The late 1960s and early 1970s were a genuine moment of reckoning for many fundamental political institutions in the United States as the civil rights and youth counterculture movements reached their height. This was especially the case for the Democratic Party and its crisis of political legitimacy brought on by mass protests at its 1964 and 1968 national conventions, as well as the crushing defeat of the unpopular Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential race against Richard Nixon.Footnote ¹ Feeling pressure to take definitive action, the Rules Committee at the 1968 Democratic National Convention established the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, or the McGovern-Fraser Commission as it came to be known under the leadership of Senator George McGovern and later Representative Donald Fraser. At the most basic level, McGovern-Fraser aimed to make the selection of delegates to the national conventions more democratic and inclusive of the party’s diverse rank and file in order to restore political legitimacy to the presidential nomination process.Footnote ²

Now fifty years after the McGovern-Fraser Commission first deliberated on the future of the Democratic National Committee and Convention, this article revisits the significance of this well-known story of electoral reform. Drawing from archival evidence such as DNC memoranda, party publications, mainstream media, and the 1972 presidential campaign, it is clear that the McGovern-Fraser Commission was explicitly designed not only to recoup institutional credibility among the public but also to shift the balance of power between state and national party leaders. In the period between the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, the Democratic National Committee developed a strategic rhetoric of reform that leveraged its crisis of legitimacy to build up its influence and nationalize the party. Under the leadership of George McGovern, the reform commission situated the problem firmly within state parties as the source of corruption and undemocratic delegate selection—a problem that only a streamlined and centralized national party could solve.

An emphasis on public legitimacy and party nationalization counters three major conclusions that have comprised the dominant historical narrative on McGovern-Fraser for decades. First, prominent histories of the period have framed McGovern-Fraser at the center of a political insurgency that captured the Democratic Party and moved it further to the left in the early 1970s.Footnote ³ Second, this liberal group of outsiders that is said to have displaced the party old guard did so through massive reforms that went largely unnoticed. These perspectives are best articulated in the classic texts on McGovern-Fraser, Byron Shafer’s Quiet Revolution and William J. Crotty’s Decision for the Democrats, both of which argue that Democratic Party regulars underestimated the potential impact of reform as the commission developed its changes largely obscured from the public eye.Footnote ⁴ Third, McGovern-Fraser is a core element of the party decline thesis in political science, which claims that the reforms precipitated a candidate-centered primary system that allowed insurgent candidates and primary voters to usurp the party’s right of vetting and selecting its presidential nominee.Footnote ⁵

The premise that the McGovern-Fraser Commission was mainly a tool of radical insurgents, developed almost inconspicuously, belies its broader public perception and organizational purpose. Contrary to these long-held presumptions, the reform process was necessarily outward-facing and backed by the national party establishment in the context of a larger public discourse on political legitimacy and the future of democratic governance in the 1970s. At the center of this historical intervention is a challenge to the myopic focus on ideological division and the individual motives of strategic politicians.Footnote ⁶ Instead, McGovern-Fraser should be viewed through an institutional lens that sees explanatory value in the Democratic National Committee’s organizational concerns and strategic goals. Since its founding in 1848, the DNC continually struggled to develop permanent funding, staff, and political power beyond the quadrennial conventions. By the late 1960s, it still lacked organizational capacity and was subordinate to the dominance of state party leaders in the presidential nomination process.Footnote ⁷ For the perennially weak National Committee, McGovern-Fraser was a rare opportunity to reframe the party system and establish its authority as the central force for delegate selection, organization, and rulemaking.Footnote ⁸

A narrow definition of what constitutes a “party” contributes to the erroneous framing of McGovern-Fraser as a sign of party decline. Granted, the reforms stripped state party bosses of their discretionary power over the delegate selection and presidential nomination processes, but state parties were just one part of the larger whole. By limiting their definition of party to merely encompass state leaders, adherents of the party decline thesis have only been able to articulate a total loss of power rather than a shift in power from the states to the national party. Similarly, historical literature on parties often essentializes the party as the singular embodiment of one specific stakeholder such as a president, interest group, or particular movement. This single-actor definition of party precludes us from exploring the tensions between different party groups and institutions that collaborate and compete for control of the party agenda. As such, it is incumbent upon both political scientists and historians to disaggregate the “party” and carefully examine the development of its discrete constitutive elements such as state parties, citizen activists, interest groups, and in this specific case the National Committee.Footnote ⁹

