What started as a paper turned into a book.
Graduate student Marty Cohen had been writing a paper on primary
elections when he and political science professor John Zaller saw
potential for a bigger project.
Their work-in-progress, “Beating Reform: The Resurgence of
Parties in Presidential Nominations 1980-2000,” is
co-authored by Zaller and Cohen, along with Hans Noel and David
Karol.
Noel is a political science graduate student. Karol is now a
political science professor at UC Berkeley.
“It’s a book about how party insiders coordinate
themselves to try to control the nominations,” Zaller
said.
Political science junkies might be the obvious reader pool, but
the authors hope to direct it to a broader general public.
The book is explanatory for the most part. People need to
understand what’s happening before they decide what they
think, Karol said.
In the political climate of the Vietnam War, Democratic Sen.
George McGovern and Congressman Donald Fraser battled party
favoritism in presidential nominees through commissioning reforms
to make the process more democratic and representative.
The McGovern-Fraser reforms did away with the strong political
party barrier that ensured party favorites would win the
presidential nomination.
Such reforms enabled a party outsider by the name of Jimmy
Carter to sweep the Iowa primaries and eventually secure the White
House in 1976.
“After Carter, no party outsider ever won the nomination,
though they’ve come close several times,” Cohen
said.
Political parties adapted to a new era and used their political
muscle to ensure that an outsider ““ anyone the party
didn’t support ““ wouldn’t win again.
“We were looking at every election since 1980. The
candidate who was expected to win was the front-runner, and did win
… there were no more of these surprise upsets,” Karol
said.
This year’s Democratic primaries confirm the book’s
argument that party outsiders don’t become presidential
nominees.
At first, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean appeared
to contradict the trend. An outsider, he took a surprising lead in
the beginning of the presidential nomination race, boasting a large
campaign chest and several endorsements.
“This year, some very strange things have happened.
Nothing like what we’ve predicted is this. The Internet
changed things; it got Dean noticed. The party had a hard time
coordinating someone other than Dean,” Noel said.
Dean didn’t have much insider party support in the
beginning, but was able to gain more high-profile endorsements as
it became evident he was a viable front-runner.
“If you looked in 2003, it was John Kerry, the
establishment guy who totally fits the profile. But in the way it
happened it was totally deviant,” Karol said.
“The party endorsers didn’t coalesce around one
candidate. There was no consensus figure which divided the party.
The people were on the sidelines,” Karol added.
Dean made extensive use of the Internet, mobilizing supporters
and funds. Some say Dean’s strong anti-war stance also
appeals to Democrats. The other Democratic hopefuls’ weaker
stances dispelled a sector of Democratic voters. Dean fit in the
slot and mobilized that sector.
However, Dean wasn’t getting money from normal party
sources. He was getting money from the people ““ and that
hasn’t translated to votes, Cohen said.
When he lost the Iowa primary, Dean significantly dropped in the
polls.
There have been cases where the front-runners suffered defeats
earlier on, but bounced back because insider support cushioned the
blow. For instance, in 1992 Bill Clinton lost in the New Hampshire
and Iowa primaries and still won the election.
As their book required a great deal of research, the authors
sifted through books, newspaper articles and archives to examine
each campaign.
Collecting and counting endorsements comprised a large part of
the research. However, the process was not wholly quantitative.
They found it was the endorsee’s power that mattered
more.
In Dean’s case, his endorsements weren’t enough to
pull him through his defeats. Political endorsements give
candidates a network of people to aid their campaign, not just
funds.
“Dean built his own machine “¦ but (it) just
couldn’t compete with the regular political people,”
Noel said.