You decide

Call it the Original Lie of campaign journalism, the serpent and the apple story of manipulative political reporting. 

It stares you in the face at the outset of each campaign season. You’ll typically see it in a graphic. 

On Fox, it’s YOU DECIDE. ABC has been going with YOUR VOICE, YOUR VOTE. CNN prefers AMERICA’S CHOICE.

As much as possible, the press underscores the you-ness of elections. It’s all about you! You get to choose! We’re just tabulating the results!

Except the networks do not actually believe this. Most of the top campaign analysts in the biggest print outlets don’t believe it, either. 

It doesn’t take much digging to find different analyses of what elections actually are, or what they’re supposed to be, in the eyes of the pundit-o-sphere. The real slogan should be:

YOU SORT OF DECIDE! 

Or:

2020: YOU DECIDE. AFTER WE DECIDE.

Here’s what Nate Cohn wrote in the New York Times in early 2015, as part of an argument for why Donald Trump could never win the nomination. Check out the odd language:

Grass-roots conservatives and liberals may resent it, but many analysts – including me – argue that the outcome of presidential nominations is shaped or even decided by party elites.

Why would only “grass-roots conservatives and liberals” resent the idea that elections are decided by party elites? Shouldn’t everyone think that’s nuts? 

Sadly, they don’t. Most campaign analysts see the campaign season as a referendum on their ability to steer electorates. When we talk about “party elites” deciding elections, what we really mean is that institutions like the press, the two political parties, and corporate donors can throw up insuperable obstacles to anyone they please. 

Cohn phrases it as follows:

Party opposition is even worse. It ensures a chorus of influential critics in the media and a well-funded opponent with endless resources for advertisements to echo the attacks. Grass-roots support and super PACs can help compensate for a lack of broad support, but they probably can’t overcome broad opposition. The voice of the elites is too strong and influential.

Here’s how the process usually works, bearing in mind that Donald Trump is and was an all-time outlier.

At the end of each election cycle, key donors, along with corporate consultants and leaders of party organs (like the Republican National Committee, for instance), will informally talk about what went wrong and how to fix it. These ideas may then be batted around in a formal proceeding like the drafting of an electoral “autopsy” or “postelection report”.

After 2012, for instance, Republicans were convinced they needed to soften on immigration to close the gap with Democrats. The RNC report on the loss of Mitt Romney laid out a whole series of reforms they thought would be necessary, including, “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”

Then the few hundred people who actually matter in Washington will get their heads together and quietly decide which candidate is going to get the money for the next run. That candidate ends up with a few hundred million bucks and a head start with the press. This is how the Times described it in a different piece: 

The endorsements and donations garner mainly positive media attention for a candidate, and the candidate’s poll numbers then typically increase. These increases generate more positive media coverage, which in turn generates more endorsements and donations, and rivals are winnowed out of the competition.

This is the so-called “invisible primary.” The term comes from a 2009 book written by a group of academics and published by the University of Chicago Press, called The Party Decides. 

The book’s four authors took on the proposition that parties had become increasingly irrelevant in modern politics, as decision-making left the smoke-filled room.

The history here is important. In March of 1968, incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, probably stunned among other things by his poor performance McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary against antiwar challenger Eugene, abruptly decided not to run for re-election. Vice President Hubert Humphrey decided to run in his place as the choice of the party establishment. But it was too late in the game for him to formally participate in primaries. 

So the race ended up being between two candidates who were actually on the ballot – Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy – and one who was not, Humphrey. Kennedy would be assassinated before the convention. 

In the convention in Chicago that summer, Democratic party bosses nominated Humphrey on the first ballot despite the fact that the other two candidates had won the votes. At the time, bosses could still control delegates without having votes behind them. 

In an effort to quell the fury of Democratic voters (particularly young antiwar voters) Humphrey, in characteristic fashion, made a Mephistophelean bargain.

He accepted the nomination for that year, but agreed to create a commission that would reform future elections. The subsequent McGovern-Fraser commission created the system of “pledged delegates” we have today that puts more power in the hands of actual voters. 

The authors of The Party Decides let us in on a secret: the McGovern-Fraser commission didn’t actually disenfranchise party bosses and donors! Actually they still control things a lot! 

The “invisible primary,” they argued, was and is a pre-primary period in which party bosses “scrutinize and winnow the field before voters get involved, attempt to build coalitions behind a single preferred candidate, and sway voters to ratify their choice.”

The authors went on to list countless examples of pre-primary money and endorsements being deciding factors. Bill Bradley and Al Gore were equally sucky campaigners, but Gore had 82 percent of the party endorsements, and more money, so – win, Gore. George W. Bush in 2000 was another pre-anointed nominee. Mondale in ’84, same thing. Bob Dole in ’96. And so on.

The Party Decides is packed full of (I think unintentionally) unpleasant metaphors about how our democracy works, or is supposed to work. In one particularly hard to follow section, the authors describe something they call the “restaurant game”:

Here, then, is a coordination game that better captures what may happen in the invisible primary. We call it the restaurant game…

Imagine that a large number of people are trying to coordinate on a place to eat and that, if a majority manage to go to the same restaurant, they will get some benefit, such as a price discount. At the same time, all want a restaurant that matches their culinary preferences, which differ. Some diners, whom we may call purists, are more finicky than others.

