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>> thank you for coming. >> fortunes above $50 million. you make it that big, pitch in two cents so everyone else has a chance to make it. >> a lot of it is old-fashioned retail politics. we are doing the policy releases. people here want to get to know you, what you are about. happy to talk to you. >> she is freaking out. >> as his vice president, it is my great honor to add his name to the new hampshire republican primary ballot today because we need america to give us four more years. [cheers and applause] ♪

>> dr. lara brown, that is a glimpse of the 2020 primary process. a process that this year attracted more than 20 democrats. last time around, 17 gop candidates vying for the nomination. you have spent your academic career trying to understand and explain the american electoral process. when you try to explain where we are today to people and how this process works, how do you explain it? dr. brown: the thing you have to start with first is that competitiveness drives a lot of candidates. one of the things that is so interesting, when we really understand why there are so many candidates in the democratic primary field, why there are so many republicans in the 2016 field, it was because the presidency was seen as being up for grabs in both instances. in 2016, it was an open seat.

there was this belief that the republicans could win that seat from the democrats. so many republicans jumped in. when we look at 2020, you see president trump is something of an embattled incumbent. that also sparks candidates in the opposition party to jump in and try to vie for the presidency. host: what should we know about the kind of people who threw their hats into the ring these days? dr. brown: the interesting part is since 1976, our candidates have had more and more individuals who have claimed they are outsiders. first, they began as these outside washington politicians. governors like jimmy carter, ronald reagan, and bill clinton.

now what we have seen in the last few cycles are individuals like president trump saying, i'm not even from the political system at all. if you look at candidate tom steyer's ads, he's running on the same line of donald trump. that he is a washington outsider and a businessman who can save -- can fix the system, despite having no political experience before joining. host: we thought we would spend this hour with you learning how really going through history. -- you learning how we got to where we are today by really going through history. the major points in the process where the electoral system has changed. we have to go back to the beginning. you have written about, starting in the continental convention and the debates amongst our founding fathers about the selection process for the president. i remember the phrase circular debate. what is important to know about what they were trying to achieve? and what came out of it? dr. brown: when we look back, we have to realize our framers were trying to do something that was

not done around the world. they were trying to figure out how to elect an executive for the country. that was not something that was done all around the world. there were hereditary monarchs in power. as they looked out, they looked to governors of state and they tried to invent their own system. they said, well, let's see, should the congress elect the president? they said no, if they do that, the president will be the creature of congress, meaning that congress will own the presidency. then they said, should there be a direct popular election? they said no, that won't likely result in any sort of consensus. they're going to be too much chaos and impracticality at that

time. they came upon a notion of the electoral college. what this basically was was a way to say, let us get leaders from each state to go to their state capitals, have a meeting, and for the specific purpose, put forward names, vote on, if you will, two different people who could potentially be president and send them up to congress to determine who was actually the winner. that is really how it started. it started with this idea of, let us get some local leaders to help create some nominees. host: of course, in the past couple decades, the debate has been raging about whether the electoral college still works for a country of this size, complexity. can you give us the pros and the cons of the electoral college today?

dr. brown: the biggest thing in its favor is that it does have a tendency to force presidential candidate to campaign broadly and to win different states narrowly. it is more important to win a lot of states by 51% than a couple of states by 60%. what that does is ensures the president, in fact, represents most of the states in addition to most of the people. in other words, the electoral college really does do what the framers had hoped, which was that it would be an office, the presidency itself, that represented the people through their states. the combination of the house and the senate. the biggest problem with it is actually a problem the parties created themselves, and in fact is not related to the electoral college. it is related to how each state

allocates its electoral votes. all states but maine and nebraska allocate those in aoral notes -- votes winner take all manner. if you win by 51%, you win all of that state's electors. a much more fair way would be for there to be essentially proportional representation by the awarding of those electors. if one candidate won 55%, they get 55% of the electors. if the other candidate who lost the state would still get 45% of the electors. that would do a better job of more approximating the overall national popular vote. host: is that debate going on in any state legislatures today? dr. brown: sort of. what we have is a lot of different reform efforts that are attempting to overturn how the electoral college works.