In short, this article examines the centralizing impulses behind the Democratic National Committee’s rhetorical construction of one of the major electoral reforms of twentieth-century U.S. political history. By controlling the narrative and direction of its own crisis, George McGovern and other DNC leaders addressed the pressing calls for reform and simultaneously consolidated power at the expense of state party credibility. The focus on the Democratic National Committee’s organizational concerns, rather than the dominant narrative’s emphasis on ideological insurgency, thus centers and reframes the causal significance of institutional structures such as party commissions and procedural rules. Though the “revival” of American political history has certainly emphasized institutional histories of the state, the same cannot be said for party histories.Footnote ¹⁰ As this case study will demonstrate, historians must also consider the institutional components of political parties in order to more fully understand the alignment of electoral factions and the development of modern American democracy.

On August 13, 1968, an ad-hoc group of party regulars and a staff of young lawyers held the one and only meeting of the DNC’s Commission on the Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees. In the span of six weeks, this group was established and staffed, and produced an official report for the members of the Rules and Credentials Committees of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The commission, chaired by Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa, was originally spurred by Eugene McCarthy supporters’ challenge to the seemingly biased process for selecting National Convention delegates at the Connecticut Democratic State Convention.Footnote ¹¹ The Hughes Commission’s report, “The Democratic Choice,” issued several recommendations that hoped to set national standards for what was at that point was a hodge-podge confederation of states parties, each with their own specific procedure of convention-delegate selection.Footnote ¹² Foreboding language of the party’s impending demise accompanied the recommendations and analysis, issuing the following warning: “Participants in the Democratic National Convention of 1968 face an urgent task of intelligent conserving. They must conserve not only the convention itself, but also related institutions and values, which would not easily survive its end.”Footnote ¹³ Though specific in its original motivations, the short-lived Hughes Commission set off a larger discussion of crisis within the ranks of the Democratic National Committee.

In the days leading up to the 1968 Convention, the DNC Rules and Order of Business Committee met for its executive session on the morning of Friday, August 23, at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Electoral reform and other issues raised by the Hughes Commission dominated the day’s discussion. Most of the deliberations focused on the abolishment of the unit rule, a rule that allowed state parties to allocate all of their convention votes to the candidate supported by a simple majority of the state delegation. For many state parties, the unit rule was a long-held philosophy that allowed states to create influential voting blocs and was argued to be just as valid a representation of the electorate as a primary election. The tide of popular opinion, however, was quickly turning against the unit rule as national committee members believed that bloc votes expressed the sole whims of state party chairmen and precluded votes from sizable dissenting factions in unit-rule states. But the most critical ramification of abolishing the unit rule lay in the fact that it was the predominant and preferred method of nominee selection among Southern party chairmen.

The unit rule was one of the remaining tools at the disposal of Southern party leaders to maintain a modicum of influence in the national nomination process, but the debate to eliminate the rule was just the latest development in a decades-long power struggle between the national party and Southern Democrats. Most notable were the proceedings of the 1936 Democratic National Convention that lowered the required votes to win the presidential nomination from two-thirds to a simple majority of all delegates. The elimination of the two-thirds rule destroyed what was essentially a Southern veto of any nominee and formed part of Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to replace “the intransigent localism of the party” with a national liberal agenda.Footnote ¹⁴ Defanged southern party leaders notoriously expressed their dissatisfaction with this arrangement through the Dixiecrat Rebellion, in which Southern conservatives walked out of the 1948 National Convention and supported counter-nominee Strom Thurmond in protest of the party’s civil rights platform and nomination of Harry S. Truman for president.Footnote ¹⁵ In the context of the Democratic Party’s midcentury turn toward racial liberalism, an attack on the unit rule was the potential death knell for the influence of Southern parties in the Democratic presidential nomination.Footnote ¹⁶

