Switcheroo

     Oh, no!  A Presidential candidate from one of the major political parties, who had already won that party's primary, has stepped down!  It's a crisis!

     At least that's what leading lights of the other party are saying, along with a few of his own.  But is it true?

     You can't look to the U. S. Constitution for answers.  The men who drafted that document weren't thinking much about political parties and it doesn't address primaries.  When they did get around to mentioning factionalism in the Federalist Papers, they didn't like the idea. (Some history here, a little here.)

     By the time the new government was in place and George Washington was stuck with the top job, the first Senators and Representatives were well on the way to inventing a party system, centralizing Federalists against the free-trade yeoman farmers of the Democratic-Republican party.  Washington warned against it, but in that effort, he was more Cassandra than Cincinnatus.  But there weren't any primaries; Congressmen from each of the parties caucused to pick who'd they'd chivvy into trying for the hot seat.  That system held up for not quite a lifetime before state-level parties agitated to have more of a voice against Washington, D.C.'s insider's club; a third party who didn't have any Congressmen held the first nominating convention in 1831 and the idea caught on.  For the next eighty years, a mix of conventions and colluding elected officials picked candidates with conventions gradually dominating: the "smoke-filled rooms" of each party got bigger.

     That system had some merits, but transparency wasn't one of them.  Just ahead of the First World War, primary elections began to emerge as a way to advise and even direct the choices of delegates to political conventions.  It took sixty years for that movement to grow, but by 1972, the "binding primary" had taken root in all fifty states, fueled in part by the dramatic mess of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

     Notice anything?  I haven't mentioned the Constitution.  It still doesn't have anything to say about political parties or how those parties ought to go about choosing candidates for Federal office.  Even a binding primary only holds convention delegates to obey the results per their party's convention rules --  usually for a round or two of voting, after which, it's a free-for-all.

     We still have, as Benjamin Franklin observed, a republic, and both of the major political parties are determined to keep it that way at their conventions: the delegates represent voters and are expected to use their best judgment, not simply carry the results.  Parties set their own rules at their own conventions.

     So there's your "crisis:" a tempest in a teacup, intended to stir public opinion and get eyes on screens while keeping emotions riled up.  The Democats will sort their candidates out at their upcoming convention and presumably the Republicans will gird up to campaign against them, same as has happened every four years since the first party system emerged.  We're not on the same two parties, not even close; we're on the sixth or seventh party system and it's still running ad hoc, improvised outside the terms and definitions of the United States Constitution.  So don't be buffaloed; it's all as legal as church, and (finances aside) slightly less Federally regulated than religion.