mostly there is a national popular vote reform that really argues what should happen is whoever wins the national popular vote, that state's electoral votes should go to that candidate. i will tell you i think that is a horrible idea and it is a horrible idea not because it seems unfair, but in fact because in practicality i think it would cause even more angst at the system than the system we have now. i cannot envision a scenario where a republican won the national popular vote and everyone in california would say, yes, isn't it great? all of our electors should go to the republican candidate as well. that is not something i imagine californians would be pleased to

see, all 55 electoral votes going to a republican candidate that they clearly did not vote for at the popular vote level. host: going back to early history, george washington by acclamation in two elections, but early on it became clear the system was not functioning as they hoped. what happened? dr. brown: what is so fascinating is that this system almost immediately fell apart. the framers had this notion that the electoral college either would find a consensus candidate that everyone loved, like george washington, or that there would essentially be a split decision. every state would put forward a favorite son. no one would have enough electoral ballast to get a majority, and as a result, the decision stayed among the top five according to the original constitution would go to the house of representatives.

then the house would divide into state delegations and vote for president. what really happened was that parties formed before the 1796 running of the presidency. host: why did they form? dr. brown: they formed for a couple reasons. political science talks about the need for what we call long coalition in the legislature. basically government would not be able to operate without parties. what we mean by that is, imagine every piece of legislation. you had to form a brand-new coalition every single time. it just would not form or function. parties operate as what political scientists call long coalitions. they are a group of people with interests that are generally aligned. they agree to support each other and band together. with that, you are able to address more issues more quickly

and efficiently than you would otherwise. these parties really formed in early 1790's because during washington's administration, there were issues that started to divide people very quickly. you saw the debt assumption bill, a bill where basically washington, d.c. and the federal government assumed all of the state's debts from the revolutionary war. that created some angst among southerners who did not want to see a powerful federal government. very early on, there started to be this division between a party that looks at a strong federal government with international interests and essentially a plan

to improve the nation versus a party that was more interested in state and local power, a federal government, and a more inward looking foreign policy. that separated pretty much right away around the 1794, 1793 timeframe. host: when did the first crisis occur in the electoral process? dr. brown: the very first competitive election. in 1796, we have a situation where john adams is essentially the federalist nominee and thomas jefferson is the democratic nominee at the time, his party was called the democratic republicans. they basically were competing against each other. they each had different favored vice presidential candidates, but when the balloting happened and every state voted for two

people, it turned out john adams came in first and thomas jefferson came in second. all of a sudden, you have opposition partisan serving as president and vice president in the same administration. that clued in everyone there was going to be some problems. the next election, 1800, was essentially a rematch, but now john adams is the incumbent president. thomas jefferson is working with james madison, speaker of the house, in the opposition party. in that running of the election, thomas jefferson is now more popular than the incumbent president, running as this outsider against those in washington, so to speak. you end up having thomas jefferson tying the electoral college with his own vice presidential pick, aaron burr.

because at the time there was no official casting of ballots for president and vice president as separate ballots by the electors, aaron burr stayed silent and thought, maybe i can actually be made the president in the house of representatives vote if i just go along. anre federalists like me th thomas jefferson, maybe i will be able to squeak out the presidency. that created, obviously, a massive division in washington over who should become president. on the 36th ballot in the house of representatives, thomas jefferson was made the president of the united states. was needed.y a fix was the 12that fix amendment to the constitution, which what it did was force the electors to cast separate ballots.

one for president, one for vice president, and be clear in that. it reduced the overall number of individuals who, basically, if there were a tie or no one received a majority, would go to the house of representatives. it reduced it from five to three. host: the next election everyone studied in high school was the 1824 election. clay,uincy adams, andrew jackson. what is important to know about that? dr. brown: there's a couple things that are really important to know. up until james monroe's presidency, this idea of how does the nominee get decided really was not a controversy. everyone understood john adams would be the successor to washington. everyone understood james madison would be the successor to thomas jefferson. the problem was now you had

james monroe, who had been governor in virginia. he had been secretary of state under james madison. he again becomes president. a lot of other people are starting to say, wait a minute. how come the virginians are consistently getting nominated for this office and winning? by the time monroe's presidency is winding down, it is 1824 and competition has been brewing for years. people cannot wait to jump in. they have a lot of candidates and one of those was actually william crawford, who had been secretary of the treasury, if i recall, and crawford gets what's called the king caucus endorsement. the king caucus was essentially

