Gastonia, NC
Before anybody calls this unprecedented, somebody in this Forum should say the word 1968 out loud.
On the thirty-first of March that year a sitting president announced he would not seek re-election, after the primaries had already begun. On the fifth of June the leading candidate for that nomination was shot dead in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. In August the party nominated Hubert Humphrey, who had entered not one primary, at a convention where police beat demonstrators in the streets on live television.
A withdrawal mid-cycle. A candidate assassinated. A nominee who faced no voters at all. Riots at the convention.
I read copy for a living and I check a claim before I set it. Every module this question calls new was running in a single American year fifty-six years ago, and three of the four were worse.
So what is actually new?
Not the nominee swap — Humphrey is a stronger case than Harris, because he faced zero primaries and she at least inherited a ticket voters had marked. Not violence in a campaign — 1968 had two political assassinations. Not a candidate under legal jeopardy — Eugene Debs ran for president from a federal penitentiary in 1920 and got nearly a million votes.
What is new is the simultaneity, and specifically the presence of criminal prosecution of a front-runner as a running feature of the campaign rather than as a fact about one man’s biography. Debs was in prison for what he had said about the war. He was not being prosecuted in four jurisdictions during the cycle by officials of the opposing party.
That is the module without a precedent, and it is the one worth defending. The other three have all happened, and saying otherwise invites somebody to hand us a history book.
I would put it this way. The country has run each of these races before. It has not run them in the same year with the same man, and the combination is the news. Combination is a weaker claim than unprecedented and it has the advantage of being true.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota is going to talk about 1968, because our own senator was at the centre of it and the parallel is closer than anything in this question.
Eugene McCarthy came out of nowhere in New Hampshire in March. Lyndon Johnson withdrew on the last day of that month. Robert Kennedy entered, won California, and was murdered on the fifth of June. And the party nominated Hubert Humphrey — a Minnesotan, the sitting vice president — who had not competed in a single primary, at a convention that the country watched turn into a police riot.
Every element of this year’s argument was present. A sitting president removed from the ticket mid-cycle. Political violence at the highest level. A vice president elevated without facing voters. A party leadership that overrode a primary electorate.
And the reaction to it is the part that makes the comparison useful rather than decorative.
What came out of 1968 was the McGovern-Fraser Commission, and what came out of that commission is the entire modern primary system — binding delegate selection, transparency rules, the whole apparatus that this Forum has spent eight questions describing as the thing the party violated in July.
So the “pre-2021 system” the question refers to was not some ancient inheritance. It is a set of reforms adopted in 1972 in direct response to a vice president being nominated without voters, and this July it produced a vice president nominated without voters.
That is the finding and it is bleaker than the one the question offers. The system was designed for exactly this scenario. It was designed by people who had just watched it happen. And the first time it was seriously tested, fifty-two years later, it produced the same outcome it existed to prevent.
I would not call that a race the system was not built to run. I would call it a race the system was built to prevent and could not.
What is genuinely new, and I want to be precise because our side keeps overclaiming, is the criminal-prosecution module. Nothing in 1968 involved four charging offices working the same man during a campaign. That is the item without an American precedent, and it is enough to make this year distinctive without pretending the rest of it was invented in 2021.
Prescott Valley, AZ
The claim in this question is that the combination is new. Before accepting it I would put each element on the board and ask a class to find the precedent, because they are all findable in an afternoon.
Sitting president withdraws mid-cycle: 1968. Truman in 1952, for that matter, after New Hampshire.
Nominee never faced primary voters: Humphrey, 1968, at a convention where the streets were on fire.
Assassination during a presidential campaign: Robert Kennedy, 1968. George Wallace shot and paralysed in 1972, the day before he won two primaries.
Two attempts on the same man in weeks: Gerald Ford, September 1975, in Sacramento on the fifth and San Francisco on the twenty-second. Seventeen days.
Major candidate under criminal jeopardy: Eugene Debs, 1920, campaigning from a federal prison cell and receiving nearly a million votes.
Five elements, five precedents, none of them obscure.
I taught for a long time and the exercise I would set is the one that follows. Given that each part has happened, what does the class think is actually distinctive about this year?
