But the proposal didn’t take hold. And the problem both parties face today, Cowan says, is that such a late entry by a candidate is no longer possible in most places. Competition between states has front-loaded the primaries, with states eager to hold their primaries ever earlier so as to play more of a role in whittling the field of candidates. Partly as a result, the filing deadline for most states closed in 2023 or, for a few, it closes in early 2024. And that means if something should happen to President Joe Biden’s candidacy, given questions about his age, or to Trump’s likely nomination, considering his legal jeopardy, it may well be too late for other candidates to pose a threat.

But the profound upheaval to the electoral system that Cowan and other liberal idealists set in motion also created another unanticipated downside, one that has grown increasingly darker: The gradual radicalization of party primaries and therefore of the whole system.

As American politics became more polarized, moderate voters increasingly skipped the primary voting. That, in turn, meant that there would be an ever-greater gap between the activist wings of each party and their rank-and-file, that politics would grow less concerned with finding consensus and more concerned with policing ideological purity, and that the views of establishment party leaders would come to mean less and less over time. It also meant that as campaigning became more expensive, deep-pocketed amateurs with no political experience, like Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy, the current GOP candidate, could come from nowhere to jump into the game.

A recent
Brookings Institution study concluded that primary elections “have become the pre-eminent vehicle for activists seeking to affect their party’s meaning,” with the Republicans moving ever further right and the Democrats to the left.
In a 2021 podcast, “Of the People,” public radio reporter Ben Bradford placed the blame for today’s radicalization of politics squarely on the 1968 reforms. “Candidates are incentivized to win a majority of voters in low-turnout elections,” Bradford said. “In an environment where the parties have sorted ideologically, that means choosing polarizing, galvanizing issues — often cultural ‘wedge’ issues — that will turn out the most voters, often on a party’s wings.”

“The rise of party activists is the theme of the last 20 years,” says Byron Shafer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who wrote the definitive history of the 1968 reforms in
Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics. “And a lot of it does come from what happened back then.” After the changes of 1968 even mainstream candidates, like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, gradually felt forced to appeal to the wings of their parties, especially on cultural issues. Shafer points out that in the pre-1968 political world, activists or extremists occasionally broke through the party structure — for example, Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee — but “now we’re in a world in which activists are the structure.”

This trend has also turned into something of a vicious circle. Partly as a result of the radicalization of the two major parties, the number of voters who don’t identify with either party has increased by almost 20 percent since 2004, according to Gallup, which found
in a poll after the 2022 midterms that since 2009, independent identification has “reached levels not seen before.”

The trend has only grown. In mid-2023
Gallup polling showed that a record 49 percent of Americans identified themselves as independent of the two major parties — about the same as the two parties’ affiliations put together. Gallup analyst Jeff Jones told Axios that this growing trend, especially among young voters, reflects “the disillusionment with the political system, U.S. institutions and the two parties, which are seen as ineffectual, too political and too extreme.” Overall, 57.6 million people, or just 28.5 percent of estimated eligible voters, voted in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries in 2016.

The phenomenon of fringe party rule also helps explain how Trump could so easily reinvent the old GOP agenda in one fell swoop. In 2016, after Trump secured the Republican nomination, then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
declared that Trump was “not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.” As Mark Leibovich wrote sardonically in
his 2022 book, Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission: “This turned out to be 100 percent true, except for Trump’s ‘basic philosophy’ on foreign policy, free trade, rule of law, deficits, tolerance for dictators, government activism, family values, government restraint, privacy, optimistic temperament, and every virtuous quality the Republican Party ever aspired to in its best, pre-Trump days.”

Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that a
Gallup poll published on Jan. 5 shows that just 28 percent of U.S. adults — a record low — are satisfied with the way democracy is working in the country. That is a drop from the previous bottom; 35 percent surveyed shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters trying to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump.

And perhaps it is equally unsurprising that Biden, out on the 2024 stump, is now declaring that “democracy is on the ballot.”