Relax, Democrats: Primaries Working the Way They Should

Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucuses. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary. Somebody else is going to win the South Carolina. Are the Democrats in disarray?

No. The primary system is working as it was meant to. We just haven’t seen a primary season with no front-runner in a while, so Democrats and the mainstream media are freaking out.

Mainstream Media Biased Against Democrats

The mainstream media has been biased against Democrats for years, despite Republican cries of “the liberal media” (all owned by corporate media conglomerates, of course). They love the story arc “Democrats in disarray!!” and will find anything to play into that narrative.

So even though in 2012 the Republicans took 12 days to count the Iowa votes, then they declared Mitt Romney the winner, then they declared Rick Santorum the winner, the media did not criticize the GOP for it. But let the Democrats take three days to count the votes in Iowa, and the media play it that the Democratic disarray is unprecedented, and the Democratic Party chair, Troy Price, has to resign.

Different Caucuses, Different Winners, Show System Is Working

When the Democrats come up with three different winners in the first three caucuses and primaries, the media will gleefully scream “Democrats in disarray!!!” when this is actually the way the system is supposed to work.

There is no clear front-runner, so different candidates will win different primaries. Some supposed front runners like Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren will likely sink (as Gov. George Romney did and Sen. Eugene McCarthy did in 1968), and some people like Amy Klobuchar who aren’t expected to will do surprisingly well (like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008).

Brokered Conventions The Norm, 1832 – 1952

Democrats may shake out a front runner before the convention (again, Carter ’76 and Obama ’80), or they may go to the convention with nobody having it wrapped up (like most conventions between 1832 and 1952, and the GOP convention in 1976 with neither Gerald Ford nor Ronald Reagan having enough delegates until they got there, with Ford eking out the nomination).

The media will scream “Brokered convention! Democrats in disarray!” although this was actually the way conventions worked for over a century; it is only in recent decades that the primaries have decided the nominee ahead of time.

Just Relax

So Democrats should just relax, put their feet up, and watch how the primaries shake out. Even if they do not have a candidate by the convention, they will have one after, and nobody will even remember anything that happened in February ten months later on Election Day.