It's pretty obvious by now that the fringe elements of either party who have somehow wrested control of their respective parties have no concept of how to govern the country...
And for that, we can thank the 1968 Democratic national convention and the reforms of the McGovern-Fraser commission coming out of that, which gave us the modern system. (at that time, Democrats were about 54% of the national electorate and controlled enough states that a number of these reforms that happened involved STATE LAWS regarding elections).
There were always fringe elements in both of the parties, but because the nominating conventions controlled who the nominee was, there was a lot of what they used to call horse trading to tally the number of delegate votes necessary to win the nomination. Now to be fair, I don’t for one second think that that is what the radicals at that convention intended to happen. I think it was a case of youthful idealism running up against reality. And even the old system gave us such disgusting individuals as Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding.
But requiring a substantial number of the delegates being elected in state competitions, whether caucuses or primaries, was walking into a disaster from which we have never recovered. People whose lives are activism, whether on the left or on the right, have long dominated those elections, and the net result is a long list of radical promises in hopes of winning a nomination, but still being viable in a general election.
Donald Trump never would have been chosen by the Republican Party under the old system. Neither would George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, or Hillary Clinton. It is highly unlikely Michael Dukakis would also not be chosen. It is even debatable whether Ronald Reagan, who was considered an extremist when he ran, could have gained enough votes to win the nomination in either 1976 or 1980. Barack Obama, I don't know, because he had the asset of almost no previous voting record plus Illinois combined with the (then presumed) liability of his race.
Furthermore, every single time a party lost the Presidential election, they began making changes that didn't involve THEM having to change all that much. The Democrats made a bunch of changes because they lost 5 of 6 elections, including two 49-1 blowouts. Forced to accept Carter, they wrote the "peer review" of super delegates into the 1984 primaries, basically to ensure either Mondale or Teddy Kennedy won the nomination (the Hunt Commission). They bowed the knee to Jesse Jackson's whining about "but I got X percent of the votes and only 1/8X% of the delegates", which still affects their nominations today. The Republicans, deciding they somehow lost in 1992 because of the long distance from the first primary (Feb) to the last (June), stacked the contests, and the Democrats stacked them even more in 2004, opting for "let's get this settled early so we can focus on the fall election", which is part of why elections drone on forever now. There used to be a "let's wait and see who wins Wisconsin" element to it all, but no more.
I understand it was done in the name and with the goal (idealistic though it may have been) of "let's let the PEOPLE decide," but the effects of it were and are disastrous in both parties at times. Pat Buchanan winning early in 1996 was a terrifying reality; and lost in all of the "we purged our party of the racists" is the fact that on the morning after his shooting in 1972, George Wallace had about a million more votes than any Democratic competitor but only a fraction of the delegates (amazingly, nobody in his party was whining about fair distribution then).
Again to be fair - the Democrats have gotten better on this as time went by, the GOP has gotten worse.
