our ailing parties

Our Ailing Parties Voter participation would increase if “key men” in the structure were subject to direct election,

By RICHARD S. CHILDS*

NE criterion for a model state 0 party structure is that i t must routinely secure effective and dis- criminating scrutiny and selection of its leadership by a substantial percentage of the party members.

I n a previous article (see the REVIEW, June 1970, page 298), it was cited that only one of the 100 major state parties (two in each state) achieves anything like that. The percentage of members participating in selections of intraparty functionaries is actually on the order of 3 percent. This inattention is not to be blamed on the voters and described as apathy. The attention of the voters cannot be ordained or compelled; it must be attracted. A setup that fails to attract is faulty and ineffectual, and like any failing mechanism must be replaced with one that will work. If attention of a substantial percentage of the voters can only be attracted by important and dramatic issues, the structure must be revised to accord with that fact. You can’t change the voters but you can change the structure.

These 100 parties do not submit their important officers to direct elec-

* Mr. Childs is honorary chairman of the National Municipal League’s Executive Committee and a full-time volunteer on the staff. He is author of Civic V k t o f k ~ - The Story of an Unfinished Revolution (1952), The First 50 Years of the Council- Manager Plan of MuniciPal Government (1965), and many articles on citizen action and state and local government.

tion by the party members. The county chairmen (or in large cities the corresponding city leaders or district leaders) are usually the key men, but practically everywhere they are sheltered behind indirect elections. This makes corrective insurgency too difficult to be worth at- tempting and stifles internal activism.

To replace the trivia and ano- nymity of the current process we must substitute importance and drama. Hardly anywhere do the key men face the party voters as com- peting candidates in primaries. Each key man is probably the best known party officer in his county; he, his character, his influence are common talk. Put him in his party eminence out on the firing line for renewal or otherwise. Put him out there con- spicuously and alone. Endow him boldly with authority to appoint the precinct committeemen whom the party voters now decline to turn out to elect. Keep him also (as he often is) an ex officio member of the state committee (with multiple votes par- allel to the latest party turnout of his party constituency). Make him shine with sufficient power and importance to attract widespread, dis- criminating scrutiny by a substantial proportion of party voters.

The constituencies of the key men must be large enough in party membership to impart importance and conspicuousness to the post, and to

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keep the state committee down to a workable size for open debate, pub- lishable roll calls and actual management.

In such a system the county chairman, who now gets quiet, routine re-election by his precinct committeemen, will be the single party officer on the primary ballot. When- ever he has a challenger, it can be a dramatic encounter with 20 percent, 30 percent, maybe more of the great inactive membership of the party “participating” by making an informed choice.

The voters who won’t come out to shoot rabbits will, we argue, come out to shoot bear.

* * * Such a breakthrough, now fully

tested, is in effect in the parties in New York City. The change began in 1949 with the formation in the Ninth Assembly District of the Lex- ington Democratic Club. The district included a large, luxury residential area, and the new organization was launched in frank rivalry to the existing party apparatus. It faced not only the resistance of the party regulars and the habitual unaware- ness of factional issues by 80 or 90 percent of the party voters but also the difficulties of the battle terrain.

The logical targets for corrective insurgency, the powerful district leaders, were elected indirectly by a great array of county committeemen who were themselves elected in groups by the enrolled Democrats in each of the election districts (voting precincts). In order to displace a district leader it was necessary to elect a ticket of county committeemen in each of the $0 to 80 election

districts. This meant running 60 to 80 different little campaigns for precinct tickets of about 10 county committeemen each. The primary ballots presented a different contest for 10 (more or less, commensurate with the party vote) such committeemen in each election district.

The candidates supported by the Lexington Club could not be distinguished from the regulars on the primary ballots or voting machines, and the voters in each district who were ready to favor the club candidates had to be laboriously identified and reached with meticulous instruc- tions applicable to the unidentified list at the bottom of the ballot.

The Lexington Democratic Club, despite these difficulties, elected over 200 county committeemen a t its first attempt in 1949 but not enough, among the 600 or more that manned the two halves of its constituency, to elect either of the club’s candidates for the two district leaderships.

