Presidential candidates know that the “press” (that is, print and electronic media) is often a decisive force in American electoral politics and spend much of their time trying to manipulate it for their own benefit. To politicians it is really a personal political matter, and the tendency when they speak about it is to both personalize and over-generalize the decisiveness of its influence. Thus, in 1976, Ted Kennedy stated flatly, “The press made Carter,” whereas Jimmy Carter repeatedly complained of the press's crucial role in “unmaking him” as president.

To political scientists the impact of the press, particularly television, is of primarily “systematic” importance rather than of personal interest—except of course, for those who would like to spend some years in Washington as advisor-practitioners. Scholars and students know that television has changed things a lot, but we are not exactly sure how much and what kind of responsibility the press as a whole bears for the substantial institutional changes that have occurred in the last two decades. Let me offer briefly some of the conclusions I have come to after researching, thinking, and writing for some years on this topic. I shall look, first, at what is new about television news compared to the pre-electronic era and, second, how the most significant of these mass communications changes have affected our electoral institutions and the presidency itself.

A catalog of the general sources of change in the politics of presidential selection, with applications to 1984, might suggest that this politics has become more changeable—and hence more unpredictable—in the modern era, the period marked off by the extensive procedural reforms enacted after 1968. Yet an initial comparison of the period from 1968 through 1980 with the period from 1848 through 1860, from 1876 to 1888, or from 1912 through 1924—to pick several periods of a dozen years each—does not suggest that the ultimate decisions on nomination and even election in the modern era are any more (or less) unpredictable than in certain earlier periods.

What such a comparison does suggest is that the sources of unpredictability in presidential nomination and election contests are different than they once were. Once, the difficulty in calculating presidential outcomes was rooted in the fact that nominations were often realized inside national party conventions, where the bloc structure of the official party and the rules for balloting itself made all sorts of outcomes—many of them unforeseen—politically possible. Now, the comparable difficulty in calculating presidential outcomes is rooted in the process of delegate selection, where volatile public preferences and levels of participation, the constantly changing formal course of nomination politics, and the interaction among the candidates, the issues, and the other participants continue to make projection (equally) difficult.

The political science profession is very far indeed from having pronounced its last word on the subject of the reforms of the presidential nomination process which have so dramatically transformed American elections and the party system. The current wave of reform began over a decade ago, and, more or less on schedule, political scientists have now begun regularly to report findings that suggest that they have been incorporating questions about the consequences of these reforms into their research.

Many observers quite rightly have noted that central to debate about party reform among politicians and commentators have been questions of legitimacy that reflect varying conceptions of democratic theory. In this brief essay, I will consider a few of these questions further and speculate about the respects in which the work of political scientists might assist in resolving them.

Perhaps the earliest questions arose over the changes that reform seemed to induce in the sorts of people taking part in the national party conventions. Questions arose as to their “representativeness”—and especially in light of two successive Democratic national conventions— 1968 and 1972—at which there were many challenges to the right of delegates to be present. In 1968 the complaints centered on the propriety of seating delegates selected earlier than the election year and selected through processes dominated by state party leaders rather than by the insurgent forces of protest over the war in Vietnam. These complaints were largely ineffective in influencing the outcome of the 1968 nomination, but their impact on subsequent events was substantial. They formed the basis upon which the Democratic party undertook to examine the delegate selection process in its McGovern-Fraser Commission of 1969, and people associated with these complaints staffed the Commission.