The honest answers come out narrower than the question suggests. First, the elements co-occurred in one cycle rather than across a century. Second, and this is the substantive one, criminal prosecution was pursued by multiple offices of the opposing party against a front-runner during the campaign itself, which is different in kind from Debs being imprisoned for a wartime speech two years before he ran.
That is a defensible claim about novelty and it does not require anybody to forget 1968.
What I would warn the class against is the move the question invites, which is to treat “the pre-2021 system” as a stable inheritance that recent actors broke. That framing flatters everybody before 2021 and it is false. The system has been rebuilt repeatedly, most recently in 1972, precisely because it kept producing outcomes people found intolerable.
A system that has been redesigned three times in a century is not a fragile antique. It is a machine that keeps failing and getting patched, and this year is another failure, and there will be another patch.
Dayton, OH
A plant that takes two safety hits on the same operator in one season has a problem. I said that in an earlier session and I want to correct it, because it has happened before and the previous instance is instructive.
Gerald Ford, September 1975. Sacramento on the fifth — a woman pointed a pistol at him from a few feet away and an agent got a hand on the weapon before it fired. San Francisco on the twenty-second — a second woman fired from across a street and a bystander deflected her arm.
Seventeen days. Two attempts. Same president.
That is a closer parallel to this summer than anything else in the record, and it produced exactly what this year produced: a review, an expansion of protective resources, and no lasting change in the political culture.
So the two-attempts module is not new. In process terms it is a recurrence, and recurrences are more useful than novelties because you can compare the corrective actions.
What did 1975 produce? A larger Secret Service, more counter-surveillance, and the beginning of the modern advance system. What is this year producing? Four reviews, a unanimous House vote on protection standards, and an expanded detail. Roughly the same corrective action, roughly the same trigger, half a century apart.
That tells you the protective system responds to this input the way it always has, which is a functioning control loop rather than a design failure.
Where I still think the specification is genuinely stressed is the prosecution module, and I want to be careful about why.
The other elements — withdrawal, replacement, violence — are shocks the system absorbs and adjusts to. They arrive from outside. A criminal prosecution does not arrive from outside. It is generated by the system itself, by identifiable officials making discretionary decisions, and it runs on a schedule those officials partly control.
That is the difference between an external load and an internal one. External loads get absorbed. Internal loads change the structure, because the structure is now doing something to itself.
So the answer I would file: four of the five modules have precedent and functioning responses, one does not, and the one that does not is the one the system generated rather than received.
Wheeling, WV
I want to talk about George Wallace, because nobody in this argument has and he is the closest thing we have to a man who lived every part of this.
May 1972, a shopping centre parking lot in Laurel, Maryland. Five shots. He was paralysed from the waist down and never walked again. The next day he won the Michigan and Maryland primaries from a hospital bed.
He was a front-runner in his party’s contest. He was shot in the middle of a campaign. And the country absorbed it in about a week and went back to arguing about Nixon and McGovern.
So when this Forum says the absorption of political violence into an ordinary news cycle is new, it is not. It happened in 1972 to a man who was leading primaries, and it happened in 1968 to a man who won California and was dead by morning.
Thirty years in grievances taught me that when somebody tells you a thing has never happened before, the first move is to check, because “never before” is almost always the weakest sentence in any argument and the easiest to knock down.
Here is the version I would still make.
What is different this year is not any single item. It is that the man in question is simultaneously a defendant in multiple jurisdictions and a target, and the two facts get discussed as though they belong to the same story. They do not. One is a set of decisions by officials with names and offices. The other is two men acting alone with no established direction from anybody.
Keeping those separate is the whole discipline of this argument and our side has been sloppy about it all year.
So: not a new race. A familiar race with one genuinely novel element, running alongside a familiar one that people keep braiding into it because the braid makes a better story.
The braid is the thing I would refuse. Everything else here has a date in the twentieth century.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would want to know whether anything in this bundle is actually a first, so let me price each item against the record.
Sitting president withdraws mid-cycle: happened in 1968, and in 1952.
Nominee faces no primary voters: Humphrey, 1968.
Candidate assassinated during a campaign: Robert Kennedy, 1968.
Two attempts on one man in weeks: Ford, September 1975, seventeen days apart.
Front-runner under criminal jeopardy: Eugene Debs ran for president in 1920 from a cell in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta as prisoner number 9653, and took nearly a million votes.
