Of parties, presidential politics, and the quadrennial orgy

Imagine that a convention of clowns met to design an amusing, crazy-quilt schedule to nominate presidential candidates. The resulting system would probably look much as ours does today. The incoherent organization of primaries and caucuses, and the candidates’ mad-dash attempts to move around the map, would be funny if the goal — electing the leader of the free world — weren’t so serious.

Few want to go back to the bad old days when party “bosses” chose presidential candidates in smoke-filled rooms. Primaries and caucuses are now fundamental to our conception of popular democracy in presidential selection. But there is such a thing as ineffective popular democracy, especially when it is hopelessly disorganized.

A good-size piece of the problem can be labeled “Iowa and New Hampshire.” These two states seem to assume that the Constitution guarantees that they should go first, but a close reading of the text finds no such clause. The New Hampshire lead-off primary was initiated in 1920, and it has arguably been very influential since 1952, when it played a role in both the decision of President Truman not to seek reelection and Dwight Eisenhower’s successful quest for the GOP nomination. New Hampshire reprised its 1952 incumbent-toppling when Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy came within a few percentage points of President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primary, leading in part to LBJ’s decision shortly thereafter not to seek another term.  The Iowa caucus has only played a role since 1968, and its true national debut came in 1972, when George McGovern scored well there on his way to a surprise, ill-fated Democratic nomination. Just four years later, the Iowa caucus propelled a little-known former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, to the Democratic nomination and the presidency, assisted also by Carter’s subsequent narrow victory in New Hampshire. In both the Hawkeye and Granite states, Carter received less than 30% of the votes, but in a crowded Democratic field of candidates, this low percentage was enough to prevail.

Why should two small, heavily white, disproportionately rural states have a hammerlock on the making of the president? The truth is that Iowa and New Hampshire have a franchise they are determined to keep at all costs. New Hampshire even has a law that requires its secretary of state to do whatever is necessary to keep its primary first.

Without a constitutional requirement, there is simply no solution to a situation that deteriorates every four years. Try as they might, the national party committees cannot orchestrate a fix. In the end, they can only punish a recalcitrant Iowa and New Hampshire in minor ways, by cutting the size of their convention delegations or giving the delegates bad hotels and seating at the party conclaves. The candidates who campaign in states holding contests earlier than permitted can also be penalized by having the national parties deny them any delegates they may win in those states. But a handful of lost delegates is trivial compared to the whirlwind of positive publicity secured by victory in early states. These penalties, light as they are, may not even materialize. By the time of the national conventions, the parties are unlikely to want to alienate swing states such as Iowa and New Hampshire as the general election campaign begins. Nor will the parties want to aggravate their candidates by penalizing them at a time when they are attempting to fully unify their forces at the convention.

Congress has some power to intervene in the state-based, party-centered nominating process, yet the federal legislature would be highly unlikely to step into that briar patch. Presidential nominating reform has never been a priority for Congress, in part because of the traditional rights of the states and the parties to organize this sector of politics. It is highly doubtful that Congress will generate the will to clean up the nomination mess anytime soon. For one thing, the senators and representatives from Iowa and New Hampshire would be willing to do anything to stop congressionally sponsored reform, quite possibly with assistance from colleagues who would see their own presidential ambitions at stake. A senator who becomes a hero in Iowa and New Hampshire for saving the caucus and primary would be halfway to a presidential nomination! And realizing this, most or all of the senators with presidential aspirations would jump to back the Iowa/New Hampshire status quo. (It’s a rare ambitious senator who doesn’t get up in the morning and see a president in the mirror.)

Thus, the only possible, comprehensive answer is likely to be a constitutional one. In the 21st century we the people need to do what the founders didn’t even perceive as necessary in their pre-party, pre-popular-democracy age. The guiding principle should be one that all citizens, in theory, can readily embrace: Every state and region ought to have essentially an equal chance, over time, to influence the outcome of the parties’ presidential nominations, and thus the selection of presidents. We are one nation, and simple equity demands that all of us, regardless of our state of residence, should have the opportunity at some point to influence the selection of presidential nominees by filling one of the precious, early voting slots.

