The following is a re-post of something posted earlier that temporarily fell victim to the heated behind-the-scenes corporate politics prevailing here at In at the End of the World. I repost it now, with a few updates:

This relates to issues raised in What’s a Primary For, Really, and Coronations, below. I hope somebody will jump on here and give us a real history of how the party nominating processes developed. My generalized impression is of a series of ongoing reforms over many decades, intended to bring elements of democracy to a process for nominating presidential candidates that is not inherently democratic at all, given the nature of how the parties themselves developed. Like at first some guys in a room pretty much decided it, with little public input and little press coverage of all the scuzzy dealmaking involved. But if you’re a party, you want to avoid nominating a candidate who can’t win. So some public input is a benefit, and that impulse dovetailed somehow with 19thC. reform movements for making the political process more democratic. So: primary elections in some states, for one thing.

But I can well remember at thirteen, in the hot summer of 1968, asking my parents, with outrage, how my guy Eugene McCarthy could have won primaries and yet Hubert Humphrey, who didn’t compete in primaries, could get the nomination. I’m sure I answered myself: It’s rigged!

Well, yes, rigged indeed, but the rules of the rigging weren’t secret; I just didn’t know them. In those days, conventions were still a matter of peeling off the other guys’ delegates–they were far more loosely “pledged”–with promises and threats and highballs while trying to protect your own. A lot can happen between the NH primary and August; anyway, whole delegations were under direct control of governors and other bosses, and the trick seems to have been to deny a frontrunner outright victory on the first ballot, then try to widen the cracks and find a space for your candidate to rise in succeeding rounds. In the 1940 GOP convention, for example, Wendell Wilkie, after coming in second and third, was nominated on the sixth ballot.

Reforms have ensued. [UPDATE: In a comment now lost, CVFD reminded me that the most modern reforms came from McGovern, after 1968; he was the most knowledgeable about the rules. Made me reflect on how McGovern’s disastrous campaign has been invoked this year, in just this context: do you want things so democratic that a nominee is selected (cough, Sanders, cough) who might only carry one state? The counter to that would be that this year maybe *only* the more democratically supported candidate has a shot in November.] Have we come a long way since the days of brokered conventions? Should we go farther? Trump seems to want a general election–of him–in the primary process. Some Sanders supporters object strenuously to certain party voting rules in certain states as not only insufficiently democratic but outright suppression; then again, many of the same supporters celebrated Sanders’s victories in highly undemocratic caucuses; and others are pretending, at least, that their strategy is to sway the superdelegates at the convention to overcome a popular majority. So what the hell is this process, anyway, and what are the principles involved, if any, and what if anything does the process have to do with our cockamamie ideas about American democracy?  And are we going to see something old-school this summer, at least at the GOP convention?

In the meantime, I found this funny and possibly informative of realpolitik: https://www.yahoo.com/news/party-primaries-are-not-public-decisions-rules-154558765.html