In 1951 the club tried and failed again, although the hostile high command of the party structure stimulated the club’s vigor by gerry- mandering the area to its disadvan- tage.

In 1953, however, the club suc- ceeded in installing its candidates for district leader and co-leader of the whole newly-reunited Assembly district. This made i t the rfregular” club with official responsibility for conducting the party campaign against the Republicans.

Simplification of the procedure came in 1955, providing direct election of the district leaders. It so helped to alter the odds that the leader and ca-leader were re-dected

19701 OUR AILING PARTIES 367

without opposition in that year. The club took leadership, advanced candidates for public office and had to be reckoned with in the party opera- tions in larger areas.

By 1960 seven other reform clubs in Manhattan had learned from the Lexington example and had captured district leaderships. In 1970 there are 39 such clubs and such contests bring out abundant, informed participation in the primaries.

* * * In the Democratic party of Man-

hattan (New York County) the terrain offers now a party government that the people can and do change- democracy with a small “d.” Condi- tions that once fortified Tammany Hall are gone beyond recall. Dis- trict leaders now face every two years the possible appearance of a rival and submission of the challenge to whatever percentage of the inactive party voters may turn out “with blood in their eye” at the next party primary. This, to be sure, is a widely variable percentage, as low as 10 or 15 but occasionally much higher in response to larger and more emotional circumstances. But the new terrain has been proved feasible for victories by corrective insurgency, and victories by “Reform Demo- crats” are a new phenomenon in the long and lurid history of the dominant party.

Capture of the district leadership carries with it power to select and direct the election district captains (precinct committeemen).

In Chicago (but not downstate Illinois) they have the same system -direct election in the primaries of the 50 ward leaders in each party.

Ward leaders appoint their precinct committeemen and have multiple votes in accord with the party strength in their respective wards when meeting with others in joint committees, including the city committee and the Cook County committee.

This is perhaps a poor time for citing anything from Chicago to support a theorem. Mayor Daley in his fourth four-year term rides high, retaining his ward leader position and the city leadership of his party. Democracy with a small “d”? A government the people can change? Here survives one of the last bossisms of a long municipal history-until Daley’s machine joins those of Curry, Pendergast, Crump and Croker. But it seems less impregnable than it would be if the key men, the ward leaders, did not have to face periodic polls of the party members. Contests in the 1960s have been infrequent; three in 1964 and four in 1968 in the dominant Democratic party, and five in 1960, 13 in 1964 and 12 in 1968 in the Republican party. In 1969, two in the Democratic party developed and were successful, out of four contests for off-year vacan- cies. The quaint background will suffer an earthquake sooner or later and, I conjecture, reformers will some day realize that even in Chicago this exposure to direct election of the key men is best for amateur corrective insurgency.

Identifying in other jurisdictions the real managers of the parties in order to advance them from the back rooms to direct exposure to the party voters in primaries involves finding


the realities among diverse titles in different states.

The commonest title of the key men we are looking for is certainly county chairman. But there is Dela- ware with only three counties, New- castle (Wilmington) , 307,000; Kent, 66,000 and Sussex 73,000. And Con- necticut has no county governments at all. There are states in the west with many counties of less than 1,000 population, and others like New York and Illinois where some counties are metropolises requiring subdivision for this purpose. There are California counties of great area-one of them is bigger than New Jersey-and some with metropolitan populations where all local elections, including county elections, are nonpartisan by state law. This includes Los Angeles with nearly 7 million population where, it is reported, the parties have no positions identifiable and ready- made as our key men. And in Massa- chusetts the counties are phantoms listed for abolition and the state committeemen, with trivia1 powers now, are chosen from the 40 state senatorial districts. County chairmen are elective in the 258 Texas counties, but except in the principal cities are inconspicuous; the state committeemen are elected from senatorial districts.

Such local actualities must guide the identification of the single elective party key man position, which it is proposed to advance to the firing line. The urban states will, of course, demand different setups in the cities than in rural counties. Cities, counties, state senatorial districts, lower house districts and metropolitan wards may all be used as constitu-

encies for key men in a single state if tradition and practicality make that the least innovative arrangement.