The nominating process ought also to be moved back into the four months leading up to the party conventions. Presidential politics now takes fully one fourth of a president’s four-year term — whether he is running for reelection or not — and with front-loading accelerating, it soon may consume even more of it. Not only is this bad for the presidency as an institution, but it causes the electorate to tire of the never-ending political campaign. It should be possible to create a system that flows from the first primaries and caucuses beginning in March or April directly into August party conventions, and then into the Labor Day kickoff for the autumn general election. Not only is this not rocket science; it doesn’t even qualify as elementary mathematics. It is easy, if the will and the means are present. The electorate must supply the will, and the Constitution should outline the means.

There have been dozens of proposals to revamp the primary scheme, though none has been offered as a constitutional fix. Clearly, that is both because the Constitution currently ignores the politics of the system almost entirely and because a constitutional insertion — virtually written in stone — would have to be as fair and foolproof as possible. The following plan, the product of much discussion and thought, is proposed in that spirit.

The regional lottery plan for the new Constitution

The Congress should be constitutionally required to designate four regions of contiguous states (with contiguity waived for Alaska and Hawaii, and any other stray territories that may one day become states). The regions would surely look something like the ones in Map 1, with natural boundaries denoting the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West.  All of the states in each region would hold their nominating events in successive months, beginning in April and ending in July. The two major-party conventions would follow in August. This schedule, all by itself, would cut a couple of months off the too-long process currently prevailing in presidential years.

Map 1: National regions for hypothetical primary system

The presidential nominating system would still be state-based, so each state party would be free to choose any date it wished within the region’s month, and further, it would be free, as currently, to choose either the primary or the caucus method of selecting delegates. Of course, all the states in a region might try to front-load their contests on the first possible day, but that actually would make little sense, except perhaps for the first region in the series. Even in that first region, a state might have more influence coming later in the month, perhaps standing alone on a particular day — a situation that would encourage presidential candidates to spend time and money in the stand-alone state. After all, the post-primary headlines would belong solely to the candidate who won that stand-alone state. If there were 10 states on a particular day, the headlines as well as the candidates’ time and money would be split 10 ways. Note, too, that the regional system would concentrate the candidates within a single region for a month. They would have a better opportunity to get to know the problems and peoples of the region and its states, and the geographic proximity of the campaigning would cut down on the wear and tear on the candidates, to some degree anyway.

But how would the order of the regions be determined? In many cases, there would still be a bonus in going first. The establishment of a U.S. Election Lottery, to be held on New Year’s Day of the presidential election year, would yield fairness and also add an element of drama to the beginning of a presidential year. One of the nation’s famous lottery machines with the popup ping-pong balls would finally find a purpose beyond bestowing untold riches on people who can’t handle it. Four color-coded balls, each representing one of the regions, would be loaded into the machine, and in short order — the length of a 10-second lottery TV drawing — the regional primary order would be set. Since none of the candidates would know in advance where the political season would begin, part of the permanent presidential campaign would be dismantled. After all, even a very wealthy candidate wouldn’t waste the money necessary to organize all 50 states in advance, and the four-year-long homesteading in Iowa and New Hampshire would be gone forever (a note from the perspective of 2020 — OK, maybe Michael Bloomberg would or could). Much more important, the “law” of averages would give every state and each region, over time, the precious opportunity of going first. Clearly, there is no guarantee that a particularly lucky region would not be repeatedly chosen to start the process, but the equal-access principle is key to the fairness in this plan. These new constitutional provisions would “repeal” the nonexistent constitutional right to go first that Iowa and New Hampshire have appropriated for themselves.

Another benefit of the Regional Lottery Plan would be the reasonable spacing between contests, allowing candidates potentially to recover from setbacks in one region and to regroup prior to the next set of contests. The news media and voters in each region would certainly be on the same page on this critical matter, demanding their fair share of attention.

