The Primary Problem

George Will makes some good points regarding the newly-frontloaded presidential primary schedule. The Feb. 5 super tuesday isn't necessarily going to make voters in the big states any more relevant, but it is likely to give voters less chance to see how the candidates perform over time.

On the first point:

Every campaign is shaped by two scarcities - the candidate's time, and money. No candidate will have enough of either to campaign intensely, in person or even on television, in perhaps 24 states across the continent in the 22 days between Iowa (Jan. 14) and Feb. 5. As political analyst Charlie Cook says, this will raise the stakes - the free media attention, and the momentum it imparts - that will accrue to the winner or winners of the first four states (South Carolina Democrats and Republicans vote on Jan. 29 and Feb. 2, respectively). Indeed, if one person wins three or all four of those, the Feb. 5 primaries might be mere ratifying echoes rather than deciding events.

With regard to the second point: complaints about the long primary season notwithstanding, the new calendar is actually likely to compress the primary campaign into a very brief window of time late next winter. The nominees-apparent will then be left to keep themselves busy until the party conventions. It's kind of a dreadful prospect, when you think about it.

I've never been one to moan about how unusually long the American presidential campaign is compared to those in other countries. We're a big country, and the long campaign is a result of both that and of the democratization of the nomination process. Our nominees are no longer chosen in smoke-filled rooms at brokered conventions, nor are they pre-designated parliamentary leaders. They're chosen by the voters - which means they have to criss-cross the country to meet the voters. And that takes a lot of time.

Complaints about the length of the campaign season seem misguided to me. It is fair to complain about some states having more influence than others in the primary calendar - but the solution is not to create a national primary in early February. Many people have suggested some form of rotating primary calendar. This seems to make a lot more sense - and it would preserve the tradition of retail politics, which may seem to take ridiculously long, but is, after all, a solid democratic process.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, primaries

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:29 AM 3 comments

  Return of the Smoke-Filled Room?

The Politicker posts a fascinating email from Andrew Rice about what could end up happening as states shift their primaries forward: a return to old-style brokered conventions.

[I]f big delegate states like California and New York move ahead in the calendar, there might not be time for this shaking-out process to occur. It'd effectively be a national primary, taking place over the course of a couple weeks, and you could certainly imagine a scenario where Edwards takes the south, Hillary wins New York and the northeast, and Obama wins Illinois and California --in other words, a return to the kind of fractured regional politics that made the smoke-filled rooms of the old conventions such interesting places to be.

Rice points out that the Democrats, several decades ago, gave a major role to "superdelegates" as a way of stamping out insurgent candidacies.

[M]ost of the superdelegates are party elders--the very sort of people who might be beholden in some way or another to the Clinton machine. So all of a sudden, you have candidates spending the spring courting the likes of Tony Coelho. Journalists everywhere have to start familiarizing themselves with the arcana of delegate selection. The Huffington Post starts a "Draft Gore" campaign. It's chaos--and everyone realizes that the nomination process, though it pretends to be democratic, is really a relic of the party boss era.

Yeah, it would be a PR nightmare and a field day for hacks, but man it would be interesting.

Labels: 2008, Andrew Rice, Presidential election, primaries, The Politicker

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:17 PM 0 comments