In this way, the National Committee’s effort to shift the Democratic Party from a state-centric system to a strong national organization was deeply rooted in the persistent problem of Southern factionalism. But opposition to the unit rule was not totally exogenous given that some of the most prominent voices in the Rules Committee debate were southerners. Irving K. Kaler, a convention delegate from Georgia, urged the committee to replace the unit rule with a reformed nomination process “unbound and untutored by a bossism which we believe to be represented by the unit rule.”Footnote ¹⁷ Jim Hunt, president of the Young Democrats of North Carolina (and eventual four-term governor of the state), also found the unit rule to be a tool used by state bosses to repress the political preferences of youth, blacks, and liberals in the South. Yet the real problem was within the National Committee itself, which had little to no control over state parties and the presidential nomination process as a whole. To this end, Hunt argued, “we need to make the Democratic National Committee a more vigorous, progressive, and viable organization than it presently is.”Footnote ¹⁸ Thus the deliberation over the unit rule linked the distinct issues of fair delegate selection, Southern state party intransigence, and national party empowerment as part of the same political crisis to be carefully considered and acted upon at the convention in a few days.

The 1968 National Convention authorized the creation of several commissions, including the commissions on Equal Rights, Rules, and Party Structure and Delegate Selection.Footnote ¹⁹ While the three were all related to procedural reform of delegate selection, the most responsible and consequential of them was the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. It had two principal mandates: elimination of the unit rule and recommendation of uniform standards to oversee delegate selection. On February 9, 1969, DNC Chairman Fred Harris announced Senator George McGovern as the chair of the new reform commission, in addition to its twenty-six members, consisting mainly of state party officials and politicians, with an even geographic spread of West, Northeast, Midwest, and South.Footnote ²⁰ Just prior to his appointment, McGovern had sought and lost the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination as an anti-Vietnam, New Politics candidate, and had just begun his second term as a U.S. Senator from South Dakota. McGovern was a compromise between the extremes of radical and old guard, “an insurgent who had nonetheless endorsed and campaigned for Humphrey in 1968.”Footnote ²¹ His popularity with young activists, his regular cooperation with DNC leadership, and his reputation as a measured intellectual made him a logical fit for the position.

Word of McGovern’s appointment as commission chair spread quickly. Congratulatory notes came across his desk from colleagues in the political world and beyond in the weeks following the announcement. In his response to a letter from Harvard Law Professor Adam Yarmolinsky, McGovern noted that his new role was “a rather delicate and hazardous assignment.”Footnote ²² In fact, McGovern had been thinking a lot about the precarious existence of his party, and by extension American democracy, long before his chairmanship. Locally, Democratic voters had been actively questioning the representativeness of the party leading up to the 1968 election. Ms. Ina Litke, a constituent from the small town of Vermillion, South Dakota, wrote to her senator in the summer of 1968 with serious concerns about the Democratic National Convention. Litke expressed to McGovern that she and others in her community held a strong suspicion that the party “pros” would ignore the wishes of the people and select the insider favorite, Hubert Humphrey. The small-town woman advised her senator in the straightforward and discerning tone of a fed-up voter, “I feel it’s critically important for individuals to feel they have a stake in this campaign and election.”Footnote ²³

There was also much talk about the problems facing American democracy in elite political circles at the national level. In a notable example, Senator Sam Ervin Jr. of North Carolina wrote to McGovern in November 1968 with a legislative proposal to eliminate the Electoral College.Footnote ²⁴ In his letter, Ervin linked the Democratic Party’s debate over the unit rule to the larger representational issues of the Electoral College, arguing that “the present system of selecting a President and Vice President is a questionable appendage to our governmental institutions since the rise of political parties.”Footnote ²⁵ Though Litke’s and Ervin’s letters are the minority in an archival source pool focused on the discussion happening inside the institution, it is hard to imagine that McGovern read their concerns as separate problems. In fact, these local and national concerns about the American political system would come to dominate George McGovern’s work in the DNC over the next two years, in ways he could not have foreseen at the end of 1968.