One additional facet should be added to the plan in order to enhance its effectiveness. The best argument made for Iowa and New Hampshire is that their small populations allow for highly personalized campaigning. The candidates are able to meet individual citizens for lengthy and sometimes repeated conversations about the issues, and these voters are able to size up potential presidents at eye level, without the candidates having the protection of the usual large retinue of image makers and staffers. In that sense, lightly populated states can serve as a useful screening committee for the rest of us. The United States is a continental country, after all, and each large region is still enormous in size.

There is a way to combine the advantages of small-state scrutiny of candidates with the inherent fairness of round-robin regional primaries. We can achieve the best of both worlds by adding a second lottery on Jan. 1. The names of all states with four or fewer members in the U.S. House of Representatives (at present, 21 states) would be placed in a lottery machine, and two balls would be selected. This plan excludes the island territories, which are far-flung and don’t influence the November presidential outcome because they have no electoral votes. The District of Columbia should be included, however, and this would mean 22 jurisdictions would have a chance to be selected in the second lottery. With a larger population than Wyoming, and with three electoral votes assigned in November, the District’s citizens — currently and shamefully without full voting representation in either house of Congress — would no doubt relish and deserve this opportunity, should Lady Luck in the lottery deliver it to them.

The two small states (or D.C.) with relatively low populations would lead off the regional contests, and they would be held on or about March 15 — at least two full weeks before the initial contests would begin in the first region. These two states would be free to stage a primary or a caucus, and the candidates would be free to participate in none, one, or both. As a practical matter, most candidates would choose both, unless a prominent candidate hailed from one of the lead-off states. Traditionally, a home candidate gets deference and is sometimes unopposed for the state’s delegate votes. Of course, the other party can still have a full-fledged fight in the state’s primary or caucus.

No doubt, all the candidates would rush to these lead-off states right after the lottery on January 1, and they would have two and a half months to campaign. But there would be no permanent, four-year campaigns there, and personalized, one-to-one campaigning would be a large part of the effort. In other words, the two states would offer all the advantages of Iowa and New Hampshire, without having to always be Iowa and New Hampshire. Additionally, the guarantee of at least two weeks of decompression after the leadoff states make their choices gives voters in the first region a chance to evaluate the results and reevaluate the winners — and possibly to make different choices.

In sum, the Regional Lottery Plan would achieve many good things simultaneously for a selection process that currently makes little sense. The election campaign would be shortened and focused, a relief to both candidates and voters. All regions and states would get an opportunity to have a substantial impact on the making of the presidential nominees. A rational, nicely arranged schedule would build excitement and citizen involvement in every corner of the country, without sacrificing the personalized scrutiny of candidates for which Iowa and New Hampshire have become justly known. And all of this can only come about by putting the politics of nominations and elections in its proper place — the United States Constitution.

Tomorrow marks the start of the brave new world of President Donald J. Trump. But today marks the end of the Obama-to-Trump transition. They, and we, survived the interregnum, more or less — and it was not guaranteed and is worth celebrating.

Truly, has there ever been as dramatic a contrast between outgoing and incoming chief executives as Barack Obama and Donald Trump? Actually, yes: the refined John Quincy Adams and the rough-hewn populist Andrew Jackson despised each other. Jackson believed he had been cheated out of the White House by a corrupt bargain during 1824’s House of Representatives “run-off” that installed Adams as president. Jackson spent four years making sure that wrong was righted on Inauguration Day 1829.

Other jarring transfers of power surely include the ones between the timid, indecisive James Buchanan, doing nothing while seven states left the Union, and Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union in a bloody civil war (1861); the scholarly, erudite Woodrow Wilson and the tawdry, careless Warren G. Harding (1921); Herbert Hoover, a great humanitarian but hapless president, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gave people hope and sustenance through the depths of the Great Depression (1933); and Jimmy Carter, tortured by a bad economy and the Iranian hostage crisis that persisted to the moment of Ronald Reagan’s oath-taking in 1981.

