Presidential primaries are less democratic than American Idol

Presidential primaries are not democracy in action. Presidential primaries are opinion polling. They are convoluted beauty pageants for ugly people.

Remember that the Republican and Democratic parties are not the government, they are private institutions (which are actually conglomerations of a bunch of state or local institutions). They can listen to the voters or not.  Their rules can be whatever they want them to be.  In 1920, for example, only convention delegates that could demonstrate the ownership of a car could vote at convention, delivering the nomination to Calvin Coolidge and his coalition of wealthy supporters and Detroit auto workers.  OK, I just made that up, but the rules committees could have approved that, and any other rule they wanted.  “Only candidates name Steph Curry can be on the ballot?  No problem, we can do that.”

On the Democratic side, while delegates are awarded roughly proportionally to the vote, 15% of the total convention votes go to 719 party members as an insurance policy in a close battle.  That’s similar to letting your children walk through a department store by themselves — except for that funny looking kid leash you’ve attached to them.

You the voter are that kid.  The party is the disembodied hand.

The Republican side is far more complex, with each state having different rules, and different number of human votes adding up to delegates (from 810 votes per delegate in Maine to 95,601 votes per delegate in Illinois.  That’s pretty far from one person, one vote).  There’s enough room for unintended consequences that the rules designed to help insiders like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are helping outsiders like Trump.  It’s like Cupid’s Arrow killing its target, or like this:

Squashed by the party’s own rules.

American Idol, despite some controversy, is basically far more democratic.  Sure, they get the occasional ballot stuffing argument or hanging chad like recount.  But it is still a paragon not a pariah of voting rules compared to presidential primaries.  You call the number that corresponds to your candidate, and they record the vote.  If you are super passionate, you can even call more than once and they will record up to 10 votes per voter (that may sound undemocratic, but it is an alternative voting format similar to weighted or ranked choice voting, and some vote scholars think it’s a good idea).  You can’t even write a multi-million dollar check to your favorite finalist.  How novel.

So basically, this would be an upgrade for the American Primary Voter: