Amelia: before the 70s, candidates were picked at the convention, it's not a crazy idea.
Bob: I guess you need a little history lesson, Amelia, to explain why it is a preposterously awful idea, especially in today's politics.
In March of '68, LBJ dropped out due to opposition to the Vietnam war, after winning early primaries and being well on his way to the nomination. His VP Hubert Humphrey threw his hat into the ring and got the nod at the convention without winning a single primary. There are a number of things that contributed to his loss to Richard Nixon by less than 1%, Eugene McCarthy's relentless antiwar campaign, Nixon's team secretly scuttling the Paris Peace Talks until after the vote, but the reason Humphrey himself credits is that he simply had no time to raise enough money in a federal campaign account to run in the general election. The magic pony Dem governors everybody mentions, Newsom, Shapiro, Whitmer, are statewide politicians who all have ZERO money right now in a federal campaign account.
Beyond that, the '68 Chicago convention was an epic disaster for the Democrats, with Mayor Richard Daley's machine Democrats violently battling the antiwar contingent inside and outside the convention hall. That's why the DNC changed the rules in '72 to require nominees to have to go through the primary process.
Flash forward to 2016. Remember the Berniecrats crying that the primaries were rigged for Hillary? Well they weren't, but there's no question the Democratic establishment would have preferred Hillary to the self-identified Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders. And that's fine and normal and to be expected, provided of course that there was no cheating, which there wasn't. It's just that the establishment lined up behind Hillary and the Berniecrats thought this was so unfair that many of them sat out the general election or voted for Jill Stein. They were utterly furious.
So what do you think would happen today, in the age of superempowered Internet influencers with everybody blasting out their oh-so-special opinions on social media and the sense of entitlement that creates, if the DNC selected their champion to beat Trump behind closed doors and foisted them on the Democratic rank-and-file?
Chaos, disillusionment and protest votes is what would happen, Amelia.
(h/t Lawrence O’Donnell)