That’s the title on Larry Bartel’s op-ed in today’s NYT about reforming the presidential primary process. It’s noteworthy that there’s been an outpouring of commentary and academic work in the past few years urging re-consideration of the nominations process we stumbled into in the 1970s and have lived with since. As readers here know, I’ve been pushing on this issue for a number of years, as can be found here and here.

After providing some excerpts from Bartel’s piece, I’ll offer a brief comment on it. From the piece:

Research on primary voting demonstrates that voters make better-informed and more coherent choices when the race involves just two or three major contenders. That’s why political elites and political institutions have a crucial role to play in shaping the options presented to primary voters. . . .

What is largely missing from this process is the professional judgment of people who actually know the candidates — officeholders and party officials. But the Democratic Party’s attempt to insert the judgment of “superdelegates” at the end of the nominating process, after primary voters have already had their say, has generated bitter complaints about “undemocratic” elites overriding the will of the party rank and file. . . .

A better approach would be for the party itself to conduct systematic polls of Democratic senators, members of Congress, big-city mayors and state party officials — not to determine which one candidate they support, but to solicit their confidential evaluations of each candidate on his or her own merits. The results could be used to formalize and accelerate winnowing the field, allowing voters to tackle the more manageable task of choosing from a short list of candidates vetted by the political professionals they themselves have already elected.

It’s unclear to me what it would mean to use these polls of party figures to “formalize and accelerate winnowing the field.” That sounds like giving party figures distinctive, formal weight in the process — which in turn sounds like a partial return to a significant, formal role for “peer review” in the nominations process, though Bartels does not seem willing to quite come out and say that.

I have no illusions in our current political culture that there is any imminent prospect of restoring a role for party figures and peer review in the nominations process. Still, the fact that more commentators and scholars are willing to raise this issue is worth noting.