a meeting of each party's congressional delegation to determine who should be the party nominee. it is kind of derogatorily referred to as king caucus because people from outside washington were saying, wait a minute, you mean these congressional members get to elect the king? how is that? we are in a democratic country. you have this sense that the fix is in. william crawford gets this nomination, which might not have been so bad but for the fact that he had a very debilitating stroke and he was partially blind and mostly paralyzed. yet he still wins the caucus endorsement. the idea that all of a sudden, the presidency is going to somebody who was basically unable to fulfill the duties of the office raised the hackles of many other individuals,

including andrew jackson, the war hero from the war of 1812 and his battle of new orleans fame, who basically is looking at this as, he is the outsider. he wants to run. then there is john quincy adams, who was now the senator from massachusetts. he is interested. and henry clay, speaker of the house. all of them jump in. all of them start contesting the king caucus endorsement by trying to get basically resolutions from their states and their state legislatures, saying isn't this great? we love our person. this should be the president. the electoral college again essentially runs into a problem

because the ballots are split. what we have is a situation where no one earns a majority of the votes and because it is now the top three, that means it is between john quincy adams, andrew jackson, and william crawford. and henry clay, who is speaker of the house, gets to essentially decide. the former candidate who gets ousted because of the 12th amendment, gets to help make the decision. he makes it in favor of john quincy adams. that becomes the basis of andrew jackson and his supporters' cry of a corrupt bargain. the whole system again turns into controversy by 1828. host: jackson is successful in 1828 and is the president that our current incumbent president

trump points to as his favorite in history. how did the election of andrew jackson change the system again? dr. brown: it certainly changed in that andrew jackson was from tennessee, he was this war hero, he had a certain celebrity in the country. he also wanted to represent the common man. interestingly enough, in 1828, he basically picked up william crawford's campaign manager, who had been martin van buren, who later becomes president. but martin van buren helps andrew jackson to expand the basis of the parties. the parties become these mass organizations. by 1832, andrew jackson and martin van buren had decided to adopt an innovation called the national convention, which was a way to bring all the state party

leaders to one convention to choose the nominees instead of using this either state legislative resolution or a congressional caucus or king caucus decision. host: at the same time, what was happening in the electorate? who could vote? dr. brown: generally speaking, what was going on was that white males were now enfranchised. they reduced the property requirements that were in existence early in the republic. it was also true that the states had essentially moved to the system of winner take all in most of the electoral vote allocation. it was also true that states were no longer essentially choosing electors by the state legislature, determining who

knows electors were, relying on the votes of the people in their states. host: the national conventions, which start in 1830, there were three distinct periods in history of national conventions. the national party leadership, next exemplified -- best exemplified by abraham lincoln's election. what was the story? dr. brown: it takes some time for state party leaders to actually build up enough credibility to become delegates at their convention. we look to james polk's nomination, or abraham lincoln's, a lot of people who are delegates, managing these candidacies, are the ones ensuring the votes for these individuals. they are in some ways more

national party leaders than they are state party leaders. they are still senators, still representatives. they are sometimes governors, but more often than not, they are still people who had power in washington or had powerful networks nationally. james k. polk would never have been the nominee in the democratic party had it not been jackson's mentorship and his maneuvering martin van buren away from the nomination that year. host: how did abraham lincoln, with a brand-new party, the republican party was a few years old at that point that -- how did he maneuver through that system to his advantage? dr. brown: this is the interesting part. in these early years, so much was about creating a deadlock. if you created a deadlock in these conventions, what you could create through kind of the

stage managing of different delegates activities, putting the name into nomination or given a speech or creating a general uproarious noise when that person's name was called, you could essentially stage-manage this notion there was momentum behind an acceptable candidate. these individuals we think of as dark horses who came out of nowhere, they did not really come out of nowhere. they were people who were working within the conventions to make sure that if deadlock happened, if more than one ballot occurred, they would candidacyr favored into the process and work to essentially gin up a majority. there were deals cut. it was the quintessential kind

of back room of politics that we think about. host: when was the first time presidential candidates started going to their own party conventions? dr. brown: they don't start going until fdr. that is the big moment where he is there. he, in 1932, flies into the convention. it is a very big deal. there had been earlier instances of individuals showing up at the conventions, but it was not normal, which is one of those amusing things. if you are going to be an acceptable candidate, you had to manage to become the nominee without being there. that is quite a trick, to have your supporters and friends put your name into the nomination and run that whole process through. that is why, in the late 1800s, the party bosses became so important.

