Washington
Washington
BY JERRY WATSON

A change for Illinois Democratic delegates

THE CHICAGO machine's ability to control presidential primaries in Illinois appears to have passed into history along with the Daley Era. A decision by the 1976 Democratic National Convention (DNC) to kill off the type of primary conducted in Illinois is currently being given form by a party commission, and key members of the commission, including its chairman, see almost no likelihood of a stay of execution.

The doomed system, which is employed in 13 states, including six big ones, has variations but works this way in Illinois: Convention delegates, running uncommitted or committed to a specific presidential candidate, are elected in congressional districts. The result, in a multi-candidate field, can be that a candidate with only a plurality — say 40 per cent — of the vote can win all of the delegates in a district (or, by extension, most or all of the delegates in a state).

But the spirit of reform in the Democratic party increasingly has found such a result repugnant. The rallying cry is proportional representation or "PR," which, except in states like Illinois, was interpreted in 1976 to mean that delegates should be divided among candidates in proportion to the vote they received in a district. Thus, if a candidate got 30 per cent of the vote, he was to get 30 per cent of the delegates. (However, to qualify for any delegates, he or she had to get at least 15 percent of the vote.)

The Illinois-style primary was tolerated in 1976, but disparagingly dubbed a "loophole primary," because there was no guarantee of PR. For the machine, the system worked well. Daley cowed most candidates into not running delegate candidates in Chicago, and he harvested a bumper crop of delegates technically committed to Adlai Stevenson III but in fact controlled by Daley.

The idea was to maximize Daley's and the machine's clout at the convention.

At the 1976 convention, the Daley camp thought it had assurances from the Carter high command that Carter would back a move to overturn a Rules Committee vote outlawing the loop-hole. But, alas, the support never materialized. And ironically, because he could not afford to be a controversial figure at a third straight convention, Daley vetoed recommendations that he fight to save the loophole. So the convention directed its (Winograd) Commission on Presidential Nomination and Party Structure to write a rule banning the loophole. It has begun to do that, among other things, and only an unlikely two-thirds vote by the Democratic National Committee would erase the ban.

State parties will hold hearings this fall on a draft report (covering a number of subjects) produced by the commission in September. A final report, perhaps modified as a result of the hearings, will be written in December. The DNC will act on it in the spring.

At this writing, the commission was considering allowing states to elect delegates in tiny single-member districts. This would preserve a modified loophole primary, because a presidential candidate still could win a large proportion of a state's delegates with a much smaller proportion of its vote. However, various commission leaders said they expected this type of primary to be banned, too.

If the ban goes into effect, Illinois Democrats will be required to take "positive provable steps" to change state law and create a new primary system.

The party could seek a caucus system of choosing delegates, but seems unlikely to do so. Or it can opt for having presidential candidates run in congressional districts, winning delegates in proportion to their vote.

If the party makes a sincere effort to change the law and fails because of Republican opposition, the national party could decide to let Illinois keep its loophole system in 1980. It also could elect to put aside Illinois law and decree a system for choosing delegates that complies with national party rules. The national party's power to take such a drastic step was confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case resulting from the challenge to Daley's Chicago delegation in 1972. Daley had been quoted as saying, "to hell" with party rules, but the court said the party rules overrode state law.

Supporters of the loophole primary maintain it is a fair, democratic way to winnow out also-rans and select a delegation. Voters get a chance to ballot for the delegates who must adopt a platform and may have to choose a compromise candidate at the convention. They do not get that chance if the candidate picks the delegates after the primary, when he learns what proportion of the vote he has received. The issue can be debated for hours, but the firm course of the party makes such debate a mere exercise for "proportional representation" has all but won the day.

There are other battles the machine can perhaps fight more profitably: The national party favors a "closed" primary where voters must register party affiliation in advance. Such a system narrows participation and enables a strong organization such as the Chicago Democratic machine to better control the results.

But the loophole primary, which gave a Boss Daley the power to shoo candidates away from the primary and take control of a robot-like delegation, appears finished, gone with the winds of reform that have blown, now soft, now hard, since 1964. 

October 1977 / Illinois Issues /35


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