The transition gives Americans sufficient time to adjust to the change they themselves have wrought. Over 70 days of transition exist between the November election and the Jan. 20 inauguration, and before the 20th Amendment first applied in 1936, the transition was close to double that time span, from November until March 4. The transition was cut in half precisely because the Hoover-to-FDR handoff was fraught with peril and left the nation rudderless during a calamitous period.

Much worse than any scheduled transition were the nine immediate White House transformations caused by natural death, assassination, or resignation. Popular and governmental adjustment had to be instantaneous, and the elevated vice presidents usually had personal styles that contrasted with their late predecessors, as well as some different substantive policies. Theodore Roosevelt was about as dissimilar from William McKinley as two presidents from the same party could be, for instance.

History could only partially prepare us for the aftermath of November 2016’s earthquake. In the hours and days following Donald Trump’s shocking upset, many observers wondered if a crisis would develop right away. How could Trump and Obama, fierce personal enemies and ideological polar opposites, ever manage a transition? After all, Trump had spent five years as the most prominent leader of the spurious, outrageous birther movement that sought to delegitimize Obama’s presidency by claiming he was not a natural-born American. In return, Obama had made a thin-skinned Trump the butt of jokes and barbs for years. And no one worked harder than Obama to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.

It couldn’t have been easy for either man to be civil to the other after the election. But they were and continued to be, for the most part, to their substantial credit. Our country is still deeply divided, much more so than usual, yet imagine how much worse it could have been had No. 44 and No. 45 feuded day after day. Their businesslike tone made cooperation possible, or at least less of a chore, for their staffs. We can’t expect political enemies to join hands and sing kumbaya; we can expect presidents to act in the national interest.

For those who think Obama and Trump’s minimal level of comity is assured, a few historical reminders are in order. John Adams was so contemptuous of Thomas Jefferson that he left the White House in the middle of the night on March 4, 1801, refusing to attend the inaugural ceremony of the man who had vanquished him. (What great correspondents and friends they became in later years, however; for politicians and the rest of us, reconciliation is possible until the tomb beckons.)

Democrat Samuel Tilden, who handily won the reported popular vote in 1876, was urged to lead an army into Washington to stop the “corrupt” handover of power by Congress to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes; luckily, Tilden declined, partly because the election was tainted on both sides. Nonetheless, Tilden and his backers insisted they had been robbed. President Hayes, thereafter called “His Fraudulency,” never had widespread respect or support in his single term.

As already mentioned, the long Hoover-FDR transition was a disaster that inflicted additional pain (such as loads of failed banks) on a suffering nation. President Hoover attempted to get Roosevelt to join him in a reform program during their four-month transition, but FDR refused — believing the reforms inadequate and the ideas designed to tie his own hands. So bitter were these rivals that they said not a word during the 1933 inaugural drive from the White House to the Capitol. Hoover and Roosevelt never reconciled, and they hurled insults at one another with regularity.

We have been more fortunate in modern times. Harry Truman didn’t much care for Dwight Eisenhower — at least the Republican political version of him — but Truman ordered up the first real transition plan, and it benefited Ike significantly. In turn, while Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were not at all close, and the outgoing president was deeply disappointed that his vice president, Richard Nixon, had lost to JFK, pre-inaugural relations between Ike and JFK were correct and cooperative.

When Nixon finally won the White House in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson was angry that Nixon had helped deep-six his Vietnam peace talks. Yet the transition went fairly smoothly and the image of unity was projected. Naturally, behind the scenes, they were less flattering about one another. For example, LBJ reveled in describing the tour of the private residence he gave Nixon — always adding that in eight years as vice president, Nixon had never once been invited by Eisenhower to see the living quarters in the White House.

