| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. If you're not in the mood for impeachment hearings today, I suggest turning your attention to an important recent article by Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja, in which they argue against primary elections and for more party control over nominations. I'll start by saying that on the big questions I'm totally with them. Nominations should be controlled — or at least heavily influenced — by political parties. Democracy depends on it. So does the election of people who are good at the job of presidenting. I agree that primary elections are fundamentally flawed. I agree with their critique of voters. And I agree that the vetting of candidates by those with strong incentives to find good ones is far preferable to vetting only by the mass media and voters. I also agree, finally, that the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 is best understood as a failure of the process, and a failure of the Republican Party to prevent an outsider from taking its presidential nomination — the most important thing that U.S. political parties have. All that said, I think Rauch and La Raja are too pessimistic about the current process. Yes, it failed in 2016. And they're right that the system doesn't guarantee that party influence will be successful or that it will eliminate candidates who are poorly suited to the office. But there's no plausible system that could make such a guarantee. That's true anywhere (see the U.K. Labour and Conservative parties right now), but it's especially true in the U.S. because of the highly unusual nature of American parties, which are sprawling, decentralized, non-hierarchical messes made up of both formal organizations and informal networks. Rauch and La Raja are fans of strengthening the formal organizations, on the theory that they're less likely to be ideological and more likely to be pragmatic and responsive to the healthy incentive of winning elections. But it's not as simple as that. Formal organizations have weaknesses of their own. Very strong party organizations may develop extensive bureaucracies, for instance, thus leading to very complicated incentives. As it is, there are complaints that the national party committees are more concerned with protecting their budgets and control than with winning elections. But a more important problem is that there's no reason to think state and local organizations are central to the overall party — see, for example, Seth Masket's excellent study of party networks in California. And making them crucial players in nomination politics risks results that are unrepresentative of the party as a whole. Even worse, it risks factional takeovers. A lot rests on whether Trump was a fluke or a sign that the process has broken down. I'm basically on Team Fluke, because I think changes in the nominating process in 2016 made it harder than usual for party actors to work together to ensure an acceptable candidate won. So far in 2020, and despite the persistence of some candidates who would've been eliminated by elite vetting, it looks likely that the Democrats will wind up with someone most party actors are comfortable with. It's also true that parties do best with stable rules and norms. That said, there's still a long way to go in 2020. Among the serious contenders at this point, according to the polls, are at least one factional candidate (Bernie Sanders), and another without conventional experience (Pete Buttigieg). It's even still possible that Tom Steyer or Andrew Yang, candidates with hardly any party support and no relevant experience, could win the nomination or come close. (Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg Opinion parent company Bloomberg L.P., is also seeking the nomination.) My guess is that we'll look back on the 2020 nomination and see that party actors had been intensely vetting candidates all along and that the process worked just as Rauch and La Raja would want it to — just not exactly in the way that they envision. But as with so many things about this process, we'll know more in a few months. 1. Robert Farley on what slashing U.S. defense spending would actually look like. 2. Elle Pfeffer at the Monkey Cage on Boris Johnson and crime. 3. Steve Kornacki on the history of front-runners after Iowa and New Hampshire. 4. Harry Enten on Trump's approval rating and re-election. 5. David Byler on Kamala Harris's exit. 6. Ross Douthat on Democrats and expertise. Interesting. I suspect that he's overestimating how many Democratic voters (and, perhaps more important, party actors) are fed up with the wonks, but it's an interesting way of thinking about the candidates. 7. Susan Simpson takes a careful look at the House Republican claims about the Ukraine scandal. 8. And David Leonhardt suggests eight articles of impeachment. I probably wouldn't include the hush-money incident during the 2016 campaign, and I'd also group them differently, with his fourth, seventh and eighth articles all part of one for "abuse of power." But, yes, these are all violations of Trump's oath of office. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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