At its first official meeting on March 1, 1969, the McGovern Commission authorized a national hearing process, which was intended to gather input on the group’s mandate and the kinds of recommendations it should propose. Hearings were organized in sixteen major cities, to be conducted by five commissioner taskforces.Footnote ²⁶ Over the course of that spring and summer, the commissioners toured the country and received testimony from hundreds of individuals invested in the future of the Democratic Party. Though commission staff did not see much use in the listening tour, given that their research and writing was already well under way, the events did further other objectives.Footnote ²⁷ The hearings gave a space for state party leaders and other traditional Democratic stakeholders to express their concerns. By physically going to request input in major cities like Chicago, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, the McGovern Commission was taking the first steps in demonstrating an earnest reform effort and obtaining buy-in from key state parties and core constituencies for a project that would spur the growth of the national party apparatus.

The testimony of labor leaders was especially important for the commission staff to highlight in reports to McGovern given their status as one of the most tenuous blocs of the endangered New Deal coalition, in addition to being powerbrokers at the state and local levels. Organized labor, among other party regulars, actively participated in the hearings, counter to the assumption that they were inherently opposed to the commission’s work.Footnote ²⁸ Leaders of the politically liberal United Auto Workers were most supportive of the reform project, as evidenced in the impassioned testimony put forward by Paul Schrade, the California regional director of the UAW. “Our party, like our nation, is being overwhelmed by repression and exploitation by the few at the expense of the many,” Schrade testified at the Los Angeles hearing. “This is why we need a new politics, a new coalition, and a new Democratic Party.”Footnote ²⁹ But the left-leaning UAW was not the only labor voice at the hearings. Darwin Aycock, the secretary-treasurer of the more conservative Arizona AFL-CIO, also gave a surprisingly optimistic testimony at the Phoenix hearing. “If the new politics means anything,” he argued that May, “it means that people chosen as delegates must be chosen democratically so that they represent in a real sense their state’s democrats.”Footnote ³⁰

Soon after the Arizona hearing, commission staff processed hundreds of testimonials from the first half of the hearings into an executive summary for the commissioners. The staff emphasized three main issue areas: delegate selection, grassroots participation, and party structure. The first two areas understandably dominated much of the hearings, with well-established concerns from participants over the fair representation of minority groups and the removal of barriers to inclusion in party decision-making. The third area of party structure, however, should not be ignored. Commission staff highlighted in their summary that, “many witnesses have expressed the view that the national party should play a more significant role in the ongoing affairs of the party.”Footnote ³¹ Among the discussions of diversifying delegations to the convention and making elections more representative, participants at the hearings also expressed that problems in their states could not be solved without a national party structure to coordinate and standardize the changes. It is this underanalyzed logic of party nationalization that was unreservedly embraced by the McGovern Commission, perhaps more than any other.

Over the course of the summer, commission staff worked with a three-member consultant committee comprised of commission members Anne Wexler, Richard Wade, and Alexander Bickel. Wexler chaired the consultant committee because of her knowledge of party process as a member of the DNC Rules Committee. Prior to this appointment, she had already made a name for herself as one of the forces behind the party’s reform movement. Her leadership of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign effort in Connecticut led to the challenge of the state’s delegate selection practices, which ultimately forced the creation of the Hughes Commission. As for the other two consultants, their academic expertise fundamentally shaped the commission’s understanding of the legal, political, and historical implications of the party’s reformation. Like Wexler, Richard C. Wade brought his own brand of political expertise to the consultant committee. He was a professor of American history at the University of Chicago when he was appointed to the commission. Widely regarded as the father of urban history, Wade brought a historical mind to party politics. Wade “was always unusual among historians for his near obsession with contemporary affairs,” as evidenced in his management of Robert Kennedy’s 1964 senate campaign in New York while also teaching at the university.Footnote ³² Similarly, Bickel was a law professor at Yale specializing in constitutional law. His foray into politics began after law school, when he served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Bickel’s unique legal perspective that the courts “should not make decisions that cannot gain public support” permeated his thinking about the contentious, public, and delicate work of the McGovern Commission.Footnote ³³