Even after a close, losing campaign that greatly disappointed him, President Gerald Ford was determined to organize the most extensive and professional transition ever — and he did, as Jimmy Carter noted at the outset of his 1977 inaugural address and again as a speaker at Ford’s funeral decades later.

If any president has exceeded Ford’s labors, it might be George W. Bush. The Obamas have frequently mentioned the extraordinary efforts of President and Mrs. Bush to make their move into the White House a smooth one. Moreover, Bush and Obama did what Hoover and FDR did not — coordinate on some urgent responses to the near-collapse of the U.S. financial superstructure in 2008.

No doubt the precedent set by Bush influenced Obama’s actions in recent weeks. The outgoing president knew he owed the incoming one every assistance, whatever their past conflicts. And while Trump has launched broadsides at many an Obama program and ally, the president-elect of late has stayed generally respectful of the outgoing president himself.

In these hyper-partisan times, one is grateful for any hint of civility. Under difficult circumstances, both Obama and Trump have listened to the better angels of their nature. It may be too much to hope that this initial precedent will apply to the many battles on the horizon, but to the extent it can, we’ll all be better off.

As Obama and Trump complete the final act of the transition at noon tomorrow, they would do well to recall the Latin phrase, “Sic transit gloria mundi,” best translated as “worldly glories are fleeting.”

Editor’s Note: For a look back at some Crystal Ball commentary on past inaugurals, please see here for 2009 and here for 2013.

It’s already clear that the very strange political year of 2016 is bleeding over into the New Year. How could it be otherwise? President-elect Donald Trump, loved and hated by about equal numbers of Americans, continues to ignore or break with convention in a wide variety of areas. Just as the normal rules didn’t apply to him in the campaign, they may not apply to him in office either.

Let’s review what we’ve got as we head toward Inauguration Day:

• Trump won the election with narrow but convincing margins in six states won by Barack Obama twice (Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, along with bigger victories in Iowa and Ohio). This kind of swing-state sweep cannot be called a fluke or an aberration, especially given Hillary Clinton’s towering financial and organizational advantages.
• At the same time, Trump lost the popular vote by close to 2.9 million, the largest number ever by a candidate who captured the all-important Electoral College. Losing nationally by 2.1 percentage points will hinder Trump in various ways during his term; at the least, it provides a stinging rebuke for Trump’s opponents whenever he takes unpopular actions. (While the popular vote is not how the United States picks presidents, the Trump camp’s argument that they could easily have generated the needed votes in non-swing states if they had wanted is a weak one. The Clinton campaign could have produced millions more votes, too, had there been some payoff for doing so.)
• While almost nothing Trump says or does reduces the fervency of his millions of core backers, the president-elect’s controversial tweets and braggadocio have won him few new supporters. He has not reached out to reunify a badly divided country in any sustained way. As a result, he has the lowest ratings of any modern president-elect during the transition period. Essentially, he is about at the 46% level he garnered on Election Day, while other recent presidents-elect have soared in the run-up to their swearing-in. For instance, Gallup found in mid-December that just 48% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling his presidential transition, compared to 75% for Barack Obama, 65% for George W. Bush, and 67% for Bill Clinton.
• Meanwhile, the outgoing president has sustained and even expanded his approval, which now stands at around 55% in the polling averages. In RealClearPolitics’ average, Obama is at about the same place as he was in December 2012 just after winning reelection, and in HuffPost Pollster’s aggregate his approval has not reached such heights since his initial honeymoon period in early 2009. The remarkable thing is that Obama was unable to transfer enough of this popularity to Clinton, his chosen successor, despite the dramatic improvement in the devastated economy he inherited in January 2009. Consider the 1988 election as a comparison: According to Gallup, Ronald Reagan had a 51% approval rating in late October 1988, but the incumbent was a key factor — maybe the key factor — in Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 53%-46% victory over Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

So it would appear that Obama is up and Trump is down, the outgoing president triumphant and the incoming president facing a difficult future. And this picture is thoroughly misleading.

