Covert Origins

From August 1981 to February 1982, the 70-member commission met in some of Washington, D.C.’s most storied hotels. From the Capitol Hilton to the Mayflower—a mecca for the capital’s rich and powerful, where Franklin Roosevelt’s right-hand man first penned the line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—a group of labor leaders, high-ranking party functionaries, senators, representatives, governors and mayors hammered out the nitty-gritty details of reform.

The gathering got off on a light note when Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser joked that the party could simply announce it wouldn’t nominate anyone selected through the primaries. This, the transcript notes, elicited “general laughter.”

The very democracy of the primary process appears to have made the Commission members nervous. They felt they had to give party elites—elected officials and high-ranking party members—a greater hand in choosing candidates, or as Xandra Kayden, a member of the Center for Democratic Policy (now Center for National Policy), put it, the power to “to regain control of the nomination.”

This was partly couched in a belief in elites’ superior judgment. “They bring to the convention a certain political acumen, a certain political antenna,” explained Connecticut state Sen. Dick Schneller, a liberal member of the party.

The inspiration for these words was likely Jimmy Carter, whose presidency cast a long shadow over the proceedings. The Georgia governor had won the nomination running as an outsider against “the political bosses.” Carter often bragged in his stump speech: “I’ve never worked in Washington. I’m not a senator or congressman. I’ve never met a Democratic president.”

As president, he passed over party insiders for appointments in favor of his close-knit team of Georgia unknowns. His strained relationship with his party was exacerbated by his reluctance to compromise on pork-barrel spending, which congressmen relied on to shore up support in their districts.

Excerpt from the Hunt Commission on Presidential Nominations

“[Carter’s] nomination at least would not have been possible under the old rules,” said Austin Ranney, an expert on elections who had worked on the 1968 Humphrey campaign and served on the McGovern-Fraser Commission.

Though his name was not invoked as often as Carter’s, these reforms were also a rebuke of George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 campaign. McGovern had won the nomination on the back of the grassroots-focused reforms he himself had helped institute in 1970. “The [Hunt] Commission doesn’t want a system that lends itself to a McGovern or Carter,” Rick Stearns, a member of the Commission’s advisory committee, would later tell the press in explaining the rationale for superdelegates.

Another fear was that the 1970 reforms led to nominees out of step with the party’s ever-shifting center—whether to its left, or, in the case of Carter, to its right. “Liberal-reformers realized that the same rules which made it easier for a liberal-insurgent like George McGovern to get nominated could be used successfully by a Southern-conservative-insurgent, which is how they perceived Carter,” wrote Commission member and Maryland Democratic Committeeman Lanny Davis not long after.

A concern was that primaries, with their lower turnout rates than general elections, could give undue power to single-issue “factions.” This was a standard complaint at the time (and since): that the Democratic Party was coming under the sway of groups devoted to narrowly focused causes, from gun control and environmentalism to feminism and civil rights.

“Our decisions will make the convention more representative of the mainstream of the party,” the Commission’s chair, North Carolina Gov. James Hunt, told the press shortly before the Commission finished. “We lost a lot of people in the last few years. Our actions should make mainstream Democrats feel better.”

“Mainstream” may have been code for the working-class voters who were fleeing the Democratic Party. The 1981 DNC report had noted significant differences between primary and general election voters; primary voters tended to be better-educated and middle-class.

While the loss of working-class support was a problem that would dog the party for decades, Commission members saw no illogic in addressing this disaffection by reinstating top-down control. Many seemed to truly believe that superdelegates could represent the will of the people more faithfully than the votes of the people could.

“They can positively bring to the convention the views of the grassroots who are their constituents,” explained New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who would become the first woman vice-presidential candidate on a major-party ticket when she was tapped by Walter Mondale three years later. “No one is better able to represent them at the convention than a member of Congress.”

Excerpt from the Hunt Commission on Presidential Nominations