate this problem very well. McGovern and Wallace wonpluralities in more states than any of the other candidates,and, along with Humphrey, polled the largest numbers of votes,but neither of them could have been elected because of theadamant opposition of substantial numbers of Danocrats. Muskie,the candidate who appeared to have the greatest breadth of sup-port, tried to follow the tactics of a front-runner and failedbecause he could not come close to winning a plurality offirst-choice votes.

The third major reason why the primaries provide a poormeasure of general election strength is that the turnout inprimaries is often very low. The primaries usually can notmeasure a candidate's ability to draw votes from independentsand members of the other party. Except in states with anopen primary, those who are not registered as members of theparty are not eligible to vote. Moreover, it is often truethat a relatively small proportion of the party's registeredvoters turn out to vote in the presidential primary. AustinRanney has collected data showing that, between 1948 and 1968,the average turnout in presidential primaries was only 27 per-cent (of persons of voting age) and that in cases with fairlyclose competition in both parties the turnout averaged 39percent.^ In 1972, in eleven states where party registrationdata are available, the turnout in the Democratic presidentialprimaries ranged from 45 to 73 percent of those registered,with a medictn of 49 percent. The combined effects of lowturnout and plurality elections can be illustrated in the 1972Democratic race. In the seven states where McGovern won aplurality against opposition in the primaries, his primaryvotes ranged from 4 to 24 percent of the total cast in theNovember election (or 8 to 47 percent of what would be re-quired to win in November). Whether a national primary wouldattract a substantially larger proportion of voters can onlybe speculated.

It can be argued that a low turnout in the presidentialprimary will cause distortion only if those who do vote inthe primary are unrepresentative of all those in the partywho are likely to vote in November. If the primary votersare an accurate sample, however, their choices should be thesame as those of all the party's voters. Very little isknown about the representative character of those who vote inpresidential primaries because of a serious shortage of sur-vey research in this area. The most detailed study is AustinRanney's comparison of participants and nonparticipants inthe 1968 Wisconsin and New Hampshire primaries. He foundcertain socioeconomic groups overrepresented among partici-pants, as would be expected from other research on voters andnonvoters. He found some differences on issues, notably inNew Hampshire, which had a higher proportion of "hawks" onVietnam among the primary participants.3 There is also someevidence in nationwide data for 1968 and 1972 from the Michi-gan Survey Research Center that there are substantial dif-ferences on some issues between those who participate in

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presidential primaries and those who participate only ingeneral elections. In general the primary participants havebeen more conservative, with the differences particularlynoticeable in the South.^ The evidence remains fragmentary,and we can only conclude that as long as turnout in presi-dential primaries remains low there is always the possibilitythat it will also be unrepresentative of party members whoare likely to vote in the general election.

Another kind of distortion can occur from too high aturnout in a presidential primary, in the sense that somestate laws permit members of the other party or independentsto vote in a party's presidential primary. If the proportionof voters who identify as independents continues to rise theproblem will become more serious. If independents are per-mitted to vote in either party's primary, they may distort theresults; if they are excluded from both, neither party canmeasure which candidate can best appeal to the independentvoters, whose support may be becoming increasingly essentialfor victory.

We know very little about what factors influence thechoice of voters in presidential primaries, but there isevidence that the voters are often poorly informed about theviews on issues of those candidates whose names have only re-cently become household words. For example, polls have shownthat Eugene McCarthy won more votes from hawks than from doves(regarding the Vietnam war) in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.There is evidence that voters' perceptions of McGovern werenot clearly formed early in the 1972 campaign, and that manyof them began to perceive him as a "radical" only after mostof the primary elections were over. It is not true that mostvoters do not care about the issue orientation of candidates.(The Wallace candidacy is a case in point.) It is true thatvoters are likely to develop perceptions about issue positionsrather slowly, only after they have become familiar with thecandidate's image and style. The structure of the presi-dential primary system makes it possible for a candidate towin primaries if he has a strong orgauiization, plenty of funds,shrewd advisers, an appealing campaign style, and a good imageon television, even if his position on issues is not wellknown and is likely to antagonize many voters once they becomefamiliar with it. At a time when issues are growing in impor-tance, particularly as a disruptive force in the parties,there are serious disadvantages to a presidential primarysystem that has the effect of delaying the impact of issueson the voters. There is no reason to assume that a nationalprimary system would make the positions of candidates onissues clearer earlier in the campaign.