Barack Obama’s legacy, at least a great deal of it, was in effect wiped out with the election of a GOP president and Congress. Over the next weeks, months, and years, Obama’s executive orders on a wide variety of subjects will be revoked, his signature Obamacare program may be dismantled substantially, and many other domestic regulations and international initiatives from the Obama Administration will be reversed or neutralized.

Obama and his team are hoping for less change than Trump has advertised, but they may be fooling themselves. For eight years the GOP leadership has been carefully planning for the day when total control of the federal government would enable them to undo the Obama agenda, and they are well on their way to achieving a great deal of this quickly.

It is true that Democrats theoretically have enough votes in the Senate — 48 when including the two independents who caucus with them — to block measures that require 60 votes. However, there are more filibuster-proof items than ever due to rule changes made by the Democrats in 2013 when they still controlled the upper chamber, meaning that Cabinet-level appointees and most federal judicial nominees (but not for the Supreme Court) only need 51 votes to be confirmed. In addition, 10 Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2018 in states carried by Trump, and some of the most endangered ones cannot be counted on to vote with their caucus in all circumstances. Maybe a few Republicans will defect in the other direction from time to time, as early declarations about the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election indicate.

The Democratic Party, which fully expected to control the White House and the Senate going forward, is still in shock from the stunning November outcome — and in its worst governing position nationally and in the states in modern times. You have to reach back to the 1920s to find a comparable period of Democratic impotence.

As we have pointed out many times, President Obama’s tenure has been a disaster for his party at other levels. Over his two terms, Democrats have set the post-World War II record for losses by the White House party. Taking governorships, state legislators, and members of the U.S. House and Senate together, Democrats have suffered a net loss of over 1,000 posts from Obama’s initial victory in 2008 to the loss of Hillary Clinton under his watch. The Democratic bench is almost empty in many critical states, another reason why political analysts have a hard time coming up with an expansive list of potential presidential nominees for 2020. Given the potential for GOP gains in the Senate come 2018, Democratic hopes for fresh blood may depend heavily on their performance in big-state gubernatorial elections at the midterm.

All 435 House seats will also be contested in 22 months, but despite the Republicans’ substantial 241-194 majority in the new Congress, Crystal Ball Managing Editor Kyle Kondik found that only 23 House Republicans occupy seats won by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race (it is possible that this number will change slightly but not substantially). Compare that to the 2010 midterm, when Democrats were defending 48 seats won by John McCain in 2008 — major Democratic overexposure that significantly contributed to the GOP’s massive 63-seat net gain. Democrats also hold 12 districts won by Trump in 2016, including a few he won by double digits. Republicans may mount credible challenges in many of these seats. Simply put, the Republicans do not appear to be all that overextended in the House at the starting gate of the 2018 campaign, although much will depend on the national mood heading into the midterm.

It has been said a million times that “elections have consequences,” and this truism applies even to very close elections for the White House when the popular-vote winner is vanquished. George W. Bush had an eventful two-term presidency despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000. And everything we’ve seen so far suggests that Donald Trump will engineer a term full of drama and significance, whether the next four (or eight) years’ substance is your dream or your nightmare.

If you doubt it, think back over the Obama-to-Trump transition. While Obama and Trump have been mostly gracious to one another (with prominent exceptions), the two presidents have been akin to dueling suns in the sky. For the most part, this is unprecedented, and the “one president at a time” convention has been shattered. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt sharply disagreed during their 1932-1933 transition, but the differences were not played out in the headlines. In other party turnovers in the past hundred years-plus, disputes were muted in the interregnum, with the incoming president deferring to the outgoing chief on policy while the president-elect concentrated on picking a Cabinet and making quiet preparations to govern. This description applies in large part to the transitions between Eisenhower-JFK (1960), LBJ-Nixon (1968), Ford-Carter (1976), Carter-Reagan (1980), Bush 41-Clinton (1992), Clinton-Bush 43 (2000), and Bush 43-Obama (2008).

