Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

The images are filling the screens this week: the clouds of tear gas, the flailing nightsticks, the helmeted police hurling bodies into police vans, all to the near-compulsory strains of Buffalo Springfield — “There's something happening here/ What it is ain’t exactly clear.” It’s the latest in a long string of commemorations of the tumultuous events of 1968, and if you’re not of the baby boom generation, you may be tempted at this point to declare, “Enough, already!”

It’s a temptation to be resisted. The fallout from that convention led to a half-century worth of struggles over who and how the parties choose their candidates, and those struggles are with us to this day. Just last weekend, the Democratic National Committee again altered the rules in a way that could end up determining who the next Democratic presidential nominee will be. Changes like these have gone a long way toward redefining, if not undermining, the very notion of what a political party should be. If the Democratic Party doesn’t exist anymore—and there’s a strong argument that it doesn’t, certainly not in the way it was understood for generations—the changes that have occurred since 1968 are to blame.


What Democrats did last week was to ensure that the roughly 800 “superdelegates”—members of the House and Senate, governors, national committee members, and “distinguished” party members—could not determine the identity of the party’s presidential nominee on the first ballot. Only if a candidate has a majority of all delegates would the votes of superdelegates be counted. Otherwise, superdelegates are barred from voting unless a second ballot is required, which has not happened in either party’s presidential balloting since 1952.

The idea is to prevent the party “insiders” from conspiring—presumably in a smoke-free room—to override the will of the primary and caucus voters. To truly understand this decision, we need to go back to what happened in 1968 after the tear gas cleared and the busted heads healed. What antiwar Democrats found that year, as they looked to support candidates like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, was that in most states, there was no way to participate. Convention delegates had already been selected in closed processes, months before the political season had begun.

In response to this frustration, Democrats created a “Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection,” which led to a huge expansion of primaries, along with a requirement that delegations ensure that women, young people and minorities were fairly represented. This led to a new outbreak of discontent, especially after the party suffered landslide losses in 1972 and 1980. Where were the wise hands, the experienced party officials, who could vet candidates, and protect the party against a temporary firestorm that put an unelectable, even dangerous figure as the party’s standard-bearer?

Thus the rise—and now the not-quite-fall—of the superdelegate, part of the permanent battle over where the decision-making power in a party should lie. For all the attention paid to them, superdelegates never wielded decisive power in any nomination contest. Since their creation in 1984, they have never voted to deny the nomination to the candidate winning the most delegates from voters in primary and caucus contests. Back in 2008, for instance, the great majority of superdelegates were strongly behind Hillary Clinton. But when Barack Obama began to win the lion’s share of primaries and caucuses, the superdelegates moved to his side. Eight years later, it was Hillary Clinton who won most of the pledged delegates, and the superdelegates followed suit. (This led to a moment of cognitive dissonance, when the Bernie Sanders supporters, who were militantly opposed to the whole idea of superdelegates, began importuning those same insiders to ignore the primary and caucus results and swing their vote behind the candidate the Sandersistas perceived as a more likely winner. The insiders declined the offer.)

Elaine Kamarck has been living with this tug of war for decades. She’s been a member of the DNC’s Rules Committee for more than 20 years, and wrote “Primary Politics,” an indispensable guide to understanding the byzantine world of conventions. For her, the same key question has been playing out for 50 years now.

“In both parties,” she says, “the question is: Do nominations belong to the institutional party, or to the primary voters who happen to show up each year? Right now, the zeitgeist is for the primary voters, unlike just about every other country. Elsewhere, there is some level of party membership that does not exist here. There were Bernie voters and Trump voters that had absolutely no allegiance to either party.”

This change has come at a great cost. “The party doesn’t decide anymore,” Kamarck says. “What we lost after ’68 was a review of presidential candidates by people who actually know them. To be sure, the first time that actually mattered was Trump. Before then, parties had managed to nominate plausible presidents. But these rule changes encourage anybody to run. It’s a system tailor-made for demagogues, reality TV stars, people who have no business being president—including this one.”

But that view is not shared by another figure steeped in the lore of party politics. Josh Putnam lectures at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His “FHQ” site is required reading for political junkies. “What 1968 did,” Putnam says, “was to decentralize the process away from the national party, yes, but codify a ‘tinkerer’s mentality’ where the rules that nominate a winning general election candidate became the quadrennial holy grail.”

But what about the idea that without the decisive role of party insiders, there is no mechanism to keep a blatantly unfit candidate like Trump from winning the nomination? And therefore, there is no party anymore?

“I would submit to you,” Putnam says, “that the Republican Party did decide in 2016. They decided to be split. That the party could not settle on one alternative opened the door to Trump’s eventual success.” (Kamarck makes a similar argument; she believes that the electable alternative to Trump—Ted Cruz—was so unappealing to the party pros that they decided to let Trump have the nomination in the sure and certain belief that he would lose in a landslide, and thus the fever would break. How’d that work out?)

The diminished power of the superdelegates does not eliminate them as a political force at the convention. They can still vote on platform, credentials and rules issues, and that can make a huge difference in who wins a nomination. If Democrats had permitted winner-take-all primaries in 2008, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee; had Republicans barred such contests in 2016, Trump’s nomination would have been a lot less certain. Even so, no one’s going to be counting the votes of superdelegates during the Democratic nominating contests of 2020.

Unless, that is, you believe Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics. He believes that the reduced power of superdelegates has one potential result that will gladden the heart of every journalist and junkie who watches films of old, riotously combative conventions with envy. “The real danger Democrats face today with eliminating superdelegates is that, with so many Democrats running and with strict proportional representation throughout the race, no one gets a majority,” Trende says. “Without superdelegates to break the tie, a brokered convention is a very, very real possibility.”

Well, a man can dream.