Primary contests arose in the progressive reform era of the early 20th century as a way to, as Kamarck puts it, "bring the nomination process … out of the backrooms of political parties." But not every state had a primary, not all presidential candidates put their names on the ballots, and powerful politicos still largely controlled the election of delegates to conventions. In 1960, Senator John Kennedy competed successfully enough in the small number of primaries (in 15 states and the District of Columbia) against other hopefuls for the sole purpose of demonstrating to party leaders that a Catholic could be a viable nominee. And yet through the 1968 contests, primaries remained mostly a non-factor in the nomination process.

 

Party leaders started to lose control of presidential nominations in 1968. In August, Democrats held their nominating convention in Chicago amid political tension wrought by the Vietnam War, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and race riots in some American cities. Senator Eugene McCarthy emerged as the anti-war candidate and nearly beat President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, spurring Robert Kennedy to enter the race. Johnson then withdrew in the face of mounting costs and casualties in Vietnam, and Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California primary in June.

 

The political mood across the nation was tense, and in Chicago even more so, as anti-war protesters were clubbed by Chicago police. In the convention hall, Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who entered no primaries, won the nomination on the first vote as antiwar activists who supported McCarthy angrily voiced their discontent.

 

During that tumultuous week, Democratic Party leaders promised the activists that they would create a reform commission to examine the nomination process. The panel, led by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Minneapolis Mayor Donald Fraser (and thus called the "McGovern-Fraser Commission"), would go on to institute reforms that created the modern nominating system we know today, and not just on the Democratic side. Two developments in particular led this transformation: closed party caucuses became open events, and the number of binding primaries increased (more on the caucus and primary systems in Lesson 2 of this course). The commission was the first of many over the subsequent decades in which the Democratic Party would consider changes to the rules that govern how it nominates presidential candidates.  

 

Since 1968, the number of state primaries has steadily grown, from 15 in that year to 40 in 2016. At the same time, the results of primaries increasingly became binding in terms of delegate selection in a way that they were not before the McGovern-Fraser Commission.

 

The events of 1968 propelled Democrats to change how they picked their presidential candidates, but what about the Republicans? GOP leaders, like their counterparts, controlled the nomination process from the early years of political parties into the 1960s. But Republicans had their McCarthy-like insurgency even earlier, in 1964 when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater captured his party’s nomination—proving that the old system was also vulnerable to takeover from an insurgent candidate. While winning the White House in 1968 and in the next election dampened the urgency for reform on the Republican side, the party nevertheless adopted changes at its convention in 1972 that would make its nomination process, like the Democrats’, a fully open and public system. But unlike Democrats, Republicans could only change their nomination system during their quadrennial convention. "This system," Kamarck notes, "has made it impossible for Republicans to appoint the kinds of commissions and committees that the Democrats have used to adjust their rules after every presidential election."

 

The end result of reforms since 1968 in both major political parties is that voters, and not political elites, choose the nominee of their party.

 

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