It’s upon us. About one half of one per cent of all registered voters in the United States—ninety-six per cent of them likely to be white, a hundred per cent certain to live in Iowa or New Hampshire—will now exercise their inalienable, God-given, legally mandated right to choose the Presidential nominees of the two parties. Since the advent of the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucus as we know them, in the nineteen-fifties and seventies, respectively, no one has been elected President without winning one or the other—except Bill Clinton, whose second-place finish in New Hampshire, in 1992, amid various scandals, was a victory over expectations, and proved that he was indefatigable. So is the political hegemony of these two smallish, non-representative states. If the Presidential-nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo. But, amazingly, all this outsized clout comes free.

Direct primaries—the selection of candidates by voters instead of by party leaders—came into existence a hundred years ago. They were the inspiration of reformers who wanted to take power away from political machines and corporate interests, and return it to the people, who were believed to be wiser and more capable than the bosses, because they were less self-interested. The act of voting would turn ordinary people into good citizens. “The direct primary will lower party responsibility. In its stead it establishes individual responsibility,” George W. Norris, a Progressive senator from Nebraska, wrote in 1923. “It lessens party spirit and decreases partisanship.” In many ways, the Progressive era anticipated our own. The concerns about plutocracy, political corruption, technological change, and mass immigration were similar, and the reformers’ high-minded cures were forerunners of today’s ideas for limiting campaign funds and drawing congressional districts in nonpartisan ways.

The struggle between bossism and reform never ends. As late as 1968, Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey became the Democratic Presidential nominee without entering a single primary. (The Party then created a commission, led by Senator George McGovern, to democratize the process—one result was the Iowa caucus.) More recently, Republican Party leaders have had their way in election after election, with the nomination going to establishment candidates named Bush, Dole, McCain, and Romney, regardless of the populist eruptions of the moment. Perhaps 2016 will be different.

Now that we’re entering the frenetic, relentlessly tactical stretch of the campaign, it’s strange to think that the long months before Iowa and New Hampshire actually marked the substantive phase. Candidates had to show up for lengthy debates (even if their answers often ranged from the canned to the preposterous). Every now and then, they gave speeches and issued position papers on issues like tax reform and war in the Middle East (even if their ideas didn’t always stand up to fact-checking or common sense). And, because the candidates were spending so much time in just two states, they had to face questions from actual voters. As a result of all this, we now have a reading of the American political temperature. What we’ve learned is that it’s burning a lot hotter at the grass roots than either party’s leadership seems capable of understanding.

Neither billionaire donors nor the Republican National Committee nor Fox News has been able to mute Donald Trump and his millions of supporters. Politico notes that “establishment Republicans have begun a ferocious round of finger-pointing over who is to blame for the party’s failure to stop Donald Trump.” Should Right to Rise, the hundred-million-dollar Bush Super PAC, have directed its dollars against Trump instead of against Marco Rubio? Should Rubio have been more willing to criticize Trump, and Ted Cruz less willing to flatter him? Which is preferable: fear (Trump) or loathing (Cruz)? The latter, says a recent issue of National Review that was wholly and belatedly devoted to stopping Trump. Bob Dole sees it the other way around. The Party leadership expected the primaries to proceed as a kind of demonstration of democracy, with the result already in the bag. Shock is finally giving way to rage.

Democrats are more used to choosing outsiders, like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. But the long-shot campaign of Bernie Sanders is the opposite of those insurgencies—it has nothing to do with personality or biography and everything to do with issues. Sanders’s persistently surprising popularity shows that the Democratic establishment grasped the deep alienation of its voters no better than its Republican counterpart did. The energy of this campaign has been generated on the margins, by two kinds of Americans: younger, better-educated, more urban ones on the Democratic side; older, more working-class, whiter ones on the Republican side. As with the Progressives and Populists of a hundred years ago, both groups harbor a sense that their country has been taken away from them. Neither has traditionally been oppressed, which makes the sense of disenfranchisement all the more acute, and they assert increasingly extreme views against the powers they see concentrated against them—big business, big government, big media, big globalization.

That was the original purpose of direct primaries—to force the parties to answer to the voters. But Senator Norris was mistaken about one thing: the voters turn out to be more partisan than the bosses. Primaries drive politicians toward the extremes, and neither side is willing to acknowledge the legitimacy or, in a sense, the existence of the other. Sanders Democrats cheer his proposals for higher taxes, single-payer health care, and free college education without demanding that he explain how he’ll get those proposals through a highly ideological Republican Congress. Trump just tells his faithful to give him the power and he’ll make everything right, and they believe him. Cruz sneers about “New York values,” as if support for gun control and abortion rights weren’t majority views in America.

These disruptions have troubled the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg enough to make him consider an independent candidacy. He disapproves of partisan primaries. An aide told the Times that Bloomberg thinks that Americans are seeking “a non-ideological, bipartisan, results-oriented vision.” He would spend at least a billion of his own dollars to find out. Nothing about the campaign so far suggests that he would get much of a return on the investment. ♦