In October, the academic duo completed a set of discussion papers for the commission’s deliberation on the path forward, known as the Wade-Bickel papers. The papers outlined the legal and political debates around two key issues facing the commission: apportionment and fair representation of social and political minorities within the party. The problem of apportionment dealt with the issue of how states should determine the influence of Democratic voters in the delegate-selection process according to the principle of “one man, one vote.” Through his argument, Wade set up two options for the commission: either create national guidelines dictating intrastate apportionment or allow the states to decide for themselves in the current chaotic system that would result in “inevitable litigation.”Footnote ³⁴ The choice between a national or state-based solution was clear. On his end, Bickel focused on how states could ensure representation of minority views in their delegations to the National Convention. Though the DNC framed its problem as the public’s waning trust and faith in the party, Professor Bickel astutely addressed the institution’s problem as a crisis of legitimacy:

It was in this document that a historian and constitutional law scholar put words to the crisis that the national party leaders had been talking about. Together they helped define the problem and prescribed the means for the institution’s salvation. With the terms of the reform now established, the rhetorical campaign to sell the reform to state parties and the public began.

By October 1969, the commission nearly finalized its proposed guidelines for delegate selection and distributed well over two thousand copies of its findings with a request for feedback to state party chairmen, Democratic governors, members of the Democratic National Committee, members of Congress, labor leaders, racial-ethnic interest groups, and academics. This request for feedback was largely symbolic, a way to impart on state-based interests the sense that they had a stake in the commission’s work.Footnote ³⁶ Only a month after the comment period, the McGovern Commission met and adopted the official guidelines for delegate selection at its November 20 meeting. In contrast to the language in the reports of the 1964 Equal Rights Commission and 1968 Hughes Commission, the eighteen new guidelines were more than mere recommendations. Two categories indicated the level of adherence expected from state parties: “required” and “urged.” Required changes included a codified ban on racial discrimination, the creation of clearly delineated delegate-selection rules at the state party level, and an end to the unit rule in time for the 1972 National Convention. The guidelines also urged states to adopt other changes such as lowering voter-registration barriers, but these were not immediately required because their implementation might involve lengthy changes in state law or other complications.Footnote ³⁷

State buy-in to the reform process developed quickly in the autumn of 1969, as thirty-three states appointed reform commissions of their own to create and change state party rules in accordance with the forthcoming requirements of the McGovern Commission.Footnote ³⁸ This was the early fruit of the commission’s consistent outreach and correspondence with state party leaders to jumpstart the process, in addition to local calls for reform. DNC publications such as the biweekly Demo Memo were the main vehicle for disseminating information to state parties and making the case for the reforms. The November and December issues highlighted the early progress that several individual states were making in terms of meeting the new guidelines, perhaps to the chagrin of less proactive states left behind. In a December Demo Memo article on the McGovern Commission guidelines, the publication stressed the open and participatory process that resulted in the new policies, stemming directly from the public hearings and comments from party leaders. Alongside its discussion of the McGovern Commission was coverage of the recently launched O’Hara Rules Commission, which focused on the reform of interstate delegate apportionment.Footnote ³⁹ Together, the commissions were framed as part of one whole reform process that would make the national convention more representative and add “new vitality and strength to the national party.”Footnote ⁴⁰

While word spread to stakeholders within the party, DNC officials were simultaneously communicating to the skeptical public that the Democratic Party was holding true to its promises of reform. The DNC’s external rhetorical strategy sought to justify its approach to legitimacy and bolster its position with the public at the expense of state parties. Senator Fred Harris, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press for a Sunday morning interview on October 19, 1969. Host Lawrence Spivak moderated the wide-ranging interview between Harris and a panel of four journalists, covering a gamut of issues including the Vietnam War, inflation, and, of course, party reform. Prominent reporters Robert Semple of the New York Times and Russell Freeburg of the Chicago Tribune were guest interviewers on the show and directly engaged Harris on the issue of reform.

They asked whether or not the reforms would exacerbate divisions among the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, favoring a base that was increasingly northern, intellectual, black, and young, leaving Southern Democrats behind. Harris countered the negative forecast with complete faith in the transformative effect of the McGovern Commission. “There are a lot of people that confuse disagreement with hopeless division. I believe there is a great deal of dynamism in the party … engaged in self-renewal, in reforming and rebuilding itself from within.”Footnote ⁴¹ Here, Harris tried to flip the script on the crisis facing the party; this was not a moment of fracture in his view, but rather of reinvention. It is curious that “rebuilding” the party was Harris’s primary response to a question on the fragmentation of the Democratic base, when one would logically expect a message of reconciliation and compromise. Though it may have seemed incongruous that the DNC chairman viewed national party building as the right response to accusations of hopeless division, his message was fully aligned with the rhetorical strategy developed by the McGovern Commission.

