Mike Lux responds on the primaries issue, says my anti-Iowa, anti-New Hampshire views have some merit, but says he "still believe[s] passionately in small state starting this thing" because that forces closer interactions with the candidates. I see the merits in that, though I'm significantly less passionate about it than I am about the idea that it's really deleterious to give this sort of outsized role to two lily-white states with no major urban centers. One could, however, have it both ways. Iowa has 7 electoral votes just like Oregon or Connecticut and it's actually bigger than Rhode Island, Nevada, or New Mexico.
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20 Aug 2007 09:28 pm
Comments (24)
I like a drawn-out primary process, because I think that, as the race evolves and the candidates are winnowed, a better candidate can emerge. I don't see why it should start with one state, then another, before moving to dates with several states, though.
That the states who are winners and losers in the primary schedule should be the same every four years is clearly unjust, which is why the schedule is disintegrating as states move up to fight their irrelevance.
In my perfect world, there would be a new schedule every four years (known well in advance, of course), determined by some sports draft-like process, with advantages given for small size and for recent late placements.
Of course, as New Hampshire apparently pulls in hundred of millions of dollars and vastly more media attention than comparable states, they'll never give up their special privilege. Similarly Iowa.
Is there any state where the Democratic Party picks its nominee for governor by having one county vote one week, then another county a week later, then several counties a few weeks later, and so on?
If there is, I might see some merit to the primary process as it stands. Otherwise, you are picking a candidate who will fight a national campaign for a national office. If you are going to have a primary to pick the nominee -I'm actually OK with having elected officeholders do it instead, but that's another argument- then it should be a national primary.
Basically what Democratic primary voters have done is to delegate to a group of voters in two states the task of getting a good look at the candidates through retail politics, then deciding on their nominee for them. You can call this want you want, but its not a democratic selection process. This procedure is also not used to fill any other office, anywhere, in this country or in other countries. If the electoral system you are using is that weird, there should be some better arguments in favor of it than what I've been hearing.
I know a place with 3 electoral votes that is 100% urban and where whites are in the minority. Perhaps DC could be moved up to share the first place and balance the demographics a bit.
Ed pretty well nails it. I've yet to hear anything other than appeals to speculative imagination to suggest that we get better candidates by allowing some arbitrarily designated minority to pick the nominee. From what I can see, the resistance to the idea of a single national primary comes either from sentimentality (but we ALWAYS did this state-by-state!) or as a result of desperate hand-waving by people in the states that benefit from the current idiotic setup.
Nor do I see any great advantage to drawing out the campaign. It might have made sense back before television and jet travel to allow time for candidates to be seen in disparate sections of the country. These days it just leads to a tedious repetitive process that adds nothing useful.
We ought to do a single national primary (using nationally enforced voting standards) much closer to the general election, no earlier than July. As you may guess, I have a very low opinion of what is known as federalism.
I may well be seeing it through rose colored glasses - it was the first race I was just too young to vote in, and the first election I volunteered on - but I have fond memories of the 1992 nominating race. The fact that my side won in the fall (I supported Tsongas; the first in a line of bad calls) probably doesn't hurt its image in my mind, of course.
It was possibly the most recent hotly contested race on either side (2004 was a big fight until Iowa crushed Dean's candidacy, and the nomination was entirely predictable a week later after New Hampshire). 1992 really seemed to be a developing struggle in which a talented candidate emerged and proved his chops.
Delaware is a good candidate as well, and if we want to get all regional and stuff, an Arkansas (post-Clinton era, or course), Oregon (or WA, but I live here), Delaware, Iowa first round would be good. NH can even play in that scenario, as they can remain at the front of the line, but with limited influence. Likewise with Iowa, regardless if they adopt a primary or retain the organization-heavy caucuses (I actually don't have an opinion on that).
I also like the idea of a "phased in" primary, starting with geographically/urban/rurally diverse set of states each round, getting larger each round (both in terms of state population sizes and the number of states in play), culminating in NY, FL, TX, CA for the final round (and possibly including OH, MI, PA and a few other monstrous electoral vote states). The idea of a one-day national primary only means that I'll wake up on January 21, 2009 to endless mailings and campaign costs will go up by ten-fold or so as far as I can tell.
I also endorse Warren's idea of a rotating list of states participating in each "round" of the primaries. Choose from a list of small states from different regions for the first round, a list of medium states (and losing small states) for rounds 2 and 3, and leave the big-ass states in the final round. The big states will have final say, but the influence of the smaller states will be pronounced, and a bit more spread across the country and voting populations.
The idea of a one-day national primary only means that I'll wake up on January 21, 2009 to endless mailings and campaign costs will go up by ten-fold or so as far as I can tell.
Huh? Why? Under my proposal, in January 2009 the next national primary will be 42 months away. Why would anyone be sending you mailings then?
As to costs, well, we've just seen Mitt Romney pay around $300 per vote for a straw poll, for Christ's sake. If starting candidates are going to blow obscene amounts of cash anyway, why not make them do it talking to the country as a whole and not to just a tiny rural conclave here and there?
