Early American Presidential elections were not popular elections, not only because the vote was mainly restricted to white male property owners but also because delegates to the Electoral College were elected by state legislatures. The legislative caucus worked only as long as voters didn’t mind that they had virtually no role in electing the President, a situation that lasted for a while since, after all, most people living in the United States at the time were used to having a king. But a new generation of Americans objected to this arrangement, dubbing it “King Caucus.” “Under what authority did these men pretend to dictate their nominations?” one citizen asked in 1803. “Do we send members of Congress to cabal once every four years for president?” New states entering the union held conventions to draft state constitutions, in which they adopted more democratic arrangements. This put pressure on old states to revise their own constitutions. By 1824, eighteen out of twenty-four states were holding popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College. Between 1824 and 1828, the electorate grew from fewer than four hundred thousand people to 1.1 million. Men who had attended the constitutional convention in 1787 shook their gray-haired heads and warned that Americans had crowned a new monarch: “King Numbers.” [...]
Populism is very often a very clever swindle. But since 1831, with only one exception—the Whigs in 1836—every major party has nominated its Presidential candidate at a Convention. [...]
The rise of the primary was a triumph for Progressive reformers, who believed that primaries would make elections more accountable to the will of the people. That didn’t quite come to pass. Instead, primaries became part of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of newer members of the electorate. Frederick Douglass addressed Republicans at a Convention in Cincinnati in 1876, asking, “The question now is, Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?” Sarah Spencer, of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was less well received at that Convention, which marked the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. “In this bright new century, let me ask you to win to your side the women of the United States,” Spencer said. She was hissed. In 1880, Blanche K. Bruce—a former slave, a delegate from Mississippi, and a U.S. senator—served as an honorary vice-president of the Republican Convention, and wielded the gavel.
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