Presidential Nomination Process

Report Outline
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Overview

When Sen. John F. Kennedy set his sights on Pennsylvania's 81 delegates to the 1960 Democratic convention, there was not much question about how to win their support for the presidential nomination. Rather than setting up an organization in the state, publicly campaigning there or wooing political activists far and wide, Kennedy and his advisers simply went to the state's powerful Democratic leader, Gov. David L. Lawrence. After intensive personal negotiations, Kennedy won Lawrence's backing, and the legendary political boss delivered 64 convention votes to the Massachusetts senator.

Those were the old days of American politics, and they are long gone. While Kennedy sought support among big-city Democratic machines and union locals, today's candidates for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are haunting the living rooms of a few thousand party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire, the sites of the crucial first contests in the nomination struggle. While Kennedy wooed backers with the customary blandishments of politics—federal patronage and support for other candidates on the party ticket—the 1988 hopefuls are lining up allies by voicing interest-group concerns and striking up personal relationships with activists in the two early states, where the rewards of victory are modest in terms of delegates but immense in terms of momentum and publicity.

The jump from Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel, where Kennedy cemented his alliance with Lawrence, to the coffee klatches of Iowa symbolizes the dramatic changes that have reshaped the nation's system for selecting major-party presidential nominees in the past two decades. In short, the nomination system has been opened up in a way that Lawrence and others of his time might scarcely have imagined. It has been transformed from a process in which a handful of leaders exercised a dominant voice, if not outright control, over their party's nomination choice, to one in which thousands of party workers and millions of primary voters decide the outcome.