Key man constituencies need not be of equal population or of equal party membership if, as in the new New York statewide primaries, these officers sit and cast appropriately weighted votes in the state committee. Often it will be reasonable for the two parties in a state to be diverse in structure; the Republicans in southern states can have key man constituencies that do not coincide with those of the Democrats, and areas that are heavily one-party may need several such constituencies in places where their rivals can be ade- quately served by one. The limita- tion would be to a reasonable geo- graphical and demographical area for the administration by each key man of his local party duties.

* * * In some states or areas, as in Los

Angeles, there may be no party officers of importance comparable to typical county chairmen or the New York City district leaders. They may have to be created and built up until they deserve wide voter attention.

In many of the parties the key men are already enhanced in importance by being ex officio members of the state committee.

In New York City, many district leaders, being also the local members of the strengthened state committee under the state’s 1967 primary, are further enhanced in importance by the fact that their committee is em- powered to “designate” party candidates for the statewide offices. Their counterparts upstate have other local titles but are also directly elected

19701 OUR AILING PARTIES 3 69

and enjoy similar local prominence. Together they constitute state committees of 345 Democrats and 380 Republicans. These committees replace the state nominating conventions of the past (leaving them now in only two states, Indiana and Delaware). They “designate” candidates subject to challenge and refer- ence of contests to the party voters a t a primary.

Each member casts in the committee the number of votes that the latest candidate of the party for governor won in his constituency. An aspirant who gets 25 percent of the committee vote is privileged to require that a party primary be held to settle the issue. Other aspirants for a statewide office may also take their claim to a primary by a peti- tion procedure. If the committee designee for an office is not contested, no primary is held for that office and he goes to the November election with his party’s label. The statewide officers thus nominated in New York are governor and lieu- tenant governor paired, U. S. senator, attorney general, controller and, in rotation, members of the court of appeals. The certificate of the committee qualifies its designees for a place on the primary ballot without, however, any indication thereon of the committee’s support.

This idea, adapted now in the 1967 New York direct primary law, orig- inated with Charles Evans Hughes when he was governor in 1907-1910. He was not successful in getting it adopted and revived it when he became president of the National Mu- nicipal League in 1920. Subsequently (1951) it became as it is now the

Model Direct Primary Law of the league. It was Hughes’ idea that parties were necessary (as of course they are in large constituencies), that they were entitled to have responsible management and that management, as distinguished from great conventions, was entitled to manage subject to opportunity of the membership to correct or oust it. Hence the ide& of making the management reveal its proposed ticket with time left for dissidents to field a contest.

State committee designations, made in an anxiety to cater accepta- bly and avert contest, will often be uncontested as shown in the Repub- lican party in New York in 1969 and 1970 and in the procedures of Con- necticut and the other states that have the pre-primary party designating principle.

* * * I n Connecticut, which has no

county governments, the town committees of each party designate a party ticket, including their own successors, long enough before the deadline to permit the mounting of contests. About 60 such local contests are freely attempted in a typical year and are frequently successful. At the statewide level, however, the designations are made not by a committee but by the less observable processes of a convention. If an aspirant gets 20 percent or more of a convention poll he is privileged to carry the issue to a primary, although from the initiation of the system in 1956 to 1969 there were no such appeals.

In five other states pre-primary conventions have been designating candidates subject to appeal to pri-


maries for some time. In Colorado the system applies to the long list of 11 statewide offices-two justices of the supreme court, governor, lieu- tenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, auditor, attorney general and three regents of the university. In the years 1958-1968, 86 nominees were designated, and 14 were chal- lenged, five successfully.

Idaho used convention designation in 1964 without challenge in either party.

Massachusetts aspirants to statewide offices also have been convention- designated, subject to challenge, since 1938. In the biennial elections of 1954-1968, inclusive, 96 candidates were designated, 33 were contested and seven were successful. In one case the party primary displaced the convention’s designee for governor.

New Mexico, beginning in 1949, enabled pre-primary conventions to designate candidates for the statewide offices. Sometimes these conventions named more than one candidate as acceptable. The procedure was tried, repealed, tried again and in 1967 repealed. Conventions in 1952, 1954 and 1964 together designated candidates for 82 offices of which 28 were contested, 18 successfully.