As chair of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, George McGovern was the most ardent public advocate of the reforms. In January 1970, McGovern was featured in an issue of Harper’s Magazine entitled “Power & the People” along with opinion pieces by Saul Alinsky, Bayard Rustin, and other voices for radical political change. In his essay, “The Lessons of 1968,” McGovern outlined the crisis of legitimacy facing his party and the way forward to Harper’s national audience of nearly four hundred thousand monthly subscribers.Footnote ⁴² The piece began by framing the violence and ideological division at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as the peak failure of the convention system’s structure, “a failure of democracy, [that] went to the heart of the American political system.”Footnote ⁴³ McGovern then provided a historical overview of his commission’s investigation and hearing process concerning the corrupted presidential nomination process. At the core of the article were the scathing findings of an unnamed state’s delegate selection procedures. “As a consequence of the absence of state or party rules, vast discretion was left to local leaders in the arrangement of conventions,” the article read; “not surprisingly, the discretion was often abused.”Footnote ⁴⁴

This example of the anonymous state was McGovern’s way of highlighting the problems that his commission had found and hoped to resolve. In a masterful rhetorical move, McGovern addressed reform skeptics by demonstrating the progress his commission had made in only nine months. At the same time, the structure of his argument rooted the corruption of the process explicitly within the states. The article emphasized to the reader that the abuse of discretionary political power at the local and state level was not limited to just one case. As McGovern noted, “the Commission’s inquiries have shown that its practices are far from unique.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way, McGovern constructed the crisis of legitimacy as the failure of local and state parties—a problem that only regulation from an empowered and responsible national party could solve. Much like Chairman Harris’s framing of the Democratic Party’s growing pains, the language of crisis masked the contradiction between the DNC’s goal of increased representation and the solution, which required taking power away from state parties. But the work of the McGovern Commission was still ongoing, and the rest of the year would be focused on making this particular solution to the party’s crisis a reality.

In April 1970, the commission released its full report, Mandate for Reform, to the Democratic National Committee, state parties, and other interested stakeholders. The report consisted of a history of the commission, the required guidelines, and a state-by-state analysis of the current delegate-selection procedures. But the contents are of less importance to this argument than how they were presented to the members of the party. The report was prefaced with statements from national party figureheads, including Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, Eugene McCarthy, Edward Kennedy, Fred Harris, and Larry O’Brien. In their praise of the commission’s work, these collective endorsements from the party establishment sought to counter the notion that the reform effort was a front for ideological insurgents to capture the party and move it further left. In his introduction to the report, McGovern emphasized that the reforms were not only in the interest of marginalized constituencies, but were vital to the very preservation of the two-party system itself. Party nationalization once again played a feature role in the justification of the reform process. McGovern confirmed to readers that “throughout its deliberations, the aim of the commission has been to strengthen the National Convention, and in the process, to strengthen our Party and American democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁶

George McGovern’s primary task as commission chair was accomplished with the release of the report. He had successfully launched and steered the effort through the hearing, research, and reporting phases. In July, the commission’s executive committee met to discuss the future activities of the group. Now that Mandate for Reform was published, the staff shifted its focus to mailing reminders about the guidelines, drafting state-specific position papers for state parties, preparing interim reports on state conventions and a final report to the rules and credentials committees of the upcoming national convention.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the time of the executive committee’s meeting in July, forty states had already established party reform commissions of their own.Footnote ⁴⁸ Progress continued at a steady pace, and by November of that same year, Commission Staff Director Bob Nelson reported that only three states had not yet appointed reform commissions.Footnote ⁴⁹ This headway in state parties’ implementation of the national requirements was just the solid foundation McGovern needed to depart with an easy conscience.

