The calendar has proven no significant hurdle for NH in the past. They are prepared to move to whenever they need to in order to preserve their first in the nation status.
Yeah, I know. Their primary was originally in March, now it’s in February. They’ll even move it to January (and have!) if someone moves theirs earlier.
Let’s say someone moves their primary to the Tuesday the week after Labor Day the year before. Like September 10, 2019, to use this year’s calendar as an example. NH’s choices in the way of a move are: (a) to move it to the day after Labor Day, when people are still getting back from vacations, or (b) move it to August, when people are on vacation. Or (c) move it way earlier.
I think assuming they’re good for any of those rather drastic moves is quite an assumption. Moving your primary up by a few weeks is one thing; moving it up by half a year or close to it is quite another thing entirely.
That’s the distinction? A “primary” is state funded (and subject to state laws) while a “caucus” is neither? Huh, I had vaguely wondered for some time why it was the New Hampshire Primary and the Iowa Caucus but never bothered to look up the significance of those terms. Thank you.
Caucuses are completely different beasts; they’re not really a vote. It requires people to be in a particular location for extended period of time in order to participate and therefore is usually restricted more to the party faithful and seriously motivated voters.
No. Yes, I know IA and NH are really white. But they’re also swing states and quite different. Promising everything to farmers in IA doesn’t fly in NH. Both states are accustomed to retail politics every 4 years from both sides. I spent ten days in SC, and I encountered mostly political apathy among the Dems. That’s not uncommon when you know you’re going to lose pretty much every statewide race and national race. It’s a great test for Republicans but not so much for Democrats.
Another aspect is that there are plenty of veteran campaign staff that already know the lay of the land in IA and NH. That makes it especially helpful for the lesser known candidates. It’s helpful having your staff spend more time planning campaign events and less time researching hotels and other mundane stuff.
Every 4 years we hear the same griping about IA and NH, but they’ve done a decent job in allowing candidates to get their messages out. My own candidate, Pete Buttigieg, is one of the most remarkable political success stories in the modern primary era.
That’s not really true. Yes, it was for FDR, but Truman was chosen by FDR to replace Wallace whose socialism had become toxic. As for JFK, his campaign didn’t really take off until he won WV, putting the whole fear of a Catholic behind him. The earlier loss by Al Smith made the party bosses leery of running a Catholic.
That said, I agree the whole primary system has been a disaster. For both parties. Does anyone think the party bosses would have nominated Trump? Or Roy Moore? Although I hesitate to make a prediction, it is at least conceivable that the Republican party will go down the tubes over Trump.
A better system would be a national primary with ranked choice voting. But the real problem is that the candidate who best appeals to the base will almost have to be the one who least appeals to the rest of the country.
Incidentally, it is not at all clear that Hillary wouldn’t have been nominated by a smoke-filled room (although nowadays the smoke would smell heavily of pot). One of the charges made against her was that that party bosses had put a heavy hand on the scale. That may have made a lot of Bernie supporters sit on their cans or get up and vote for Jill Stein. Another argument for ranked choice voting.
On the other hand, Bernie supporters wouldn’t have had months of Bernie running against the Democratic Party and screaming ‘rigged, rigged allowing them to believe every conspiracy theory imaginable.
That’s true in Democratic caucuses, but the Republican Party requires simple secret ballots for the presidential preference portion, and there’s a trend toward longer voting hours, so they end up looking like a party-run primary.
So legally speaking, could the Democrats say, “We’re going to ignore the results of the official NH primaries, and instead hold our own privately-funded primaries in New Hampshire in May?”
Yes, but that would only affect the selection of delegates from New Hampshire. The press would still be free to show up in February to cover The New Hampshire Primary and give a bunch of coverage to the winner, which is the main actual benefit from winning (or outperforming expectations) in Iowa and New Hampshire.
There are states in which state law requires a presidential primary, but one state party or the other doesn’t want it, so there’s a “beauty contest” primary alongside a caucus that determines the actual delegate results.
Would people actually go to vote if they knew that their vote was meaningless?
I mean, even more than usual?
Farther down the calendar, the non-binding primaries do get really low turnout, but the attention given to the early states has nothing to do with the delegate allocation, so I doubt the turnout would be affected much.
Before 2016, the Iowa Republican caucus was non-binding and plenty of people turned out (relative to other caucuses).
Nevada and South Carolina were added as early states to create that minority influence. If seems to be working just fine, since IA and NH aren’t as important as they used to be. The last few races have been long delegate slogs where a lot of states ended up mattering. The last competitive race that was rendered finished by IA and NH was the 2004 Democratic race. Which is when they made the changes, because Kerry did not stand head and shoulders over his competition enough to justify him having unstoppable momentum from those two wins. But that seems to be a problem that’s been mostly solved. Minority voters basically decide the Democratic nomination now. Without IA and NH you could basically just call the race for Biden now.
The candidates have been in Iowa all summer. Marianne Williamson moved there! She’s been campaigning in New Hampshire since January!
I’m really not seeing much difference between this year and 2015. Minorities are getting shafted as per usual. I find it impossible to believe that huge outcries for more and proper attention to be given to diverse states will not be forthcoming. What actions that will precipitate are sadly unforeseeable.
Which minorities have been shafted? Harris gambled on trying to get SC support early on. That backfired. She wasn’t able to get enough people in SC to start caring about a Feb 2020 primary in the middle of June 2019.
They didn’t “shoot the hostages” because, as it turned out, the Michigan delegates didn’t matter - and Michigan’s Democratic Party counted on this when it made the decision to have the early primary. That’s why every “early state” that has an early primary does it; they know that, in the end, their delegates will not have any effect on who the nominee will be, so why not have an early primary so the state can have some say in the matter (through the process of momentum), and, invariably, when a candidate has enough delegates well before the convention, the party will let the early states’ delegates into the convention as a show of unity?
The 2020 Democratic Delegate Selection Process lists the following penalties for “early primaries”: the state loses half of its pledged delegates and all of its superdelegates, and any candidate that campaigns in the state on or before the primary is held cannot receive any votes from that state’s delegates. IIRC, in 2008, Clinton did campaign in Michigan before its early primary, while Obama did not.
If the entire field were spending as much time in SC as they were in IA, maybe that would be different.
IT’s not about attention, it’s about actual influence on the nominee, and minorities have more influence on the nominee in the Democratic Party than white voters do.
I am waiting with bated breath to read how you will back up this statement.
The winner of the minority vote has won the last two competitive Democratic primary contests over the winner of the white vote, and the polls currently show us heading in that direction again. If the candidate with the whitest support indeeds wins IA and NH and then loses anyway, it kinda proves the point in a pretty ironclad way.
Let me back up a little on 2016. Sanders probably didnt’ win the white vote, but he won in the whitest states and NH while coming close in IA, and it didn’t get him the nomination. Clinton went on to cream him in states with significant minority populations.