34 United States The EconomistJuly 27th 2019
21Democratic side will be winnowed down to
a more manageable number. Yet although
candidates have already started dropping
out, their reasons for doing so do not sug-
gest a process that is working well.
Eric Swalwell, a congressman, suspend-
ed his campaign because he was spending
so much money on fundraising to pull in
enough individual donors to qualify for the
debates. In one month, “we spent $110,000-
ish to get $100,000. So it’s like you’re like
spending money to get less money just to
meet a threshold,” Mr Swalwell said after
dropping out of the race. He may be no
great loss. But if Democrats lose Mr Bullock
or Michael Bennet, an impressive centrist
senator from Colorado, in the next round of
winnowing, they may find they lose candi-
dates with a good chance of beating Mr
Trump months before the first actual prim-
ary takes place, in February 2020.
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Insti-
tution, a think-tank, and author of “Prim-
ary Politics: Everything You Need to Know
about How America Nominates Its Presi-
dential Candidates”, believes this system
makes it far too easy for parties to be hi-
jacked by outsiders. “No other political
process in the modern world”, Ms Kamarck
writes, “has so abandoned this critical vet-
ting function of the political party in the
nominating process.” A system of peer re-
view by elected officeholders before candi-
dates were put before primary voters
would, she argues, work better.
What would this look like in practice?
Ms Kamarck presents three possible sol-
utions. First, both parties could increase
the role that superdelegates—convention
delegates who can vote whichever way they
please—play in the process. Currently Re-
publicans do not use superdelegates in
their selection process, and Democrats
have recently cut their power. Second, par-
ties might consider a national convention
to endorse a limited number of candidates
before the choice between them is present-
ed to the voters. The third option would be
to let a party’s members of Congress pre-sent a slate of endorsed candidates to prim-
ary voters. Julia Azari, an associate profes-
sor of political science at Marquette
University, says that the ideal system prob-
ably lies somewhere between the brokered
conventions of the 1960s and the nearly
fully democratised system of today.
It is too late for reformers to affect the
system that will be used in 2020, but it is
not unimaginable that they may do so later
on. Both parties already enact restrictions
on who may run, and even the constitution
includes some anti-democratic require-
ments, such as the need to be 35 years or
older to run for president. Nor is it abnor-
mal for the parties to exercise a heavy hand
in their nomination processes. In the 2008
primary, for example, the Democratic Na-
tional Committee voted to strip Michigan
and Florida of all their pledged delegates
after they scheduled their primary elec-
tions earlier in the year than originally
agreed. The rules committees of the two
parties still have the power and flexibility
to reform a system that is failing to work.
They should use it. 7Too many cooksSources: “The Making of the Presidential
Candidates 2012”, by W. Mayer and
J. Bernstein; news reports*Including those that
dropped out before
the first primariesUnited States, number of candidates
in presidential primary*0510152025301952 60 68 76 84 92 2000 08 20Democrats
RepublicansF
or two years, Robert Mueller has
loomed over American politics, nearly
unseen and largely silent. Mr Mueller, who
was appointed to investigate Russian in-
terference in the 2016 presidential elec-
tion, after President Donald Trump sacked
James Comey, the then-fbi director, stayed
silent throughout the 22-month inquiry. In
March, after indicting 34 people, executing500 searches and issuing 2,800 subpoenas,
his office submitted a 448-page report
summarising its findings and then closed.
Mr Mueller gave brief public remarks after
the report’s release, stating that it would be
inappropriate for him to testify before Con-
gress because “the report is my testimony”.
Despite that admonishment, on July 24th,
Mr Mueller was hauled before two commit-
tees of the House of Representatives,
which is controlled by the Democrats, and
made to testify for six hours. He did not de-
viate much from his pledge.
Democrats were hoping Mr Mueller
would recount the president’s misdeeds in
clear, shareable sound bites that would in-
terest the voting public again after the mut-
ed reception of the report. Although close
associates of the president were charged
with crimes over the course of the investi-
gation, the report did not turn up proof of a
conspiracy with Russia. The second half of
the report detailed repeated efforts by the
president to derail the investigation, in-
cluding by trying to sack Jeff Sessions, the
attorney-general at the time, so that Mr
Mueller could be reined in. Because of an
existing legal opinion stating that a sitting
president cannot be indicted, the report
did not reach a judgment on whether Mr
Trump should be prosecuted for obstruc-
tion of justice. The final sentence of the re-
port notes that “while this report does not
conclude that the president committed a
crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
A hefty minority of the party hankering
after impeachment, against the wishes of
the Democratic leadership, had hoped to
bolster their stalled case. They repeated the
most damning excerpts of the report—es-
pecially one in which the president
slumped in chair and said “Oh my God.
This is terrible. This is the end of my presi-
dency”—hoping that the former special
counsel would chime in and help them
along. But Mr Mueller, who stammered,
asked for questions to be repeated and an-WASHINGTON, DC
Impeachment looks even less likely
now than it did before his testimonyThe Russia investigationThus spake
Mueller
I refer you to what is written in the report