Not so in 2016-2017, as Trump tweeted and telephoned his way through delicate matters of all varieties. In response, Obama was often passive, perhaps believing (as mentioned earlier) that by minimizing conflict he could keep communication lines open and preserve some measure of influence on the future of his programs.

In just a couple of weeks, the old sun will be completely eclipsed by the new one. Democrats will be essentially on their own, in a greatly diminished role. Their future will depend on President Trump’s performance, and no one really knows what will happen. It’s easy to spin scenarios whereby Trump becomes popular and successful, and equally easy to see how and why he might crash and burn. The point is that Democrats have no representative in the cockpit of the plane; on most days in most ways, they are now merely passengers on a long flight whose direction and destination are determined solely by the Republicans at the controls.

Whatever else the Trump quadrennium may turn out to be, it is unlikely to be boring. (Now there’s an understatement!) Millions of Americans are living in ecstatic anticipation, while millions of others are experiencing a dreadful foreboding. There’s only one thing we know for sure with the coming of this unique presidency and its peripatetic Oval Office occupant: There will be almost no quiet days.

There are a lot of ways to tell you’re getting old, and one is the realization that you have watched every presidential general election debate in U.S. history.

The saving grace is that the history is short, with TV debates only beginning in 1960. And truth be told, I was just eight years old when Kennedy faced Nixon, and my parents told me I fell asleep during all four debates. But I’ve studied the tapes since and interviewed some of the key individuals involved in those precedent-setting encounters.

The dates were similar in 1960 to the ones chosen for 2016:

Of course, all the early debates were presidential. The vice presidential candidates were barely mentioned in the exchanges, and Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge certainly didn’t have their own forum. This innovation was added in 1976 — after two more vice presidents, LBJ and Gerald Ford, had succeeded to the presidency, underlining the secondary office’s importance.

Almost certainly, the 2016 debates will have a huge audience, just as in 1960. Remarkably, the total estimated audiences for Kennedy and Nixon ranged from 66.4 million in the first debate to 60.4 million at the last one. In November 1960, 68.8 million people cast a ballot, so it’s reasonable to suggest that almost every voter had seen some part of the debates.

Everyone knows the story of how JFK’s tanned, handsome appearance (with full TV make-up) helped him “win” the critical first debate, and how Nixon’s refusal of makeup was a critical miscalculation. This is actually greatly oversimplified. Nixon was sick, had been in the hospital, and had lost a good deal of weight prior to the debate.

Nixon had unwisely disregarded the advice of President Eisenhower, who thought he was foolish to give JFK so much free exposure via the debates. Equally damaging, Nixon had agreed to tackle domestic issues first, saving his forte, foreign policy, for last. Then as now, Democrats usually have the advantage when talk turns to Social Security and the like. Nixon’s decision was based on an incorrect belief by his staff that the audiences would grow over four debates, and that the last debate, being closest to the election, would have the most impact. Suppose the first debate had been about international affairs. Nixon had traveled the world for eight years, and had even debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow. If Nixon had achieved a convincing edge in the first debate with Kennedy, would he have won the squeaker in November? This “what if” can never be answered.

The 1960 Great Debates were sober, polite, issue-oriented sessions. There were stunningly few barbs, little disrespect shown to one another by the contenders, and hardly any punchy sound bites designed to dominate the headlines. The office of president was taken very seriously in the Cold War era, and gimmicks and hijinks would have been frowned upon. The novelty of these debates and the newness of the television era made both sides cautious.

This year, we’ll be lucky to go five minutes without a memorized bite or nasty attack. Donald Trump will likely launch many broadsides — and some will be highly personal. Hillary Clinton is no shrinking violet and will fire back with the ammunition her team has been accumulating for months.

Trump and Clinton have been practicing their moves with advisers and managers for many weeks. Surprisingly, Nixon did little preparation and believed his career itself was all the training he’d need. Kennedy took the debates very seriously, realizing he’d have to do well as a relative unknown compared to a two-term vice president. Yet even JFK’s practicing was mainly limited to studying arguments and quotes on note cards, just like college debaters of the time did.