Remember I'm suggesting forcibly shortening the campaign season. That alone ought to cut costs a lot.
jimBOB, I should clarify. With a huge initial (and final) target for campaigning, the impulse would be to begin efforts ASAP, instead of allowing the "culling" process to affect the race as it currently does. With all returns coming in on one night, the need to get the message everywhere at the same time will lead to both saturation and starting the messaging process ASAP.
Campaigning is generally crude in its tactics, and more money and more presence are easier to accomplish than a "tight" campaign. So, money involved will go up, as will time frame.
On the flip side, if you are looking for a compact campaign time frame, that means that only the big states (in terms of electoral votes) will get attention. I am not sure I have a problem with this (as they do, in fact, determine elections), but if I lived in a small state it would simply underscore my feeling of being left out in the case of a one-day national primary.
Perhaps small states should suck it. But, absent a really long campaign season, I don't see how anyone in their right mind could launch a truly national campaign unless they started really early and spent tons and tons of money. The alternative is a short campaign season that only targets states with more electoral votes.
I have no evidence to back up this hypothetical, and am curious to hear your thoughts. Just a hunch, as it were....
Well how about if we take a 180 and dump states rights altogether (they've outgrown themselves anyway) and have County/Parish electoral votes.
Bear with me for a moment. Most counties/parishes have a population that is greater than the original states so it would be more in line with what the founding fathers had in mind. It all fits in with "All politics are local" and as a Norte Californio I would not be subjected to the mass of voters in SoCal. Think about it, perhaps third parties would also win Electoral Votes . . . oh crap, doomed to failure as the only bipartisan cooperation is excluding the fringe parties.
Can someone build on this please?
We already have something like county/ parish electoral votes, in the House of Representatives. We have 435 districts, each district has a population of about 700,000. There are proposals to assign electoral votes via district. I think the proposals are a bad idea, since its very possible to win a majority of the districts and a minority of the popular vote, plus you would see gerrymandering get really out of hand.
Since the Democrats are the party of the cities, any assigning of electoral votes to local units would help the Republicans, since the Democrats pile up a huge number of votes in the cities. With the electoral college as currently constituted, there is a small Republican advantage, due to their strength in low population mountain and plains states, but its somewhat muted by the existence of six states in New England and the three electoral votes of DC.
Direct presidential elections just isn't as hard as most Americans seem to think it is. France does it, with two rounds and a short campaign. Latin American countries do it. If Brazil, a large country with huge class and racial differences, a federal system, and a political tradition that hasn't exactly emphasized good government, can pull this off I'm sure that we can as well.
The overlong campaigns are a function of a campaign finance system that places no limits on advertising. Again, other countries just limit political advertising to two months before the election, and you get shorter campaigns. Now I realize that the current Supreme Court would stop anything like that from happening here, even if the relevant legislation made it through Congress. But its technically feasible if a way could be found to change the Court's current composition.
Another idea that I'm increasingly starting to like is to select the presidential nominee six months to a year after the President takes office. Rules could be put in to allow the party leadership to dump the nominee later and choose another if he or she turns out to be a dud. This would be irrelevant for incumbent Presidents, who always get renominated anyway. However, it would allow the "in" party to establish a successor-in-waiting shortly into the second term of a presidency, which should help alleviate the lame duck problem, and would allow the "out" party to establish the equivalent of a leader of the opposition, which is something I think we increasingly need.
Is anyone aware of a benefit to New Hampshire, similar to that of the Iowa corn/ethanol boondoggle?
Is anyone aware of a benefit to New Hampshire, similar to that of the Iowa corn/ethanol boondoggle?
According to the study New Hampshire's 2000 First-in-the-Nation Primary" (PDF):
The one-year economic benefit of the 200- primary, including $33 million in publicity benefits, was $264.4 million. That's a fraction of the state's overall economy, about six-tenths of 1 percent of the state's $42 billion gross state product.It's not a terribly recent study, but illuminating, especially since it seems to have been written to pressure their legislators to keep New Hampshire's primary the first in the nation. Also note that the 2000 spending was 50% more than in 1996, and fundraising in each of the last three presidential contests has shattered all previous records.
In any case, if you could pass a law that had almost no downside for your state and increased its gross product by almost a percent, wouldn't you?
abject funk, I think you are assuming that candidates will be starting from a position of being unknown, and building a political image from scratch over the course of a campaign. While this is something that often happens here in the U.S. it's really a rather peculiar way to pick a national leader. I'd much rather have presidential candidates be well-known figures who have a track record instead of Jimmy Carter-type out-of-the-blue type entities.
One reason we often elect relative unknowns is that candidates with a resume, as John Kerry discovered, have a nationally-based political history which gives fodder for unscrupulous attack ads. So what we get as presidential candidates are often former state governors who have relatively little national political experience.
