Trump is right, the convention is rigged -- and that's a good thing

Democratizing the nomination process has, by contrast, encouraged presidents to think they can draw on the raw and unfiltered will of the people to promote their agendas. Yet the separation of powers instructs otherwise, both because Congress, too, represents the people—represents it differently, more subtly, more diffusely—and because, as James Madison reminds us in Federalist 10, we operate under the republican rather than the democratic principle, the difference being a government in which “the scheme of representation takes place.”

Allowing the convention to act as what George F. Will incisively calls a “deliberative body” would also be the closest approximation of testing the eventual nominee’s capacity to share a sandbox with others who have also been chosen by ballot, who represent a diversity of interests in all their maddening parochiality, and who focus the public’s views. Significantly, Trump has been trounced in caucuses, which the process-obsessed media sees as a test of his organizational skills. They may more accurately be a test of his ability to survive settings in which people stop and think before voting.

Stopping and thinking is also why the parties should encourage nominating conventions rather than frontload the primary calendar in attempts to crown nominees early. This may help nominees win—may—but it does not prepare them to govern. The reason it only “may” help them win is that, like most democracy fetishes, unleashing the immediate popular will in this case does little to reflect genuine popular will. That is true in two senses: one practical, the other theoretical.