Are primaries the best way to pick presidential nominees?

More than a year away from the 2020 election, the Democratic presidential primary is in full swing with some two dozen candidates and a lengthy schedule of debates. The Republican primary has yet to reach the critical mass it needs to exist in any meaningful sense, but maybe that will change.

I confess I am not enthused about the whole thing. Perhaps it's because writing about politics for a living means I have greater than average exposure to the process, but the entire dog and pony show is seriously wearing on me already. Is this really the best option for picking presidential candidates?

It isn't what we've always done. And though I don't think I actually want to return to party bosses haggling over nominees in smoke-filled rooms, neither do I think that would be so much obviously worse than the current situation as it may initially seem. Let's start with a little history.

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For more than a century, U.S. presidential candidates were not chosen by the public. In the early days of partisan organizing, when a recently dead George Washington was spinning in his grave at the rise of American factionalism, nominees were selected by caucuses of each party's members of Congress.

That system broke down not, as we moderns might imagine, because of a desire to democratize. Parties shifted to a nominating convention format because of concerns about upsetting the balance of power by having legislators over-involved in choosing the executive; because some upstart parties did not have any members of Congress to caucus; and because the election of 1824 was one of the hottest of all hot messes in American electoral history, requiring the House to pick a winner after no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College.

Even then, however, it would be decades before primaries looked as they do today: Nominating conventions were not informed by the result of a popular vote until the early 20th century and not in any sense bound by such votes until even later. As recently as 1968, the Democratic Party chose a nominee who did not run in the primaries. Since then, Democrats have regularly tweaked their process which, to the frustration of supporters of outsider candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016, arguably remains closer to the old party boss system than does the Republican method.

The advantages of popular selection (or something close to it) of the major parties' presidential nominees are manifest: The candidate chosen is, in theory, the best representative of a major subset of the voting population, which makes the general election more likely to offer viable contenders whom many people can support. Decentralizing selection power helps prevent nomination decisions based on corrupt influence and access. (The smoke-filled room is not a positive image, after all.) This democratic approach gives candidates disfavored by the party establishment at least some shot at victory, and as someone who occasionally entertains vain hopes of such a candidate winning a major party nod, I value that chance.

And yet I can't help but notice that Donald Trump would not be president if we didn't have primaries.

Remember the early days of the 2016 election, before Trump's resonance with the GOP base became clear? He was not taken seriously by the Republican establishment, regarded as something between a joke and a vile embarrassment. If the party bosses were picking, I can't imagine they would have picked Trump. But then, maybe he wouldn't have run at all, as a boss-run Democratic primary in 2008 might well have nominated former first lady and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton over newcomer Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Such alternate histories are always debatable, of course, as is their desirability. I'm not saying a President Hillary Clinton in 2008 or GOP nominee Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio in 2016 is obviously better than what we got — I couldn't support any of them, myself. Still, the prospect of a 2019 where the cruel absurdities of @realdonaldtrump don't drive the news cycle admittedly appeals.

Also appealing is the way a primary-free nomination could shorten the presidential election cycle, something every reasonable person who is not themselves a candidate surely desires. If contenders did not need to introduce themselves to the public before the general race, the whole nominating process might be completed during the spring or summer of the election year.

Is the loss of popular control worth it to avoid an 18+ month campaign for a 48-month presidential term? It's at least tempting, and the cynic in me wants to note that popular control over the presidential selection is already more muted than we might realize by a host of institutional factors, from super-delegates and arcane party rules to the whole structure of our elections, with its overwhelming discouragement of third-party options.

Realistically, I don't expect the nominating process to move away from the voters. It didn't evolve to this point because of democratization, but any shift back toward the bosses (or even a hybrid or third way option, like something prioritizing the input of party activists or local organizers) would be widely denounced as undemocratic. Yet perhaps imagining the implications of such a change is worthwhile anyway, for it exposes all sorts of interesting questions about the functionality of our presidential selection process as it works now, about the inevitability of the candidates of the recent past, and about the distance between major party leadership and the public they claim to serve.