After the death of Rev. Jesse Jackson at the age of 84, his legacy is being remembered on a wide variety of fronts.
One of those fronts can be found in the way political parties in the United States choose their candidates for the presidency.
Jackson ran for president in the Democratic primaries in both 1984 and in 1988. He won primaries or caucuses in 13 states during the latter election before losing the nomination to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, but his performance caused the Democratic Party to change the way it nominated candidates.
Where previously the party had gone with a “winner-take-all” strategy in terms of assigning delegates to its candidates, it instead moved to apportionment of delegates based on voting.
“One of the major rules that he changed was that instead of delegates going all to one person in a state, it then became proportionality,” Delmarie Cobb, one of the key leaders of Jackson’s 1988 campaign, said.
Cobb said that apportionment of delegates ultimately paved the way for a new generational of political leaders to achieve power, including then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama when he won the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008.
“Each candidate got a proportion of their delegates based on the vote, and that made the way for Barack Obama to become the president in 2008,” she said.
Cobb praised Jackson for his shrewd use of his platform and his political power to enact change in the electoral process.
“There would be no Barack Obama had there not been a Jesse Jackson,” she said.
The former president praised Jackson’s life and legacy in a statement on Tuesday.
“In his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land,” he said.
In addition to his impacts on electoral politics, Jackson used his platform with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition to advocate for political change. He criticized the war in Iraq, raised alarm about the quality of drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and countless battles to achieve equal rights for all citizens, all the while establishing himself as one of the most influential political thinkers and speakers of his generation.