In January 1971, McGovern stepped down as chair of the reform commission and officially launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Contrary to his bid in 1968, this time McGovern was the first to announce his candidacy and became the early frontrunner. Already well known for his antiwar stances and as champion of New Politics, his leadership of the party’s reformation was a new angle of appeal for the nascent campaign. As for the commission, the implementation of the plans established under McGovern’s leadership in the time remaining before the 1972 Convention would fall to the new chair, Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota. Fraser was already a member of the commission, serving as the chairman of the Model Delegate Selection Subcommittee, and his work on state party implementation made for a smooth transition of leadership. Through the rest of 1971 and 1972, Fraser gradually led the commission in the arduous task of implementing the ambitious requirements across all states and territories. Despite the transition in leadership, McGovern continued to endorse the reform effort once he was out on the campaign trail.

McGovern’s experience leading the commission shaped his campaign strategy as the senator leveraged his image of political reformer to his advantage. McGovern on the Issues was a comprehensive policy platform published by the McGovern campaign in the fall of 1971. Alongside bread-and-butter campaign issues such as education, welfare, and foreign policy was a segment on the issue of political reform. To no surprise, the booklet touted McGovern’s role in the party’s reform process as reflective of his “dedication to an honest and responsive political system.”Footnote ⁵⁰ A campaign press release from February 1972 pushed the stakes further when McGovern framed himself as the only reform candidate in the running. The statement called into question the other Democratic hopefuls’ commitment to reversing gender inequality on the delegate slates representing them at the National Convention. McGovern charged that “both major and minor candidates in this year’s contest for the Democratic nomination have shown that the Democratic Party’s own reforms mean very little to them,” with limited representation of women, people of color, and youth in their delegate slates.Footnote ⁵¹ In the case of Pennsylvania, for example, this accusation held true, with McGovern closer than Muskie or Humphrey in meeting the requirement that delegations approximately reflect the population in terms of gender, race, and age.Footnote ⁵²

Yet when it came to party loyalty and defending the reforms, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey had more similarities than differences. On the evening of Sunday, June 4, 1972, ABC’s public affairs program Issues and Answers broadcast from Los Angeles a one-hour, special primetime debate featuring the Democratic presidential hopefuls only two days before the hotly contested California Democratic primary.Footnote ⁵³ Correspondent Frank Reynolds asked the first question of the hour: Would the candidates pledge to support the nominee of the upcoming 1972 Democratic Convention? Humphrey was the first to confirm his support of the party’s nominee. McGovern also pledged his support by highlighting his own work reforming the Democratic nomination process. “The whole delegate selection process by which we select the Democratic nominee,” he said, “is much more open and more representative this year than it was four years ago.” But Shirley Chisholm refused to pledge her support for “just any candidate” nominated by the party, a position shared by Sam Yorty and George Wallace (via proxy).Footnote ⁵⁴

This split among the candidates shocked Reynolds, who said, “Well, as I read it here, we have five contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, only two of whom will actively or openly profess to support the nominee.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As party standard-bearers and leading candidates, McGovern and Humphrey clearly understood the exigency of defending the reformed delegate selection procedures in front of a national television audience. In their view, public awareness and acceptance of the reforms was needed to justify the DNC’s growth and the preservation of the two-party system as a whole. This united front held by McGovern and Humphrey continued in their responses to Sam Donaldson’s line of questioning on the Illinois credentials challenge. Pressed further on the transparency and legitimacy of the delegate selection process, Humphrey declared, “I helped appoint the McGovern Commission that made these reforms. I stand by these reforms.”Footnote ⁵⁶ On this national stage, both men spoke with the DNC’s institutional goals in mind. On this specific issue, both men were party insiders, not insurgents.

The 1972 Democratic Party platform assumed a triumphant tone. Asserting its victory over the crisis of the late 1960s and restoration of the two-party system through the reform process, the National Committee now looked to the future. Now that the internal reforms were achieved, the DNC attempted to assure the electorate of its commitment to representative governance. The national party boldly pledged itself to advance voting rights, to increase civic engagement and gender inclusivity, and to abolish the Electoral College through a constitutional amendment. In the very last lines of the platform, the DNC linked its transformation to a national crisis of legitimacy beyond the Democratic Party, in which delegate-selection procedures were only one part of a larger issue. “These changes in themselves will not solve the problems of government for all time,” the platform argued. “As our society changes, so must the ways we use to make government more responsive to the people. Our challenge, today, as always, is to ensure that politics and institutions belong in spirit and in practice to all the people of our nation.”Footnote ⁵⁷