I think one way we could counter this is to either limit or even completely eliminate paid short-form political ads. (I realize this is unconstitutional; I'm thinking blue-sky here.) I like Ed's idea of restricting ads to a short two-month campaign. Personally I'd be happy to eliminate them altogether; I think TV/radio ads are useless as tools for carrying on a relevant political discourse, and I'd like to see more long-form multicandidate forums, with better mechanisms for creating sustained follow-up questions to force candidates to answer questions rather than parrying them with talking points.
In Britain they do this with Prime Minister's Question Time. I'd like to think that such a practice would have saved us from the current dunce, who would be destroyed if he faced intelligent sustained hostile questions instead of the pablum we see from our neutered excuse for a WH press corps.
Whatever the exact mechanisms, I think the main goals should be 1. Remove the states from the process as much as we can and 2. Shorten the campaign. I think pursing that would be a far more promising direction than setting up Rube Goldberg collections of state primaries voting sequentially.
jimBob, those are fine ideas, and I think I might even support them, but for the fact that, as you mention, they are unconstitiutional (superly uncontsititutional with the current gang on the SC bench) and while I agree with MY's and others admiration of a parliamantery (how do you spell that?) system, that is not what we have.
Which seems like a cop-out insofar as we are both dreaming of a system we don't have, but I (modestly) think my proposals recognize the power of the parties and the states in a way that might be, in the long term, somewhat doable within the current laws and political situation. I live in WA, we can't have an open primary based upon the "free speech" of the Dems and GOP...that's how screwed up it is.
But then again, neither of our plans will happen anytime soon, so arguing the pragmatics is admittedly, a bit silly. Go big, I have not problem with what you are proposing other than its likelihood of being adopted. And that is meant in good faith, not as snark.
abject funk, you are quite right, the major roadblocks, the parties and the state governments (not to mention constitutional issues) stand in the way of doing much of anything. Demosclerosis I think they call it. Though frankly I think the country faces much bigger problems right now than a squirrelly presidential primaries process. (Iraquagmire, intentional sabotage of the government's finances, the assault on the Bill of Rights, climate change, peak oil, to mention a few.)
jimBOB:
True dat. I think there are many issues that we can focus our laser-beams of eventually agreeing (mostly) upon....
Have a good one, I'm out.
Perhaps DC could be moved up to share the first place and balance the demographics a bit.
If that made DC statehood (and the attendant 2 Senators) the new ethanol subsidy, I certainly wouldn't mind.
Please, can we just dispose of this "small states are a great place to start because they force candidates to interact in an intimate way with voters" tripe. What's the point? The vast majority of those intimate interactions are staged and, for those few that are not, the candidates are thoroughly prepped for each and every one.
Whether the band is performing in a tiny bar or a sold out arena, it's still performing. Sure, in the sold out arena you get a bit more space for pyrotechnics, but it's all still performance.
Neither the visit to the tiny cafe nor the convention speech is indicative of anything real, which is too bad and an issue for a different conversation. But, the failings of our overall model of political campaigning notwithstanding, the days when the Iowa Koffee Klatch was helpful in vetting a potential presidential nominee are long since past.
As I said in the other thread, if you're going to have a draft-style primary, you could do worse than starting with the states which came closest to splitting the vote 50-50 last time. That actually includes both Iowa and NH for 2004, but also throws in Wisconsin, New Mexico and Oh-God-Ohio. That could, conceivably, lead to states pushing for tied votes in order to get all the bennies of the early primaries, but I doubt it.
It would work better for the Dems than the GOP, because the South ain't close, and appealing to the good ol' boys is a big part of the GOP primary.
On JimBOB's point: what I resent most about election campaigns in the US is that every two years, there's a massive de facto wealth transfer from individuals to network affiliates and local cable companies, with candidates serving as middleman. It really is that simple: I'd like to know the exact figures, but I'm sure that the executives at WOI-TV in Des Moines are rolling around in crisp new Benjamins right now.
"From what I can see, the resistance to the idea of a single national primary comes either from sentimentality (but we ALWAYS did this state-by-state!) or as a result of desperate hand-waving by people in the states that benefit from the current idiotic setup."
A single national primary would be nothing more than handing the nomination to the biggest name, biggest money candidate every election cycle. Small state governors, congressmen and anyone not already nationally know and with access to huge campaign contribution would even bother to run. Bill Clinton could have NEVER won a national primary. George W. Bush, however, could. Is that how you want our presidential selection process to work?
Mike
Connecticut should be the first primary state. It reflects America as a whole. It is small. Has huge wealth inequality. Some of the poorest urban centers in the nation. Infrastructure problems. Influx of immigrants towards the casinos. A WNBA team. Connecticut has it all.
How about Missouri and Ohio as the primary states? The seem pretty median in most ways (D vs. R, race, urban / rural, North / South).
Comments closed September 03, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
There's a plan out there to nationalize the primaries into four phases starting with the 12 smallest states, then the next twelve two weeks later, and so on till the final day when the big states vote. This seems to make sense to me. It'd preserve the merits of the current system while restoring some sanity to the process.
Posted by paul | August 20, 2007 9:37 PM