In the presidential primary system, as it now operates,it matters not only whether you win or lose, but how you playthe game. In 1972 McGovern was perceived to be the majorwinner in the primaries not only because of his solid vic-tories, mostly in the later primaries, but also because hestarted off as an underdog. Consequently his 30 percentplurality in Wisconsin was considered a major victory, whilehis very poor showing in Florida and Tennessee and his de-feats in Pennsylvania and Maryland were not considered seriousliabilities. Because Muskie started as the front-runner andmade the tactical error of trying to run everywhere, he wasbadly hurt in each of the early primaries that he failed to

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win. Humphrey won a few more votes than McGovern in the 17primaries that directly tested the strength of major candi-dates, but his victories in states like Pennsylvania and Ohiowere given less weight by commentators than his poor showingin Michigan and his narrow loss in California. In short, thepresent system puts a premium on skillful tactics and momentum,rather than the counting of popular votes won in primaries.Moreover, as Muskie and Lindsay discovered, a candidate whomakes tactical errors or whose momentum slips can lose polit-ical supporters and financing so quickly that he has no chanceof recouping later in the primary season. If a series of re-gional primaries scheduled over a period of months was adopted,all of these problems would remain. On the other hand, asingle national primary would make it impossible for a candi-date, like McGovern or Wallace in 1972 or McCarthy or RobertKennedy in 1968, to capitalize on early victories and attracta growing number of political supporters in the latter stagesof a campaign.

These criticisms of presidential primaries do not neces-sarily lead to an endorsement of a return to state conventionsor a vote against any form of national primaury. But they sug-gest a need for more research on the operation of the presentsystem of primaries and more thought about the purposes ofpresidential primaries and the means to achieve them. I wouldargue that a high degree of popular participation in the nomi-nating process is not an important goal in itself, but only ameans toward maximizing the likelihood that a party willnominate its strongest vote-getter.

For a presidential primary system to accomplish thispurpose, it must encourage maximum participation of bothvoters and candidates. It must be designed to provide voterswith adequate information about the views and qualificationsof the candidates, and not just their television image andpersonality. It must also be designed to reduce the impor-tance of several factors that loom large in presidential pri-maries (but are somewhat less important in general elections),such as the candidate's ability to raise large sums of money,his organizational skill and resources in a limited number ofstates, and even his willingness and ability to devote a yearor more to intensive cajnpaigning. The most difficult challengeto anyone redesigning the primary is to create a better methodof determining the breadth of support for candidates, theiracceptability to voters who prefer other candidates. The pri-mary system worked poorly for the Democrats in 1972 in partbecause of the unusually deep ideological differences amongDemocratic voters. I am not arguing that a better primarysystem could have overcome these differences. But such dif-ferences may require the nomination of a compromise candidate,and the question is whether a primary system can be developedthat can do as good a job as a convention system in selectingthe candidate with the best chance of unifying a dividedparty.

REFERENCES

The best known proposal for a national primary is probably that intro-duced by Senators Mansfield and Aiken in 1972. Senator Packwood intro-duced a b i l l for a aystaa of five regional primaries, and tepresentativeUdall proposed that any states holding primaries should be required to doso on one of three dates.

^Austin Ranney, "Turnout and Representation in Presidential PrimaryElections." American Political Science Review, 66 (March, 1972), 21-37

Unpublished data.

E. THE VICE PRESIDENCY

COMPLETING A PRESIDENTIAL TERM WITH A SUCCESSOROF PRESIDENTIAL CALIBER

Allan P. SindlerUniversity of California at Berkeley

The turnover in the vice presidency in 1973 and the pos-sible turnover in the presidency before 1976, if Mr. Nixonresigns or is impeached and convicted, dramatize anew a vexingelectoral problem for Americans: how can we assure the selec-tion of vice presidents who are of presidential caliber? Byitself the vice presidency is an anomalous position withlimited authority and standing, but it has been assigned theenormously important role of presidential successorship.Should events require the exercise of the vice president'sstand-by role, the question of his presidential capacitiesbelatedly would erupt, although an otherwise satisfactoryhandling of the vice presidency's duties would not require theincumbent to have high political skills. As a consequence, thepost ordinarily fails to attract persons thought at the time tcbe of presidential caliber, and the major parties routinelyselect vice-presidential candidates with scant regard to theirfitness to be president. True, some vice presidents who havebeen called on to complete a presidential term have provedcapable of that task (Truman, Johnson) and others have used thevice presidency as their base to secure presidential nomination(Nixon, Humphrey). But the central point remains untouched:major-party vice-presidential nominees seldom are selectedbecause their evident talents and standing, at the time theyare chosen, qualify them to complete a presidential term.

In briefly exploring the problem posed, this paper seeksto demonstrate that it may be partially solvable at best, andthen only by reformulating it mote broadly: how can we assurethat an uncompleted presidential term will be completed by aperson of presidential caliber? The dynamics of our politicalsystem, it will be argued here, require looking elsewhere thanthe vice presidency.

.I. THE FRAMERS' ABORTIVE SOLUTION

A logically appealing solution proceeds from the common-sense expectation that persons thought to be of presidentialquality would contest regularly for the presidency, but notfor the vice presidency. Why not, then, have a presidentialrace only, and designate the presidential runner-up as thevice president? Far from being unprecedented, this plan wasembedded in the original Constitution. The election procedurealso initially provided, however, for every elector to cast

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