Landslide for ‘None of These Candidates’ exposes our broken presidential elections
Nevada GOP landslide for "None of These Candidates" highlights a confusing, broken system that produces candidates no one wants.
Since state primaries became the main path for selecting U.S. presidential candidates over the second half of the 20th century, these hard-fought contests have provided some of the most memorable moments in modern American history. These range from the tragedy of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination in California to the pathos of Howard Dean’s 2004 losing scream in Iowa to the importance of Barack Obama’s 2008 speech about race here in Philadelphia.
In 2024, the worst primary season ever, the only thing we’re likely to remember is a landslide victory in Nevada by ... nobody. Literally, nobody. Indeed, nobody gave a rousing victory speech after Tuesday’s anemic primary there, in which nobody won by a better-than-2-1 margin.
Some 63.3% of Silver State Republicans who even bothered to turn out pulled the lever for “None of These Candidates” — an option more states ought to be considering amid the fiasco that is the 2024 White House race — while a meager 30.4% preferred the one sentient human being who is still a candidate and was on the ballot, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
In another sign of the nothingburger-ness of the 2024 primary season, I couldn’t find any journalist interviews with rank-and-file Nevada voters who cast “None of These Candidates” ballots, so we don’t fully know what they were thinking. No doubt a chunk of them are supporting the man who wasn’t there, GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who worked with his allies who’ve taken over the state party in Nevada to create a confusing, two-stage process that meant the primary results were essentially meaningless. Presumably, some voters were just mad that delegate selection in Nevada has been — to use a word that’s thrown around too much but actually fits here — rigged.
“They basically told us they don’t care about us,” Bruce Parks, the GOP leader of Washoe County, told the Associated Press. He seemed mainly to mean Haley, who — knowing the state was hardwired for Trump — didn’t campaign there. “By marking ‘none of these candidates,’ we respond in kind — we don’t care about you either.”
Whatever the reason, the overwhelming win for “None of These Candidates” is a great-white-whale-sized metaphor for the state of a presidential election in which most observers rightly believe that nothing less than the fate of democracy is on the line, and yet, the broader electorate is wildly unhappy with a repeat showdown between two candidates whose nomination seemed ordained from the very beginning, no matter what anyone thinks.
Late last month, a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll found a whopping 67% of the electorate agreed that they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.” And yet, voters feel they have no path for stopping the inevitability of Trump or President Joe Biden.
» READ MORE: The stars over a dark Trump night in Iowa | Will Bunch Newsletter
And that’s not surprising, because the primary process — which 50 years ago was amped up and hyped as the way to let the people and not party bosses pick the candidate — is badly broken. Consider:
For all the talk about the importance of democracy, there have been no meaningful debates in either party. Trump — invoking the realpolitik reality that his huge lead means he has everything to lose and nothing to gain by debating his opponents — has refused to take part in the GOP events. But Biden is being challenged by a sitting U.S. congressman in Minnesota’s Dean Phillips and, until Wednesday, by 2020 candidate Marianne Williamson — and the Democratic National Committee didn’t even bother to schedule debates.
Despite a modest effort on the Democratic side to reform this aspect of the system, it’s still the case that four smaller states — Iowa (31st biggest state), New Hampshire (41st), South Carolina (23rd), and Nevada (32nd) — are handed the ability to winnow out most of the candidates so that there’s no real competition by the time bigger states like California, Texas, New York, or Pennsylvania go to the polls. Those key first two states — Iowa (89.8%) and New Hampshire (92.6%) — are also overwhelmingly white.
Not only are the early states small and unrepresentative, but a conflicting morass of rules and conditions conspire to make it harder, not easier, for everyday citizens to vote. The Iowa caucus, which requires participants to sit through a lengthy meeting before finally casting their ballot, was held on a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when the state was ravaged by sub-zero weather and swirling snow. In New Hampshire, a Democratic fight over changes in the order of states meant that Biden only appeared as a write-in and did not campaign there.
Even worse, the mess in Nevada was just one of the ways Trump is trying to tilt the process on the GOP side in his direction and make it less democratic. In Nevada, where state law mandates a primary, Trump-backed state party officials created a system in which those votes are meaningless and all the delegates are selected in a separate Thursday night caucus in which candidates who entered the primary — such as Haley — are barred.
But other states like California were changed to a winner-takes-all format, also with the goal of helping Trump. The idea was even floated in a draft resolution to the Republican National Committee to make Trump the presumptive nominee before 48 of the states had weighed in — before someone realized that was taking it a little too far.
The bottom line is this: Only 764,697 people have cast ballots so far, in a nation of nearly 332 million people with more than 160 million registered voters. And yet, there’s little doubt that the die is cast, and Trump and Biden will be the general election candidates.
There’s got to be a better way.
The breakdown of the primary system is especially sad for those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, when — in the wake of the Democrats’ chaotic and violent 1968 convention in Chicago that nominated Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t even run in that year’s primaries — the system was radically reformed to take most of the nominating power from the party bosses and give it to the people. Much like that era’s noble but ultimately failed effort to get big money out of politics, that brief flowering of democracy is wilting in the 21st century.
The laws and traditions that not only give control of a national election to the states — and, in the case of the primaries, political party leaders in those states — have created this hodgepodge of confusing rules and inconsistent methods of open or closed primaries or even less participatory caucuses. A prime example is New Hampshire, which has a state law that mandates it must be the first primary in the nation, even when Biden and other national Democratic Party officials want to dislodge it.
In a recent New Republic piece, Matt Ford notes that the hundreds of power centers — national and state parties and state lawmakers and secretaries of state — managing the primary process guarantee the chaos we are now seeing. He writes that “the best solution to the problem might be one that doesn’t solve it directly but at least makes it more solvable: a constitutional amendment that gives Congress the power to control certain aspects of the presidential primary process.”
But he also notes that there’s no universal agreement on what those reforms should look like. A single-day, national primary — an idea that resonates with many voters — might give an unfair advantage to the candidate who starts the race with the most money and name recognition. But the bigger issue is that you could never get 34 states to ratify an amendment that would surrender their powers to set primary dates or rules to Congress.
The parties and their allies in state government need to fix the problems that make it more attractive to vote for “None of These Candidates” than for an actual person. It seems like that could never happen, but it did happen after 1968 — a year in which one primary candidate was assassinated and a party’s convention was overwhelmed by violence in the streets. God only knows the level of 2024 mayhem that will be needed to fix the current broken way of electing our president.
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