Candidate Selection Methods

In nineteenth century Pennsylvania, county party organizations were independent not only from each other but also from the state party. Their internal schisms reflected the factional divisions of the state party leaders at times, but these factions would also take stands on policy issues inconsistent with what the state party campaigned for, especially when they contradicted local interests, such as internal development. They had complete freedom in the way they managed intraparty affairs at the county level, and party organizations in each county adopted dissenting faction often built a coalition with the opposition party (e.g., the Federalists), in which case both the minor faction of the major party and the opposition party were classified as the non-Democratic party together. The Whigs, the Anti-Masons, and the Know Nothings were separate political entities, but they often had to work with each other in order to maximize their threat to the ruling Democratic Party. Often, they came up with fusion tickets, both at the state and local levels. There was continuance or overlap in the personnel among these forces, especially in rural counties. As a result, in most counties, the electoral campaigns took the form of two-way competition most of the time, even during the Antebellum Era. The non-Democrat category is equivalent to the Republican Party after the Civil War. The Liberal Republicans and the Independent

Republicans, who challenged the mainstream Republican machine, are classified as non-Democrat unless they clearly allied with the Democratic Party and avoided a three-way race. When there were nomination records of both mainstream and insurgent Republicans from the same county, the former classification is adopted as an observation as representing the non-Democratic category of the county.

any CSM they found convenient or developed countless versions that best suited their conditions. Although there were countless variations in the CSMs adopted by county organizations and it was often difficult to track them down in detail, most cases fall into one of the following five broad categories: mass meetings, uniform delegate system, graded delegate system, Clarion County system, and direct primary (or popular vote).45 _{The latter was also called the Crawford}

County system by contemporaries. Mass meetings had little structure, especially in terms of representation, while the remaining four methods were more or less better structured with rules for representation. The two delegate systems had an indirect mechanism of decision making in common, but differed in the apportionment rules of delegates. The Clarion system and the primary shared the direct vote feature, but the Clarion system converted primary votes into final outcomes via the winner-take-all scheme. Below, I describe each system in turn.

During the first few decades of the early nineteenth century, many county parties seemed to have used the form of CSM called mass meeting, where any voter could walk in and participate in the nomination process. In many cases, delegates were also sent in from each township, and it is not clear how the meetings were managed or how the nominations were made.

45 _{There were many county-party-years in which some information on nomination activity was available but}

for which the rules were unclear. These cases were omitted from the data set unless it was clear that the delegates from each township determined the nomination and the method for apportioning delegates was known.

Because these mass meetings were usually held at the county seats, attendees tended to overrepresent the residents of the county seat area. This may have been the reason why many county parties adopted the uniform delegate system as a next step, implying that the uniform delegate system emerged from concerns over sectional interests.

The uniform delegate system assigned a uniform (i.e., equal) number of delegates to each subdivision of the county (in most cases, townships)46 _{for representation at the county}

convention. In most typical cases, all townships in a county were assigned two delegates each, regardless of the size of their area, population, or party vote. This method was probably based on the concept of sectional interests, which played an important role, especially in the early nineteenth century, when road conditions were poor and internal development was a dividing issue. This uniform delegate system overrepresented sparsely populated rural areas while underrepresenting the densely populated urban areas within a county. In turn, this problem led to the development of the graded delegate system.

Under the most typical graded delegate system, each township in a county was assigned different numbers of delegates in proportion to the party vote cast in the previous gubernatorial election. Each township was entitled to one delegate, no matter how small its party vote had been in the previous gubernatorial election, and each was also apportioned an additional delegate for

every 51–100 party votes after the first 100 votes. For example, two townships with 35 votes and 150 votes, respectively, would be equally entitled to one delegate each. Two townships with 151 votes and 250 votes, respectively, would be equally entitled to two delegates each. The ratio of apportionment changed across time and counties, but the minimum rule of one delegate per township was universal. Therefore, sparsely populated areas continued to be overrepresented to some extent. Both the uniform and the graded delegate systems relied on majority rule for decision-making at county conventions, under which no one could win the nomination unless he won a majority of the total delegate votes cast.

The system that became known for practices seen in Clarion County was an attempt to reflect the township’s vote power in the general election more accurately in the nomination process. Under this system, a candidate who won the plurality in a township meeting (which was called a “primary” at the time) received the entire party vote cast in the township in the previous gubernatorial election. Then, these numbers from each township were tallied at the county convention to determine the countywide winner. It was a big jump from the two previously discussed delegate systems because it was the primary vote—not the delegates—that determined the outcome of the nomination. In a sense, this system can be regarded as a version of the direct primary, the main difference being the winner-take-all “unit vote” rule based on the unit of township. Although the system was well known among contemporaries, the number of counties

which adopted this Clarion County system remained relatively small compared to other CSMs. This system could result in different outcomes from those which may have resulted from a simple tally of popular vote (i.e., the direct primary). The Crawford County system was a simple direct popular vote by party supporters, under which the raw tallies of votes cast in each township determine the nomination winner under plurality rule.