we have this whole era where cities were growing, we were moving from an agrarian society to an industrial society. we had basically these party bosses who were running the political votes of their cities or their countries and the candidates were essentially going to them and eventually begging their support. if the candidates pass muster, the bosses would maneuver on their behalf at the convention. it is interesting because by the time of william mckinley in 1896, the reformers had taken hold. they were disgusted by the corruption and dealing. they in fact turned around and william mckinley tries to run a plan against the bosses. what he does is, as a republican, garners the votes from southern delegates who have

not yet been important because during that period of time, the south was solidly democratic in the general election and nobody had thought to include those delegates in the nomination process. host: during that period of time, swing states became really important. two of them people assume are going obvious -- are quite obvious, new york and pennsylvania. the third was indiana. why was indiana so powerful? dr. brown: indiana was going back and forth between democrats and republicans. you had a very strong country party, meaning that everybody in the rural areas were in support of the democratic candidates. those who were in the towns were republicans because the parties had switched coalitions. what we usually think of now, is the republicans in rural areas and democrats in urban, at

that point it was a different mix. but it was as competitive. this really just comes down to, there was a kind of divided population. an equally balanced population. when a state is that way, it becomes a battleground state in the general election. that state then matters at every level. host: during that time period, the era of smoke-filled rooms as we always hear them, there were two of those contested elections. 1876 and 1888. benjamin harrison lost the popular vote, but won the electoral college. if the party bosses were in control, why do we end up with two elections so close? dr. brown: for the same reason we ended up with two elections in 2016 that were so close.

generally speaking, no system does very well when the country is split 50-50. it is difficult to decide an election when the vote is split relatively equally. when we are talking between a percentage point. the electoral college tends to magnify, because of this winner take all allocation, the votes of those states that the winner wins. the electoral college in fact grows the candidate's mandate. that is one of the things in favor of it. we can think to 1992, bill clinton only won 43% of the popular vote. in fact he won a much larger electoral college vote, which allowed him to govern. it is interesting we have these inversions in the gilded age. the country was wildly

mobilized. we had 90% turnout regularly. we also had an equally divided country. it was literally a percentage point between the two candidates that would determine the election. at that moment, the electoral college does not work well. it can invert. you have to have another decision. 1876, it did not even go to the house of representatives. it went to a specially designed commission where we had basically appointments of republicans and democrats to the commission to review the different contested states' electoral ballots. there was one more republican on it than democrat. on every single vote, republican voted republican. as a result, rutherford b hayes won, even though the popular

vote suggests tilden may well have. host: a difficult time for hayes fraudulentcy. in history, presidents who have not won the popular vote -- how difficult is it for presidents to establish themselves in a contested environment? dr. brown: usually very hard. there is some sense the system is not working. what is interesting about it is that we read into the popular vote something we probably shouldn't. that is that it is the true measure of the nation's will. we forget that the aggregated popular vote is something of an accident. what i mean by that is that the candidates do not build their strategies around the popular vote. they build their strategies

around electoral college vote. that means the campaigns only happens in certain states and not others. that means turnout varies wildly across the states. in a state where people feel as though their vote does not matter, that popular vote that comes out of the state may not have the same kind of meaning as a state in which the candidates are heavily invested vying for every ballot. we have to realize the aggregated popular vote just does not contain the kind of meaning i think we would like it to have. the best way, i always say, and i think most political scientists say to think about the electoral college, is it is more like the world series than the super bowl. in the world series, it does not really matter how many runs you have in each game. you have to win four games. we saw the washington nationals

this last year. they had many runs down in houston. then they came home to washington dc and didn't win. it looked as though they might lose the series if they did not win another game. even when you aggregate the runs across all seven games, does the winner of the present -- the pe rson who has the most runs, should they win? no. the electoral college says essentially it is the most states. host: thanks to the washington nationals for providing the metaphor. [laughter] we are now in the age of moving images. we are going to show one from 1912. an important year because the incumbent president, taft, was challenged by a popular past president, theodore roosevelt. what happened to the process when theodore roosevelt ended up

