T WENTY-FIVE candidates are running for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Twenty of them will take the stage in next week’s televised primary debates. So large a slate could fill two football teams, provide five sets of starters in the NBA or be the primary cast for a Broadway musical. Though fields of this size are atypical compared with primaries in the 20th century, they are becoming the new normal (see chart). In 2016 the Republican field that included Donald Trump contained 16 other candidates. Party bosses recognise that having so many choices overwhelms voters and encourages candidates to take extreme positions. But doing something about it will require them to act in a way that to many seems undemocratic.

The parties’ current nomination rules allow almost anyone who wishes to run for president to do so. To try to minimise the chaos this invites, the Democratic National Committee set minimum thresholds in terms of polling numbers and fundraising that had to be met in order to be included in the televised debates. These are hard to calibrate precisely in advance. In this case the system has thrown up too many candidates for voters to evaluate. It rewards name recognition and social-media prowess, and asks activists to make decisions about people about whom they know little.

Absent from the 20 candidates who were selected for the Democrats’ first televised debates was Steve Bullock, the governor of Monatana and the only Democratic governor of a state won by Mr Trump in the race, because he was lower in the polls and had fewer individual campaign donors than other candidates. Meanwhile Marianne Williamson, spiritual guru, whose assertion that “there’s no higher art than living a beautiful life” may not be the winning message Democrats are searching for in 2020, was allowed to speak on the party’s platform to millions of Americans. It does not have to be like this. Party leaders used to exercise more sway over primaries. They could do so again.

The party subsides

Republicans’ and Democrats’ lack of control over their nominating process is a uniquely American phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world do political parties engage in years-long campaign battles between candidates vying for the approval of hyper-engaged partisans. Most other countries allow some combination of legislators, party members and interest groups to select party leaders. This is the case in parliamentary democracies such as Britain (where Conservative MP s chose a slate of two candidates to put to party members), Canada and Australia, as well as in presidential systems like France and Mexico, where most parties choose their leaders from a more restricted list.

The current system can trace its roots back to the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach. This was the first contest in which the rules of the McGovern-Fraser commission were adopted. That commission was tasked with creating more open rules after Hubert Humphrey was nominated in a contentious convention, despite not competing in any of 13 primary races. (In the five decades since the adoption of more democratic rules, the Democratic Party has won fewer presidential elections than in the five decades before, when candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.) Republicans were persuaded by similar pro-democracy arguments and enacted plebiscitary reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, increasing the number of primaries at the expense of caucuses and binding delegates to the voters’ decisions. Fans of the current system consider it a plus that the two parties are open to outsiders like Mr Trump or Bernie Sanders. They also point out that the 25 candidates on the Democratic side will be winnowed down to a more manageable number. Yet although candidates have already started dropping out, their reasons for doing so do not suggest a process that is working well. Eric Swalwell, a congressman, suspended his campaign because he was spending so much money on fundraising to pull in enough individual donors to qualify for the debates. In one month, “we spent $110,000-ish to get $100,000. So it’s like you’re like spending money to get less money just to meet a threshold,” Mr Swalwell said after dropping out of the race. He may be no great loss. But if Democrats lose Mr Bullock or Michael Bennet, an impressive centrist senator from Colorado, in the next round of winnowing, they may find they lose candidates with a good chance of beating Mr Trump months before the first actual primary takes place, in February 2020. Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, and author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates”, believes this system makes it far too easy for parties to be hijacked by outsiders. “No other political process in the modern world”, Ms Kamarck writes, “has so abandoned this critical vetting function of the political party in the nominating process.” A system of peer review by elected officeholders before candidates were put before primary voters would, she argues, work better.

What would this look like in practice? Ms Kamarck presents three possible solutions. First, both parties could increase the role that superdelegates—convention delegates who can vote whichever way they please—play in the process. Currently Republicans do not use superdelegates in their selection process, and Democrats have recently cut their power. Second, parties might consider a national convention to endorse a limited number of candidates before the choice between them is presented to the voters. The third option would be to let a party’s members of Congress present a slate of endorsed candidates to primary voters. Julia Azari, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, says that the ideal system probably lies somewhere between the brokered conventions of the 1960s and the nearly fully democratised system of today.

It is too late for reformers to affect the system that will be used in 2020, but it is not unimaginable that they may do so later on. Both parties already enact restrictions on who may run, and even the constitution includes some anti-democratic requirements, such as the need to be 35 years or older to run for president. Nor is it abnormal for the parties to exercise a heavy hand in their nomination processes. In the 2008 primary, for example, the Democratic National Committee voted to strip Michigan and Florida of all their pledged delegates after they scheduled their primary elections earlier in the year than originally agreed. The rules committees of the two parties still have the power and flexibility to reform a system that is failing to work. They should use it.■