Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford, says in this interview that a major party might get a presidential nominee who is better at governing, if it didn’t use presidential primaries and caucuses across the nation to choose its presidential nominees. Of course, the system he seems to prefer was in place in the United States before 1972.
BTW, if anyone else was wondering as I did, Professor Fiorina is associated with the Hoover Institution (associated with Stanford), but is not related to Carly Fiorina — at least, according to this article:
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/GOP-likely-to-knock-3-candidates-S-F-ties-3185041.php