Why Does America Have Primaries? (Ep. 54)

It's Primary season in America, with all the chaos, expense, and bombast that phenomenon has come to represent in our national political life. The major media now give more attention to off-year primary elections in half a dozen battleground states than they gave to the quadrennial general national election a generation ago. As if they were interpreting the Tarot or reading tea leaves or deconstructing a Papal Encyclical, the myriad pundits hover near the cameras and microphones to pontificate about slight distinctions between in-person day of the election voting, in-person prior to the election voting, mail-in ballots, overseas ballots, military ballots, counts, recounts, automatic recounts, audits, hand recounts, and all the attendant election lawsuits. With primary season underway, our resident historian examines the origins and role of primary elections in American politics and the intensification of American partisanship.