[coffeecloud]

Political parties aren’t democratic institutions. They are essentially private organizations who can operate however they want. It’s only been the last 50 years or so that either party has used primaries as anything more than a straw poll

[hnarn]

One of the problems with the US being a two party state is exactly this, people conflate political parties with the institutions themselves, which is not great.

[keybored]

The Duopoly: You can pick Pepsi or Coke

You: I want water

The Duopoly: That’s impossible and un-American

[Maxatar]

The DNC and RNC are legally bound to follow rules established both by state law and by Congress/legislation. Yes they are private institutions but they can not set arbitrary rules.

[toast0]

The rules set by state law and Congress for candidate selection offer a pretty wide berth in terms of methodology for selecting which candidates appear on the ballot. There's no (federal) Constitutional mandate for primaries; procedures for how a state selects its presidential electors are up to the legislators of each state.

[pessimizer]

When it comes to their primaries, the only obligation that they have to is to follow their own rules, and the only people that are allowed to hold them to that obligation are they themselves, and maybe their vendors.

They aren't even obligated to donors who donated under the assumption that there's some promise or legal requirement that their primaries be fair. That case was dismissed, and resulted in the quote from DNC lawyer Bruce Spiva:

"You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions."

[amai]

Political parties should be democratic institutions. Who else should be democratic if not the parties? In many countries candidates are rejected from elections if parties cannot show that they were selected in a fair, transparent and democratic process. The USA has much to learn from the rest of the democratic world.

[DesiLurker]

Well the one that calls itself Democratic party should, you'd expect, at-least make an attempt to be.

[pessimizer]

But, currently, Republican primaries are largely democratic and Democratic primaries are at best a marketing period in which their membership makes no binding decisions. Compromise with the tea party forced Republican primaries to democratize, which eventually ended with the party being forced to accept Trump as a candidate against every wish of party insiders. Democrats have "superdelegates," and a ton of other ways to fix the primary, and have gone to court to establish legally that they have no obligation to run it fairly or honestly.

The same sort of democratization happened to British Labour under Ed Miliband, which culminated with the election of Corbyn as leader. In order to fix the problem, they had to purge and expel anyone from party membership that had any sort of firm value system.

Democrats don't have that option in the US, because in the US, people aren't members of parties; they're people who have registered to vote in that party's primary, or people known to have supported that party in the past. US corporate parties have employees, not members. Getting a portion of the public to participate in their primary is the closest thing they have to rallying the membership, and the way that both parties have written election law makes it difficult for them to change anything, or to prevent anyone from voting in them.

[kristjansson]

Not to be too conspiratorial, but these gripes about the primaries seem too uniform and unipolar to be entirely genuine.