Politics is television. Do we think that’s still working?

The New York Times on Sept. 24 posted an episode of its podcast “Interesting Times” focusing on the political struggle over voting mechanics — a conversation between guest host Sarah Isgur, who among other things is editor at SCOTUSblog, and NYU law professor Rick Pildes.

Margaret Sullivan has a few choice words about it (more on that below), and while I share her view that the discussion is the state of the art for both-sidesism and false political equivalency, Pildes raised a point about elections in 2026 that is often overlooked: One of the most consequential changes in our voting process was the elevation of primaries as the means by which the parties select their candidates:

I like to tell people that the most radical change we’ve made to the democratic process in the United States over the last 50 years is something people don’t even think about at this point, which is that we ended the convention system for choosing the parties’ nominees for president. And in the 1970s, we shifted to this system, which is a purely kind of populist system of choice, where primary elections determine who the parties will nominate.

In the old system, there were a lot of filtering mechanisms in place. In a world in which you had to gain the support from a lot of elected party figures — national, state and local — to get the nomination, you had to broker a lot of different interests in the party. Yes, there were problems with that system — the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms — but it provided a certain kind of filtering of the process.

We now have probably one of the most populist systems of selection in the world among democracies, in which voters can completely bypass all the elected party figures and choose a nominee.

I think there’s no question it’s changed the kind of people who run for office in the U.S. for president, and the kind of people who get elected. That’s why things like celebrity status, name recognition — all of that counts for a lot more in a world in which we use these primary elections.

We take for granted now that that’s how you have to do it, that’s the natural way to do it, that’s what democracy means. But it’s really not the way a lot of other countries choose their nominees or party leaders for chief executive. Usually, the party figures have significant say in who becomes the party leader or the nominee for chief executive.

I touched on this 10 years ago, in October 2016, in a “One dog barking” column in Citizen Cartwright about Donald Trump’s tradition-defying candidacy.

Trump, either instinctively or intellectually, realized that the assumed rules of presidential politics — a game for experienced politicians with established public policy goals — were not rules at all, but merely conventions that played out on television. He brought his television fame to a new series — “The Apprentice: Presidential Version” — and found his popularity was transferrable to the political arena.

Competitors and political experts repeatedly judged him by traditional rules and standards. But those rules, it turns out, apply only if the audience agrees to them.

I read the Times conversation because Margaret Sullivan had mentioned it when she passed out grades Wednesday for media coverage of the campaign. She gave podcast episode “a generous D” — and I would agree she was generous. She writes:

First, an article and podcast rife with some of the worst sins of the current media era — false equivalence, sane-washing and soft-pedaling language.

Sullivan, a former public editor for the Times, happily directs us to the reader comments:

To clear away the thick smoke of false equivalence, you need to go to the top reader comments, where there’s a lot more straight talk. (I love reader comments!)

Happily, Sullivan’s report card included a number of exemplary acts of journalism, including, yes, by the Times, as well as ProPublica. We take the good with the egregious.