challenging his own president in that year? he ended up running as a third-party candidate. what happened to the process? dr. brown: what was so fascinating about 1912 is you have a former president saying i want to run again and i think my party should let me run again, and the party says no. we are going to go with the current president, taft. roosevelt mounts this run, really because he does not win his party's nomination. in doing so, he divides the party, and as a result, woodrow wilson ends up winning the election. that party, the republican party, really does divide in such a way that it is not able to reform in any sort of dominant way for years.

it is true that the republicans come back after woodrow wilson's presidency for that decade, but then what we see is that franklin roosevelt is able to pick up that coalition and run with it. the democrats are ensconced for many years. at the primary level, and what was important about that period, was that people were questioning party bosses. the progressives who really got going in the late 1890's and carried through all the way to franklin roosevelt's presidency had really been about changing the nature of who were the delegates at these national conventions? they said it is not fair that it is these party bosses or national elites. the people should decide. and the people need to have a

way to decide. what we saw was that the primary election was created as a way to select delegates to the convention. host: which was the first state to hold a primary? dr. brown: florida in 1901 is the first state to adopt a primary ballot. wisconsin really takes it forward because the governor pushes forward on having primaries in 1905. 20th century,he what are the important periods for the evolution of the electoral process? dr. brown: the most important thing to realize is these first primaries were what we generally started to call beauty contests. they were not necessarily aligned with the delegate and the vote. you would vote in your primary,

but that did not necessarily bind anyone in your state to a certain delegate or a delegate to the convention. as a result, the primaries for most of the 1900s become just a way that a candidate can demonstrate their electability. this is why everyone points to a john f. kennedy running in the west virginia primary because what he was saying to his party is, look, i am catholic and i can still do well in a very protestant state. he runs, he does well. the democratic party says, yes, he is electable. in 1968, this system of beauty contests and national elites managing the delegates reaches another crisis and comes to a head.

host: we have a video of that convention, which anyone who was alive will remember. just a quick question, because we are going to see it on television. in the 1950's, television arrived. after that, madison avenue and the advertising age. how did those additions to our culture impact the presidential selection process? dr. brown: it just starts to change the notion of who is an acceptable candidate. who should people look to as somebody who can win? this is where republicans selecting dwight eisenhower is fascinating. this is a throwback all the way to andrew jackson or to any of the other generals, grant, who won at different points in our history. war heroes were celebrities.

there was this sense that the only way the republicans could win against the democratic coalition was to bring a war hero onto the ticket and create a coalition behind him. the prior nominee had actually managed the kind of delegate vote getting for eisenhower, and it is really because of his efforts that in fact warren ended up on the supreme court. warren was interested in the nomination. he convinced him to get his votes to eisenhower. eisenhower appoints warren. the warren court is history. history which would not have occurred but for those political maneuvers. host: let's look at a clip from the convention. remember, this nation is in the middle of the vietnam war.

protests on the outside of the streets in chicago. let's look at what was happening at the podium at the democratic convention. >> i proudly accept the nomination of our party. [cheers and applause] >> we have heard hard and him and sometimes bitter debate, but i submit that this is the debate and this is the work of a free people. the work of an open convention and the work of a political party responsive to the needs of this nation. [applause] host: why was 1968 a crisis? dr. brown: because it was not really an open convention. what you saw is president lyndon johnson had worked very hard in

the background after he had stepped down from running to manage those delegates and ensure his vice president, hubert humphrey, would garner the nomination. those individuals running in the primaries and those antiwar candidates in particular, mccarthy and mcgovern, their supporters were enraged that they did not have a way to be important on the floor, to have any votes. they could not believe humphrey, who had not run in any primary, was going to secure the democratic nomination. with that, there were protests and riots in chicago that became very violent. the democrats basically said, ok. the only way to get out of this is to agree to reform the process. they established what became the