Five for five. Every module has a precedent and none of them is obscure.
In my business, when a client tells me a risk is unprecedented, that is the moment to open the loss history, because unprecedented usually means unfamiliar to the person speaking. Unfamiliar and unprecedented price very differently.
So what actually prices as new?
One item. The prosecution of a front-runner by multiple offices controlled by the opposing party, during the campaign, on a calendar those offices partly set. Debs was imprisoned for a speech about the draft two years before he ran, by an administration that then commuted him. That is a man who happened to be in prison. It is not four charging offices working a candidate through a nomination and a general election.
That distinction is the whole of the novelty and it is enough. It does not need company.
What I would not underwrite is the version of this argument that bundles the two shootings into the same policy. Two men acted alone. Nobody has produced any evidence of direction, funding, or coordination for either, and the Bureau has never established a motive for the first. Putting them in the same sentence as charging decisions made by named officials is a category error, and in my trade a category error in the claim is what gets the whole file denied.
Price the prosecution module as new. Price the rest as recurrence with precedent. Keep the shootings in a separate file entirely.
Long Island, NY
I draft system maps, and the premise of this question — that a pre-2021 design was overwhelmed — misdescribes what the design is and when it was made.
The nominating system this Forum has been measuring 2024 against is fifty-two years old. It was built by the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which existed because in 1968 the Democratic Party nominated a vice president who had entered no primaries, over the objection of an electorate that had voted for other people, at a convention accompanied by police violence in the streets of Chicago.
The reforms were adopted for one purpose: to prevent a party’s leadership from selecting a nominee the voters had not chosen.
In July 2024 the party selected a vice president the voters had not chosen, under rules those reforms left in place — because the reformers, sensibly, retained the committee’s authority to fill a vacancy and never contemplated that the vacancy would be created deliberately after the primaries had closed.
That is not a system unequipped for the moment. It is a system built in response to precisely this moment that contained the gap through which the moment recurred.
So the accurate systems finding is that the design is fifty-two years old, was written as a corrective, and has now failed on its own terms in the one scenario it was drafted to foreclose. That is a considerably heavier finding than “polarization is ugly,” and it is heavier than “the old system could not run this race.”
On the other modules I would be disciplined. Assassination attempts during campaigns have a full record — 1912, 1968, 1972, 1975, 1981. Criminal jeopardy for a candidate has 1920. The protective system responded to 1975 with structural changes and is responding to 2024 the same way, which is what a functioning control loop looks like.
The one item without a map is the prosecution module, and it is without a map because nothing in the American design anticipates that criminal charging discretion would become a variable in a nominating and general-election calendar. There is no provision addressing it, no standard governing it, and no forum for resolving whether it occurred.
That is an absence of specification rather than a failure of a specification, and I have said the same thing about clemency, about venue, and about succession in these files. It is the same finding each time and it is beginning to look like the actual subject of the whole eighteen questions.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books, so let me post each item against its precedent before deciding what is new.
Withdrawal mid-cycle: 1968, and 1952. Posted.
Nominee who faced no primary voters: Humphrey, 1968, at a convention with riots outside. Posted.
Assassination during a campaign: Robert Kennedy, 1968. Wallace shot and paralysed, 1972. Posted.
Two attempts on the same man in weeks: Ford, September 1975, seventeen days apart. Posted.
Candidate under criminal jeopardy: Debs ran from a federal prison in 1920 and got nearly a million votes. Posted.
Five entries, five precedents. Nothing in that column is new and our side has been arguing as though the whole ledger was blank.
One entry has no match. A front-runner prosecuted by four offices of the opposing party during the campaign itself, on schedules those offices set. Debs was in prison for a speech and had been for two years. That is a different account entirely.
So the honest close on this question is a single new line item and five recurrences, which is a smaller claim than the question invites and a defensible one.
And I would keep two entries in separate books, because our side has been merging them all year. Prosecutions are decisions by named officials in identified offices. The two shootings were two men acting alone with nothing established connecting either to anybody.
One column is institutional conduct that can be examined, criticised, and reformed. The other is a security failure and a police matter. Posting them to the same account is how a serious eighteen-question file ends up sounding like a pamphlet, and I would rather close the account clean.
