Super February? Giga Tuesday?
Primaries (and the less-common caucuses) have always been a fickle thing. States move theirs around to curry advantages from candidates who desperately need early wins. This could be one reason why the presidential race is already in full swing more than a year and a half before election day–the primaries are so early in 2008 that if you don’t get started now, it may be too late.
Iowa and New Hampshire have hogged the process, you have to admit. Sure, small states should not be ignored, and many of them get a lot of attention because of the scheduling of primaries. They always have to be out in front. Whenever another state moves up to compete with them, Iowa and New Hampshire move even further forward, like greedy children who have to be first in the dinner line.
California, on the other hand, has held its primary in June (except for a dalliance with a March primary in 1996 & 2000), which means that by the time the race gets to them, the nominees are already long-decided. That often happens by March, when Super Tuesday comes around. That March date has been inching forward over the years, and now may get a huge shove forward, as California and perhaps 20 other states (including Florida, New York, Michigan, Texas, Missouri, and New Jersey) consider moving their primaries to February 5th.
This will not knock out Iowa and New Hampshire, who have their caucus/primary in January. But this will make a big difference in another respect: with so many big states voting so early, the party nominee may be able to wrap things up far earlier than ever before. Iowa will probably be mid-January, and New Hampshire late January–and then the very next week, “Giga Tuesday” (as the media is beginning to call it). Just two or three weeks from the first votes until the last that matter.
This will require not just more campaigning in the populous states that will move up to February, but also longer campaigning beforehand to make up for the telescoped voting schedule, and furious campaigning in the short stretch between Iowa and Giga Tuesday.
The stretch between the nominee being decided and the convention will still be a long one, only just a little longer than before. But it will still be, in itself, a complication, due to spending rules before and after the convention–not to mention the jockeying for position in convention dates. Democrats will hold theirs from August 25-28 in Denver, while the Republicans strategically mount their own a week later, so as to steal the news attention and the poll “bump” that comes from it.
In a way, all of this is messy, uncoordinated, and inconvenient (which I believe is part of the dictionary definition of “Democracy”). Who knows, if it gets even messier in the future, things might break down enough that the whole thing will get reorganized in some way. Or then again, maybe not–look at the electoral college. We’re still waiting for that particular long-dead horse carcass to be dragged away.
Talk about messy… here in Washington, we have had a long tradition of open primaries. We don’t register by party here; we just register to vote. You get a voter’s ID card with your precinct and “where to vote” info on it, and that’s it.
A few years back, the political parties in California challenged this system. They hated that anyone that wanted could vote in their party’s primary and, in effect, pick the party’s nominee.
The federal courts held that the parties’ right to free association was being violated. The notion is that the party is a collection of people, and it exists for a reason (to essentially endorse a candidate). By allowing anyone to vote, that violates the party’s ability to pick its OWN candidates.
The suggestion is that when (for example) the Democratic Party’s nomination is all sewn up by a particular candidate, or a candidate is unchallenged, sophisticated Democrats would vote for the *weakest* Republican candidate in the primary, hoping that person would win and be the nominee.
That way, when the general rolled around and they voted for the Democrat, hopefully the Dem would be up against some crappy loser Republican and have an easier time winning.
The courts agreed, unfortunately, and ruled that the open primary was a no-no.
This affected us here in Washington, because the parties objected to the state’s open primary and got it overturned. The Washington State Grange, who were instrumental in getting the open primaries in the first place (decades and decades ago) then sponsored and saw passed an initiative that tried to get around the court ruling.
Eventually, I think here in Washington we’re headed for a totally open primary- where anyone can vote for anyone, and the top two vote-getters in the primary will be the candidates in the general election, period. The people here are really irritated with the parties’ meddling; we want to be able to vote for anyone.
And we split tickets here. For example, in 2006 we had an incredibly close election for governor. (Refusal to poke around in the aftermath of that election is what cost our local US Attorney his job recently.) Over 70,000 people in the Seattle area alone voted for John Kerry for President (the Democrat) but voted for Dino Rossi for Washington Governor (the Republicon).
So all this messiness ties into the Presidential primary voting system… like this: Here, we’re probably going to cancel our Presidential primary (which had been moved earlier in the year) altogether. Why?
Because the parties don’t use the primary for the results; they use their own separate caucuses.
(The theme here is that the political parties are deaf to what the people really want; people would probably prefer to have a primary instead of attending a caucus. The parties don’t care.)
In theory, the Presidential primary system would be one where a better-but-underfunded candidate could work a state really hard and gain some traction by showing his/her ideas and marketing (let’s face is, Presidents are a lot about marketing) are better than the other guy’s.
What I’d like to see is a system where they mixed up regions and big states with little states. A friendly, great-one-on-one candidate might do well in New Hampshire, but bomb in states like California where he or she can’t possibly campaign to individuals and has to use the media instead. Both are important.
And it should be set up in such a way that there’s enough time for someone doing poorly to get back in.
Of course, American Presidential elections are a big mess anyway. The electoral college and winner-takes-all setup is screwier than hell, when Al Gore gets 51.0 million votes but loses to George Bush who only gets 50.4 million votes.
It’s fairly ironic that the nation that was a leader in this “experiment in democracy”, the one that’s held out as a leading light in the world… we’re all goofy when it comes to electing a President.
Paul
Seattle, WA