mcgovern frazier reform. host: what were an important part of the reforms? dr. brown: the most important part of the reforms was that the delegates had to be named and selected prior to the primary in those states. what we saw was that the primaries were being bound and linked to the delegate selection process. host: if you win as a delegate, you are bound to vote for the candidate you are elected for. dr. brown: yes. it is still an interesting thing in that the parties tinker with their delegate selection processes. different states are awarded different numbers of delegates. the democrats also insured in their reforms that there was a broader diversity of delegates. they did put affirmative action,

quotas. the democratic party says all of the delegates have to be divided 50-50 in terms of women and men. it has to have a representative sample essentially of minorities. if there's 40% of the population in the state are minorities, that delegation better have something close to 40% of its delegates going to the convention be minorities. host: although political junkies and reporters would love the idea of a brokered convention. this was the deathknell of a brokered convention. dr. brown: it was, because what it meant was once you've accrued enough delegates, you would get a vote on the first ballot. host: that shifts the process to the primaries. dr. brown: it does. host: when did iowa and new hampshire become so important? dr. brown: sometimes right

after. iowa really makes its mark with jimmy carter in 1976. when you look to the process in 1976, there was a large number of democrats who were running. richard nixon had stepped down after watergate. gerald ford had taken over. he was not a popular president. there was a lot of competition. most of the people running were washington senators who were saying, look, we are here, we are going to clean out the corruption. we were part of essentially overthrowing the republicans who were engaged in not so great things for the country. jimmy carter comes in as governor from georgia, and he comes in after none of the above

in iowa. so he places second. but like clinton's second place in 1992, it rocketed his momentum upward and he careened right through the primaries and won the nomination, which surprised a lot of delegates. made the democrats on the heels of that decide they needed to tinker with their process. that was when the added superdelegates. host: the other thing that happened in 1976 was the reemergence of nationally televised debates. everyone learned about the 1960 jfk-nixon debates, but they went on hiatus. what impact did they have on the electoral process? dr. brown: debates are interesting because there's a lot of studies that show the debates are not in fact what decides the election. it is in fact the discussion

about who won the debate that becomes more important. one of the things that is true is that the debates did create more of a sense that having a television presence, being able to connect with voters through the television camera, was in fact going to be more important than the retail process of going out and shaking hands in different states. the debates have had really mixed effects. we have this situation now where , generally speaking, our primaries and our process is so much more something that approximates a reality show than it is necessarily the candidates getting to know the voters, the voters getting to know the positions, and the voters choosing the candidates who are best for their party.

host: i want to get to where we are today. briefly i would like to hear about you so people know who they are talking to. you have been an academic studying this process all your life. what got you interested? dr. brown: it is funny. i have had a lot of iterations of my life. i did start off in college in the late 1980's and early 1990's watching the fall of the wall, the berlin wall of course, the end of the cold war, and the beginning of bill clinton's presidency. i was in california during the riots that happened, during the o.j. simpson trial. there was a lot going on in the early 1990's, which made a lot of us in california say, wow, politics is important and we should engage.

in the much of my time 1990's active and engaged in democrat politics. i ended up serving in bill clinton's administration at the department of education. i worked as a corporate liaison. i returned to academia in the early 2000 and have been there ever since. i am fascinated by politics, mostly because i have seen it at every angle. i have seen it as a partisan, i have seen as a government appointee, i have seen it as an academic. i have even seen it from the position of the business community. i also worked in business as a consultant and did a lot of things with different corporations. host: you also married someone -- your wikipedia page says someone known to the c-span audience, major garrett.

he covers the white house for cbs. what are the dinner conversations like? [laughter] dr. brown: what is so interesting is major is really a phenomenal journalist. he and i always have this tension in one of our conversations. i, as an academic am always theorizing. where are things going? what is this protecting? -- this predicting? what hypothesis can i test? he always responds by saying, this is what we know now. that is really the difference. journalists report what is happening and are not interested or focused on long-term consequences. they are in the middle of the first draft of history. as a political scientist, i am always trying to understand history and what it means for the future.

host: your graduate school turns out a lot of people who become campaign managers, etc. when did they become important to the process? dr. brown: right about the time that essentially the mcgovern fraser reforms come in. in those 1970's, as the television is taking off, as managed campaigns become important, but also the parties lost power. we have to understand that consultants became a way for there to be a continuation of political knowledge and experience that used to reside within the party. now it resides within the consultants. when the parties lost their power, the consultants took over. that is good and bad.