Note: if you’re discussing campaign dynamics in America, you can’t avoid terms like “purist” or “purity.” These are descriptors invented for people who insist on voting for the candidate of their choice, like for instance an antiwar voter who won’t vote for a pro-war candidate. Snobs! In the politics-as-eating metaphor, a purist is just an annoying customer who won’t just eat what’s served. They go on later, venturing into a long, odd discussion about voter-customers ending up in a “fish-house” instead of Denny’s: 

If, as diners continue making choices, the fish house continues to draw a large and diverse crowd, even some diners with intense preferences for food other than fish might conclude that they can get a decent meal at the fish place—and earn the group discount as well. This restaurant game would play out differently in different conditions. If the diners are very hungry, they might converge more quickly than if they had just feasted. It would also matter if the town has only one good restaurant, many good restaurants, or none…

I’m not sure what the fish house is supposed to represent, but basically the authors seem to be suggesting that under certain conditions, a lot of people who would rather eat something other than fish, will eat fish: 

YOU DECIDE (TO EAT FISH. WHEN YOU DON’T NECESSARILY WANT FISH). 2020!

Here’s another analogy the Party Decides folks came up with: running for the nomination is like figure skating: 

Skaters do not determine the number and kinds of jumps and spins they must perform. Nor do they determine the standards of performance. Nor, above all, do they choose the judges, who are selected by the larger figuring skating community to implement the community’s rules of competition and its standards of judgment. Skaters win not by pleasing themselves or their coaches or even the crowd in the arena, but by pleasing the judges and the insider community they represent…

In sum, skating is not about pleasing yourself. It is about fulfilling the orders and desires of the insider skating community. Class dismissed. The cafeteria is now serving fish. 

When this odd book came out, it had a big impact on many reporters. Campaign writers quickly learned to love talking about the “invisible primary” in humble-bragging fashion: Let us tell you what goes on behind the ropeline! 

The creepy subtext of these stories – that someone else decides your vote, before you decide your vote – was rarely commented upon.

In 2016, Jeb Bush won the Republican “invisible primary.” This was all but officially announced before the race began. Romney’s 2012 finance chair, Spencer Zwick, said in February of 2015 that anyone who “wants to be taken seriously running for president” (read: seeks assloads of money from my donor list) needs “to be in a similar place” to Jeb Bush policywise. 

A little over five months later, Bush reported having $114 million in PAC money. Pretty much the same process unfolded for Hillary Clinton on the other side, as Clinton was declared the runaway winner of the “invisible primary” in the spring of 2015. 

Reporters tend to describe the winner of the “invisible primary” as more electable and the wiser choice. In some places you will see voters who reject the party-approved candidate described as “off the reservation” or “stubborn.” 

Here’s David Frum – once a neoconservative Bush speechwriter, today a darling of the Democratic intelligentsia – talking about what happened in the 2008 and 2012 races, when Republican voters kept resisting the candidates ordained for them by donors:

Big-dollar Republican favorites have run into trouble before, of course. Rudy Giuliani imploded in 2007–08; Mitt Romney’s 2012 nomination was knocked off course as Republicans worked their way through a series of alternative front-runners: Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and finally Rick Santorum. 

But Giuliani lost ground to two rivals equally acceptable to the donor elite, or nearly so: Mitt Romney and John McCain. In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The mutiny of the 2016 cycle has been different…

Ironically, about two years out from the election – right about now, i.e. November–December 2018 – is when reporters will be most open about these processes. You can find any number of stories out about the “invisible primary” and who’s winning it. (Incidentally, why is it called by such a catchy name? Why not the “establishment primary”? The donor primary? The back-room primary?)

“The invisible primary comes into view,” NBC recently announced, in a piece about 2020 Democratic hopefuls. The article is full of enough loathsomeness and nonsense to fill a few notebooks, but here’s a sample, from the always-lovable ex-Republican (and now Democratic) hitman David Brock:

“For all these other candidates, the first question is: Where are you going to get the money?” said David Brock, a prodigious fundraiser who speaks with donors often and runs a constellation of Democratic groups and super PACs. “If you can’t answer the question of where you're going to get the money, you're not going to go anywhere.”

This is coming from a man whose candidate in the last race, Hillary Clinton, lost despite nearly doubling Trump’s fundraising. 

The “invisible primary” was core belief for campaign reporters through 2016, when the Trump campaign exploded the thesis. It wasn’t just that Trump won the nomination in defiance of party chiefs, it was that the party-approved candidate, Bush, was not remotely competitive.

This (along with the surprisingly vibrant challenge of Bernie Sanders on the other side) spoke to a massive collapse in the influence of political elites with voters. But that issue has not really been addressed in print. 

The standard take instead is to treat the Trump episode as an aberration, a bad weather event, as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg just did in his “invisible primary” piece:

This is the time that party actors — politicians, campaign professionals, activists, donors and so on — can really make a difference. They may or may not be able to control nominations (I think they generally can, Trump notwithstanding). But they certainly can influence them…

The point of all of this is that most experienced campaign reporters understand that money and the preferences of donors and the party chiefs play a crucial – and typically deciding – role in picking a party’s nominee.

But it ruins the narrative to keep bringing up the smoke-filled room once the campaign gets going. So the “invisible primary” stories tend to recede pretty early. 

That’s when you’ll start getting the hot takes about how this or that bloc of voters will really decide things this year. Forget the donors! This is the year of: Soccer Moms! Evangelicals! Gun Owners! NASCAR dads! Millennials! Millennial women! Office Park Dads (seriously)! 

These stories are designed to shift attention away from the “invisible” actors and bring you back to that place where YOU DECIDE – not nineteen billionaires with their checkbooks out at a lunch table at the Monocle in DC, two years before Election Day. 

The second part of this is that the back-room nature of the nominating contests is camouflaged as the season wears on, by selling up the intense divisions of the general election. 

The more we play up the red versus blue hate down the stretch, the less voters think about chummy early processes like the “invisible primary.” And boy, do we have a lot of ways to make things heated