In the pages of history there has probably been too much emphasis on Kennedy’s professional makeup and Nixon’s wan appearance. Yes, it mattered, but polls at the time showed Nixon recovering from the setback and effectively tying the contest toward the end thanks to President Eisenhower’s campaigning on his behalf in the final days.

For those of you who would like a bit more detail on the Nixon-Kennedy debates, you might enjoy the following excerpt from my book, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. There were no precedents, and the campaigns were flying blind. Notice how many miscalculations there were. Expectation and reality are usually very different.

Even with over a half-century of experience to draw upon, the well-laid plans of one or both candidates may be upended in 2016, too. That’s one of the reasons we watch.

Excerpt from The Kennedy Half Century on the 1960 debates:

Everyone is rightly focused on the 34 Senate seats already on the ballot this fall. But there is actually a 35th, the Class I Senate seat currently held by Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.

Of the four major-party candidates for national office, only one contender holds a position whose term will not be finished by Inauguration Day, and thus a vacancy will need to be filled if he is promoted. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was elected in 2012 and therefore Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) will appoint a temporary senator should Kaine become vice president. The appointee will serve until a senator is elected in November 2017 in a special contest to be held simultaneously with the election for Virginia’s next governor.^[1]

The GOP won every White House race in the Old Dominion from 1968 to 2004, but all that changed in 2008 and 2012 with Barack Obama’s victories. The Crystal Ball now rates Virginia as Likely Democratic this November, and Kaine is certainly a major reason why. Yet the Democrats’ dominance is reduced in non-presidential election cycles, which see lower turnouts, especially among minority voters. The potential Senate vacancy may be a godsend to Democratic hopes, however.

Behind the scenes, some senior Democratic officeholders believe that if McAuliffe chooses an African-American appointee to replace Kaine, minority turnout will be much higher in 2017. While circumstances can always change, the Crystal Ball has learned that McAuliffe agrees, and at least tentatively intends to make some history and appoint the first African American ever to represent Virginia in the Senate. (Let’s remember that the appointment is McAuliffe’s alone, and he can change his mind until the minute he makes an announcement.) While there are several qualified minority candidates, and McAuliffe might pick any of them, the frontrunner is obviously Rep. Bobby Scott (D, VA-3). Scott has a lengthy, successful political career stretching back to 1977, when he was elected to the House of Delegates. After a stint in the Senate of Virginia, in 1992 Scott became the first African American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia since the Reconstruction era. Scott has never been seriously opposed since.

Scott’s tenure in the Senate, should it occur, would be a busy one. He would have less than a year before the election — and that election would only be good for one more year, until the regularly scheduled 2018 contest for a six-year term. Should there be primary challengers, Scott or any appointee would have to face four election days in two years. This will be an exhausting and expensive undertaking.

Nevertheless, it is to the Democrats’ advantage to have an African-American senator on the ballot to boost their gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who is white. At this early point, Republicans are more unsettled and have several aspirants for governor, and no doubt they will have multiple contenders for Senate as well — especially because incumbent U.S. House members will not have to give up their seats to run for the upper chamber in an odd-year special election.

The only other time Virginia has ever had a simultaneous election for governor and senator was in 1933 — when Virginia was heavily conservative and Southern Democratic, and both Democratic nominees (George C. Peery for governor and Harry F. Byrd, Sr. for senator) won easily. Today’s very different band of Virginia Democrats hopes that history will repeat itself.

Footnote

1. At first, some election specialists thought McAuliffe’s appointment could last a full two years, until November 2018. This is the case in many other states. But Virginia is one of five states with off-off-year general elections, and the applicable statute clearly places the special election simultaneously with the gubernatorial contest. There is also a 1933 Virginia precedent for precisely this kind of twin Senate-Governor election.