In Pennsylvania the party state committees meet and propose state tickets before the primaries and their slates commonly prevail whether contested or not; not always, however. In the 1966 and 1970 primaries an insurgent defeated the Democratic state committee’s endorsee for the gubernatorial nomination.

Rhode Island’s procedure begins with candidates filing for considera- tion. The state committees then des-

ignate their preferences from that list subject to challenge and appeal to the party members a t a primary by candidates thus rejected. There were no such challenges in 1954 or 1956 in either party. In 1958, 1960 and 1962 there were altogether 10 Democratic contests for 15 statewide offices, and U. S. senators in 1960 and 1964. One, for U. S. senator, was successful. In 1962 all five Re- publican designees were contested unsuccessfully. I n 1966 the Demo- cratic ticket (six) was opposed successfully in one case and the Republican ticket was opposed in two cases, one successfully. In 1968 there were 14 designations and one unsuccessful challenge. Total contests in both parties were 19 out of 94 designees of which only three were successful.

* * * Leadership develops somewhere in

every state party when it nominates a state ticket. In California the party management must not sponsor aspirants but must wait until outside candidates and committees have or- ganized and battled to a finish in a party primary. In many other states the outcome is the result of tussles between self-anointed candidates for primary votes, the party officers tak- ing no official lead. In the pre-primary convention states, leadership subject to contest in subsequent primaries is in the hands of ephemeral conventions wherein the effective party officers may be deeply obscured. In Rhode Island, in local elections in Connecticut, and in statewide elections under the 1967 New York law, the responsible governing body of

(Continued on page 391)

19701 NEWS I N REVIEW 391

RANDALL COUNTY, TEXAS, commissiion- ers have voted to make a $4,300 contribu- tion to the drug control program started by Amarillo.

* * * With the expectation that 90 percent

of the cost would be assumed by the federal farm and home administration, the PORTAGE COUNTY, WISCONSIN, board of supervisors has adopted a resolution to initiate a study of countywide water and sewer development.

* * * The ST. CROIX COUNTY, WISCONSIN,

board has approved a plan, to be supported by a .25 mill property tax, which will provide a county Iibrary system.

OUR AILING PARTIES (Continued from page 370)

the party, a committee, is clearly identified and is expected to manage, designate and face the music.

An ideal setup would and could provide in each county or district a single state committeeman or c:om- mitteewoman (suggested as a generic uniform title for all key men) as, the only party officer elected in primaries by the party members with the duty of initiating all the procedures, subject to challenge on occasion. Instead of dividing the party functions among many persons beyond scrutiny, the idea is to build up the real 1ea.ders of the party, to make them prominent and important-as prominent and important, let us say, as congres.; c men (the Gallup Poll found recently that 5 1 percent of the voters know the name of their congressman). If that percentage knew their party leaders and could vote for them directly, they would find themselves from time to time casting informed opinioiu in

primaries and exercising control without “going into politics.’’

That would constitute the vitality and participation we are looking for in place of obscurity and stagnation.

A SENSIBLE PLAN (Continued from page 374)

objective measurements of all the costs and benefits involved, so that when we have to build we can be reasonably sure we’re doing it in the best possible place.

Q. How long wozcld a national inventory take?

A . We’re hoping next year to start a pilot inventory of 50,000 square miles here in the Delaware River basin. With 15 scientists and 30 students using the electronic equip ment that we’ve already developed, our estimate is that this will take three years. My guess for a national survey would be the same length of time, but until we’ve done our pilot proj- ect, I wouldn’t want to guess how many people would be required.

Q. Do you jeel that your tech- nique, by enabling us to make more socially eflcient use of our resources, might eliminate the need for population control?

A . Nothing eliminates that need, or the need to stop poisoning our air and water. My method is a tool to help make the country more livable, but to adopt even the most successful such tool while ignoring the over- whelming menaces of population growth and the poisoning and de- struction of the environment would be precisely like what they’re doing on the flood plains-building houses in the path of the deluge.

our ailing parties

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