it is true, when we look at someone like david axelrod, karl rove, they know extraordinary political history and they have great deal of -- experience. the problem is a lot of the candidates they are managing and putting forward have very little knowledge of politics and how governance actually works. we have this problem now where the candidates keep saying they going to outsource politics to the people who know things, but then they get mad and are running against all of the people who do know things. host: the process today also costs millions of dollars. hiring staff, same for the the media. when did money become a factor? dr. brown: all of these things rise together. largely because the parties lose

their force. a colleague of mine talks a lot about weak parties and strong partisanship. that is the era in which we are in. the parties don't have that much control. the candidates have more control so long as they can raise the money. and yet the candidates don't really have the political knowledge to advance their positions, and that is where the consultants come in. host: there are a number of fixes. there is a debate that continues about iowa and new hampshire and their representation of the electorate overall. there is a discussion about a national primary or compressed regional primaries. we talked about the elimination of the electoral college. public financing of campaigns. are any of these fixes ones that would have a substantive and positive impact on the primary

and elections that we have? dr. brown: the national primary would only make a lot of the things we see right now worse. the cost of elections would skyrocket. only people with very broad name recognition or celebrity would win. a national primary is probably one of the worst reforms we could implement. i would, if we were doing it in a rational way, have a rotating inional primary so that different elections we have different groups of states go together, which would allow focused retail campaigning. the situation we have right now is really that iowa and new hampshire were grandfathered in and became important, and now there is no way to move them out of the process. nevada and south carolina have been added to the mix of early states.

you can see that often they are not necessarily as decisive as you might think. the basic problem is that you are talking about a trade-off between money and voters. if you really want the voters to get to know the candidates, you need to have fewer states. if you really want everybody to have a fair shot at electing the candidate, then you need to have those candidates have a lot of money. neither system is really fair. host: we are going to close. toys in -- twice in the last 16 years we have had two contested elections. the last one was -- in the electoral college, not the popular vote. the last piece of video is from the historic moment in the house of representatives in 2000 when one of the aspirants announced the results were his opponents.

let's watch. >> the state of the votes for president of the united states as delivered to the president of the senate is as follows. the whole number of electors appointed to vote is 538, of which a majority is 270. george w. bush of the state of texas has received for president of the united states 271 votes. al gore of the state of tennessee has received 266 votes. this announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the senate shall be deemed effective declaration of the person elected for the president and vice president each for the term beginning on the 20th day of january 2001 and shall be entered together with a list of the votes on the journals of the senate and the house of representatives. may god bless our new president and our new vice president and may god bless the united states of america. [applause]

host: we have about a minute left. we started off talking about the founding fathers and how they created the system. what does that moment say about the american system? dr. brown: that is an extraordinary moment. you have an active statesmanship. an individual who was running for election who decided not to create a constitutional crisis by essentially ignoring the supreme court decision. he could have. he could have recognized the florida representatives chamber to be the heard and to throw out florida's ballots. he had done that, he could have declared himself president. he did not. it is so important to realize that at really critical junctures in our country's history, statesmanship has been all that has kept us going.

bruce ackerman writes an extraordinary book about precisely that failure of the founding fathers around making the vice president the president of the senate who would announce that ballot. ant: we close, but interesting trip about how we elect presidents. thank you for your time. dr. brown: thank you for having me. ♪ all "q&a" programs are available on our website or as a podcast as c-span.org. ♪ >> sunday night on q&a, how a south sudanese video developer is bringing peace and conflict resolution through the refugee experience to a wider audience.

>> as someone who has been from country where 7.2% of the population is under 30, these are all young people. playing, i was like, how about these young people from south sudan start playing this videogame? the samedeogame, it is thing happening in their country, killing people. it will feel like this is how things are done. how about creating a videogame for peace an >> the decision made 75 years in at the yalta conference february 1940 five had huge ramifications for post world war ii europe. the u.s. war department produced

this film of the final meeting between the big three, soviet premier joseph stalin, british premier winston churchill and u.s. president franklin roosevelt at a crimean resort in ukraine. the film begins with a preliminary meeting on the mediterranean island of malta and ends with fdr making his final address to a joint session of congress. he died a little over a month later. ♪