Anybody else sick of NH and IA having so much say in the process?

Politics & Elections
21

Yes, and no. On the one hand, the current system kind of sucks, for reasons that you and others have already stated. But on the other hand, there’s something great and glorious and wonderfully all-American about the Iowa caucuses.

What I mean is this: normally Senators and former Vice Presidents and zillionaires like Tom Steyer are far too good to get within five miles of any building, event, or person associated with ordinary, working class people. Most of the time they prefer to travel first class (if they don’t have a private jet), stay in luxury hotels, eat lobster and caviar, ride in limos, and hang out with the rich while avoiding those icky people who aren’t rich. But the Iowa caucuses force the the candidates to spend almost a year traveling around to union halls and churches and county fairs and high school gymnasiums in rural areas and small towns, places where they normally wouldn’t go. It forces them to fry steaks (or at least be present when steaks are being fried), stand on hay bales, and do other things like that. I mean honestly, what’s better than watching Bill de Blasio and Andrew Yang snarfing hot dogs off paper trays with their bare hands?

22

I like the idea of a couple of small states being the test bed instead of making a candidate campaign nationwide for the nomination. But it should not be freaking Iowa and New Hampshire all the time. They should divide the states into tiers (small # of delegates up for grabs; medium #; lots of delegates) and then schedule them by lottery with the first few berths always going to small-delegate states with relatively affordable broadcast media. Maybe next year it would be Kansas and Delaware and then Alabama and New Mexico.

23

I agree. A rotating panel of 4-5 regional primaries would address the problem of resources. One regional vote per month would allow candidates to focus their efforts and each region would get a turn being first.

24

The system isn’t entirely broken. I’d hate to see a single national primary just because whoever has the most money, the most name recognition, and the early lead in the polls is going to win. Somehow we have to winnow the field down to a manageable number. IA and NH have been pretty effective in doing so. You have to be able to show that you can win retail politics, talking with the voters and show that you can make a case for yourself. In the bigger states, all you can do is hold rallies and blitz the media with ads.

I don’t mind that IA and NH get first crack. But then we go to SC where on one side it’s who is the reddest one of all and on the other it’s who gets the black vote. I’d like to IA and NH followed by an Eastern Time Zone primary (for states with split zones, let them choose which one to be in ), a Pacific Time Zone primary, a Central Time Zone primary, and finally the Mountain Time Zone Primary. Throw AK and HI in the Pacific for good measure. Two small states and then a month where we have a different time zone every week.

25

Small “trial” states allow candidates with both a good message and who put in a lot of work (visiting counties, holding townhalls, knocking on doors), but who otherwise have little name recognition and campaign funds the opportunity to compete against well known candidates with big war chests. An underdog putting in a strong (even second or third place) finish in Iowa potentially gives them enough media exposure and extra donations/endorsements to snowball into the next state primary, and the next one, until they are finally able to compete at a national level.

Holding primaries on the same day massively favors the established candidates with lots of money - the smaller candidates would simply fall flat on their face trying to get their message out to millions of people all at once. Having excellent retail politics means jack when you can’t afford simultaneous major ad buys to Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York metropolitan areas.

None of this matters for the general election- the candidate has already has the full party support behind them, and national recognition.

Does it need to be Iowa and NH? No, but it should probably be a small state (both in population and in overall area), with a swing tendency and a good cross section of voters.

26

There has to be some mechanism for winnowing out the less viable candidates, and NH and IA do serve that purpose to at least some degree.
In the past, the party bosses would select the candidates in a smoke-filled room. Not a great thing. But, the candidates selected were generally competent and acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate, in contrast to today’s over-reliance on primaries.
I think a middle ground is needed, where the party selects a handful of candidates and then they face primaries. This would provide an initial vetting of the candidates and allow for public input. Someone from outside could still challenge the official candidates, but would need broad support to succeed.

27

Parties can choose their nominees however they wish. It doesn’t bother me. If it were up to me I’d go back to the party boss method.

28

So, so many things, frankly.

29

Yeah, the primary system is screwed up in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to start.

The thing that’s really screwed up, IMHO, is that the campaign now starts in earnest right after the midterms, but there’s no voting for over a year. Then in the space of four weeks, we’ll run through IA, NH, NV, SC, and Super Tuesday, at which point the race will probably be effectively over.

In the odd-numbered year before the general election (2019, etc.), we shouldn’t be relying just on polls to tell us who’s ahead. We should have had some actual primaries and caucuses already: Lord knows the campaign has been going on long enough for voters in a few early states to make up their minds.

Maybe next time, Delaware could have its primary in June 2023, then maybe Rhode Island in September. The DNC would probably vote to disallow their delegates, which would turn their primaries into what used to be called “beauty-contest” primaries (i.e. vote totals that determined no convention delegates), but those states would probably gain more impact by going early than they’d lose by having their delegates disallowed.

This would also give an early test for all the vanity candidates, and the outcomes of those primaries could be used as justification for kicking the low performers out of the televised debates.

BTW, I like the idea of starting with small (but more representative) states. I think that there should be some sort of tiered system where, once the early small states were done, the remaining states had primaries that were grouped by the number of electoral votes they had: states with 6-10 EVs would have their primaries on the same day, then states will 11-15 EVs would go two weeks later, then all the states with 16 or more EVs would have their primaries three weeks after that, which would solve the problem of the race being over before the big states got to vote.

