Julian Castro has been leading the demand for a change in future elections. While that might be seen as sour grapes as he’s not doing well even in his home state of Texas, I think on a generic basis his point stands that if the party is going to preach about diversity.
The upcoming debate, as it stands, is all white. Kamala Harris qualified but dropped out anyway. Lack of money to carry forward to Iowa with donors drying up.
Now in Iowa’s defence, they take their duty extremely carefully. Being such a small state this is their time to take frontpage. Vetting candidates, attending events, questioning them and getting to know them. They propelled Barack Obama (though he was cutting into Hillary Clinton’s lead in the south anyway) and now a small town 37 year old mayor is the clear frontrunner.
On the flip side maybe if South Carolina for example where Joe Biden has a huge lead went first, it would allow candidates to make their pitch that even though Biden is someone you like a lot, he is the past. Being more diverse means you can perhaps feel more inclined to take on subjects like immigration and race passionately because your audience ought to be more receptive. It’s a subject you can hit Biden hard on. Instead they’re in Iowa. His lead with black voters is propping him up and the southern firewall is going to be stronger if there are no candidates of colour left. Mayor Pete could win Iowa and New Hampshire and still have big problems because he is polling at zero with black voters. So it goes back to the idea that perhaps the tradition has to change to reflect the democratic electorate more.
Yes. A state full of liberals and minorities is more representative of what democrats actually look like in the modern age. 43% of democrats are people of color, but another 35-40% are white liberals (I’m only counting white liberals to avoid double counting non-white liberals). Thats 80% of the democratic party right there and I don’t feel they’re represented in early states. Well, white liberals are but POC are not.
It shows how much the Democrats are not interested in winning white voters in flyover country, but will need IA and NH in autumn campaigns…both those states are swing states in the fall, but SC is ruby red.
Democrats will have to start out with SC, CA, NV, IA and NH in the middle.
The party of Woke and Diversity will have to practice what they preach.
Not just the Dems, otherwise it would be a legal nightmare. I know that NH law says their primary comes first and they’ll keep moving the date to make that happen. Some kind of rotating system should be in place. Maybe even have some county-level primaries to preserve that “retail” element.
What the Democrats really should do is scrap the primary system entirely and go back to choosing their candidates in smoke-filled rooms. That’s how they came up with candidates like FDR, Truman and JFK* (as opposed to Dukakis, Mondale and Hillary).
*Yes I know JFK won some primaries, but he was preordained by the powers that be.
When a few states tried to move their primaries a few years back, the DNC threatened to unseat some or all of their delegates. Just tell New Hampshire “Sure, you can have the first primary if you want, but we won’t be counting your votes.”
And how exactly do they change the schedule, when by state law, the New Hampshire primary must be the first primary held? The timing of the primaries is not in the control of the DNC.
I find it odd that state legislatures can influence the inner workings of political parties. Is that even constitutional?
Also, what happens if other states pass the same law?
Yes, this exposes the limits of the DNC’s control of the process. In 2008, the DNC ultimately decided not to shoot the hostages, so nobody is going to believe them in the future.
Maybe they could also punish the candidates who file for a forbidden primary, but that wouldn’t work for every contest (the Iowa Democratic caucus doesn’t use ballots at all, and some states allow third parties to file on behalf of a candidate).
I missed the US Constitutional requirement that national political parties be non-profits incorporated in Delaware and free from outside scrutiny. :smack:
State political parties each incorporate in a state under that state’s laws and regulatory purview. Also, state primary elections are funded by the state; whoever pays the piper, calls the tune, etc. So yes, a state can tell subject organizations what to do, and when, and how, when it’s on the state’s dime. The escape clause: A state or local party can hold private caucuses at will. Whether a national party accepts such is another matter.
It’s very weird, to be sure. There’s no such entity as a “Democratic Party” or a “Republican Party”. Voters cannot become party members in any normal legal sense. At most they have to register with a party to be eligible to vote in their primaries, but not all states require this. Yet neither the registration nor the primary voting are conducted by the parties, but by the states and other political jurisdictions. Each state has a private non-profit entity that “controls” the party but has little actual power besides making money available to favored candidates.
Courts have allowed the current system to function since forever, putting the power of state law behind these private events. That’s extremely unlikely to end. I think that’s the quiet rationale for not upsetting the system. The parties are entirely dependent on the states - despite their control as governors and legislators - for their existence. These “states’ rights” dominate because of the insularity and jealousy of the smaller states. The parties aren’t going to stick their hands in those beehives.
I’ve been saying for years that, given how long the campaign’s been going before we even get to a primary or caucus, and how brief the time usually is between the Iowa caucuses and the point at which there’s a clear winner, the party really needs to move a few primaries/caucuses back into the year before the election.
This suggests a path to changing things up. A small but racially diverse state that has too few delegates to really matter if it’s not one of the first few states should move its primary up to, say, September 2023 or 2027 in the next cycle that the Dems don’t have an incumbent President. (Maybe RI or Delaware.)
It’s true that the party would have to say, you can’t do that, so your delegates won’t count, in order to keep NH from moving its primary to August. (Might be too big a move for NH to consider anyway.) But since their delegates have minimal impact on the nomination anyway, that’s not much of a cost.
What they’d gain is the effect of their primary on the race for the nomination: those candidates that competed in the primary would demonstrate, early on, whether they can appeal to a diverse electorate, and those candidates that succeeded there would look a lot more viable going into IA/NH.
My objection to the early Iowa caucus isn’t that it’s a predominantly white state or that it’s in “flyover” country; it’s that it’s a caucus held in a way that isn’t really the most (small-d) democratic way to ascertain public preference. I mean, yes, the Democrats are within their rights to do what they’re doing; I just find it ridiculous that the result of the Iowa caucus is weighted so heavily in the public perception.
As for New Hampshire, well - they’re gonna do what they do. They have so little else to lay claim to; might as well let them have this.