After the McGovern-Fraser Commission’s three years of work, the new rules were finally in play at the Democratic National Convention in Miami. Tensions were high during the hot and humid days of mid-July, and two controversial challenges to the delegate selection processes in California and Illinois took center stage at the convention. McGovern had won the contentious California primary by 5 percent, a victory that earned him all of the state’s delegates according to state law. The senator’s political opponents challenged California’s winner-take-all primary in the convention’s Credentials Committee on the grounds that it was just another version of the unit rule and therefore violated the reform commission’s new rules. Ultimately, the challenge was dismissed. As for Illinois, Credentials Chair Patricia Harris completely dissolved the Daley-led Illinois delegation due to its underrepresentation of women and people of color, and replaced it with an unelected delegation headed by Alderman William Singer and Jesse Jackson. Both situations demonstrated the magnitude of the National Committee’s newfound enforcement power and the advantage that came with the McGovern campaign’s ready knowledge of how the reforms worked.Footnote ⁵⁸

A few days after becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern wrote an article entitled “How I Won It” for Newsday’s 450,000 subscribers and reprints in several other papers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even after winning the nomination, McGovern still sought to defend the party’s reform process and legitimacy to a public audience. Despite the optics caused by the advantageous implementation of the new delegate selection rules in the California and Illinois challenges, McGovern did not attribute his win to the rules, arguing that the reform process “affected the tone of the delegate selection process and of the convention more than it affected the outcome of the presidential race.”Footnote ⁶⁰ After the 1972 convention, DNC Chair Larry O’Brien transitioned to become chairman of the McGovern campaign. On August 8 at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, O’Brien made his first remarks to the DNC in his new role, launching McGovern’s presidential campaign. That night, also reflecting on the stakes of the election, O’Brien addressed the heightened challenge to regain the trust of the American people. “Perhaps no presidential election in our 200 years has been such a clear-cut test of the two-party system in America. Perhaps never before has a political party faced so vast a challenge—yet so vast an opportunity.”Footnote ⁶¹

If the 1972 presidential election was a test, then the results were mixed. The general election was a disaster for the Democrats. Incumbent Richard Nixon carried forty-nine states and beat McGovern in one of the most dramatic electoral landslides in American history. However, the Democratic candidate’s stunning electoral defeat was not the only test score he received. Three weeks after Election Day, campaign staffer Eli Segal gave Senator McGovern a memo concerning delegates selected to the National Convention. The memo was likely part of a typical post-loss campaign autopsy, but one can imagine how the message also offered a hopeful note for McGovern in an otherwise depressing moment. Segal reported on political analysis from CBS of the delegates sent to the 1972 National Convention. As the DNC had hoped, there was an increase in union officials and blue-collar workers, a testament to the weakened but still-standing labor base of the party. Most important, the memo highlighted the change in the proportion of delegates that were lawyers and businessmen.

In 1968, lawyers comprised 30 percent of delegates, while businessmen were at 29 percent, but the 1972 numbers showed a marked decrease to 12 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Segal expressed his shock at these numbers, stating that “this combined decrease from 59% to 20% is, probably, the greatest single source of our post-convention problems while at the same time the best single index of the success of our party’s reform effort.”Footnote ⁶² There was also a decrease in graduate-degree holders as well as a lowered average income and age among delegates, partially attributed to an influx of young people, blacks, and women from working-class backgrounds. Between the 1968 and 1972 conventions, youth below the age of thirty increased from 4 percent to 21 percent and blacks from 5.5 percent to 15 percent. But the most drastic increase was in the representation of women, a figure that jumped from 13 percent in 1968 all the way up to 40 percent of delegates at the 1972 National Convention in Miami.Footnote ⁶³ These demographic shifts would bring up new problems regarding the DNC’s finances, programming, and governance. Breaking a decades-long coalition with the upper echelons of the legal and business communities, while bringing new groups into the process, the politically emboldened National Committee would continue to reckon with the uncertain course it set for the future of the Democratic Party.