30

One lifetime is too short to make a complete list.

31

Now now, ITR, there are more than wypipo in barns wearing gingham in Iowa that are All-American. We too want to see all of the candidates grovel around and choke down local dodgy foodstuffs.

32

I’ve gone back and forth on this issue. Starting small does help candidates get their feet wet, especially if they’ve never ran a national campaign. Having a message bomb when you’re in some elk lodge in Iowa isn’t a campaign killer.

While I like the idea of changing around the small states, it does help that the campaign infrastructure can stay fairly consistent in the two states. It’s easy to hire a Democratic or Republican organizer because they’ve worked the state before and know how to do it. Also, the pollsters know how to poll IA and NH, Ann Selzer in IA might be the absolute best pollster in the USA. Also, IA and NH are usually somewhat competitive in the general election. Finally, the next two states are NV and SC, so you do get some diversity although it’s mainly an appeal to Hispanics in NV and the African American community in SC for the Democrats.

33

That would make sense, except in our current way of doing things, the Democratic candidates have spent what feels like a years already on TV nationally trying to get their message out. It almost feels like the caucuses and primaries are now an end point, rather than a starting point.

34

Living in Iowa, I can’t agree more, and am also very much looking forward to the next 13 months being over.

35

I used to live in Columbus, Ohio. I feel your pain even as a politics junkie. Couldn’t even watch a football game without being bombarded with ads.

36

Both parties set scheduling rules that the states must follow or be penalized. Both protect the current slow start with four states in Feb. In 2008 Michigan and Florida both tried jumping ahead of the line, violated the federal party rules, and got smacked down. They were penalized most of their delegate allocation.

37

I think 2020 in particular will not be quite as bad as it has been in other years. Iowa isn’t till February 3rd, with only NH, South Carolina, and Nevada before Super Tuesday. On March 3rd the states that vote are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. That’s a pretty good mix of large states and small, blue, purple, and red states, coastal and middle of the country. I highly doubt that any of the top five will drop out before then. If it’s going to be determined before the convention, I think March 17th when Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio vote will be the determining day.

In other words, I think that in 2020 at least we won’t have a situation where the people in the states that vote in early to mid March are going to substantially change their votes because of who wins in three small primaries and one small caucus held in February. We probably won’t be in a situation where it’s already obvious on March 2nd who the nominee is going to be. I think what’s actually happened this cycle is that Biden and Sanders sucked the oxygen out of the room and prevented everyone other than Warren from having an opportunity to break out of the pack. IOW if Biden wins Iowa and NH and then rolls on through the rest of the primaries, it isn’t so much that Iowa and NH “determined” Biden to be the nominee. In that scenario it could be any two random states that go first with the outcome likely being the same.

38

Michigan tried to cut its way to the front of the line in 2008, and that almost wrecked the convention. The thinking was this: Michigan isn’t big enough of a state to be a “kingmaker,” so it would become an “influencer” by having its primary early, under the impression that the party would react by (a) withdrawing the credentials of the state’s delegates to the national convention, then (b) reinstating them once the candidate had been established. As a result, the only person who bothered campaigning there was Clinton. One small problem; after just about all of the primaries were completed, nobody had a majority of pledged delegates, and the Clinton campaign was demanding that the Michigan delegates not only be seated, but be seated in accordance with the original primary vote, which was divided between Clinton and “uncommitted.” When the party came up with a compromise that gave Obama a significant share of the delegates, pretty much making sure Clinton could not win, the Clinton campaign pretty much left the meeting with the words, “We’re taking this to the floor of the Convention.”

I’m not sure how Iowa got to the front of the line. New Hampshire is the first primary because Tradition, That’s Why. IIRC, South Carolina and Nevada were added to make the South and West more influential.

Note that there are bonuses (in terms of delegates) for holding a primary after March 31, and for groups of adjacent states holding them on the same day. Neither of those was incentive enough to keep California from moving (for the second time) from early June to Super Tuesday.

I don’t see anything in the Delegate Selection Process that requires that a state hold its primary statewide on the same day. I suppose they can “sort of” do sub-state primaries, as about 70% of each state’s delegates are at “district level” (it’s not clear if those have to be Congressional districts or not), but they still have to be combined to determine how the state’s “statewide” delegates are divided up. The statewide delegates have to be determined at the state level; that is a rule.

39

Also, not sure about NH, but Iowa isn’t really “swingy”, except in the sense that both parties have some realistic hope of winning it in a close election. But the Democrats in Iowa tend to be much more liberal than Democrats nationally, and the Republicans more conservative. So if you’re trying to design a system that maximizes the chance of nominating a candidate who appeals to “moderates”, Iowa isn’t a good place to start.

40

Voters from cosmopolitan cities are irrelevant — they’re voting for the D.
White evangelicals from the South are irrelevant — they’re voting for the R.
Blacks are irrelevant — they’re voting for the D.
Big states like California, New York, Illinois — irrelevant.
Even Texas and Florida are irrelevant: they won’t choose the D unless the D is coasting to victory anyway.

The election will be decided by small-town white voters from states demographically similar to Iowa and New Hampshire.

In a perfect world, we’d want a candidate who appeals to a variety of citizens. In the real world we want a candidate who can get elected. She’ll need some near-redneck votes from specific states like New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania.