The ones I really don’t understand are the stragglers at the end. Other than the Obama vs. Clinton primary in ‘08, I can’t think of a single primary on either side where it wasn’t obvious who the winner would be by the end of Super Tuesday (and many times it’s obvious even before then). Yet every cycle it seems that some states don’t have their primary until late May or even June. What’s the point of waiting so long?
Primaries aren’t just for the president. Nominees for various state offices are also selected then.
Right. But the POTUS races tend to drive turnout. That’s why the mid-terms have lower turnout than presidential election years. I think a better system would be to have one grand finale in late March or early April where all the states that haven’t voted by Super Tuesday go all at the same time. At the very least it would present a better come from behind opportunity for someone who’s in a not too distant second getting hot at just the right time. With the current system they have a guaranteed loss, where after Super Tuesday it’s usually two or three states every few weeks until the end of June. Maybe they might get hot in early April, but that means they only win one state instead of 20 or 25 states. By the time the next primary rolls around a week or two later, they’ll have lost that momentum under a media portrayal of “they may have won this one contest, but they’re still behind and the only chance is if they sustain their momentum every week for the next two months” like what happened to Bernie Sanders in ‘16.
ETA. And we would be less likely to get crazy candidates winning in the down ballot races due to the increased turnout.
All the numbers are determined by the caucuses and primaries. If Candidates A, B, C, and D get 100, 50, 25, and 12 delegates in a state, delegate counts matching those numbers attend the convention. Everybody knows ahead of time exactly what the count is. The actual delegates may still be loyalists but they loyalty doesn’t matter since they are just there for the ritual.
No second ballot has been needed for any convention since 1952. Winners are known no later than June. The conventions are mere infomercials watched by fewer and fewer. Even the Vice-Presidential candidates are announced months before the conventions.
Lots of money to be made from campaigning. Presidential campaigns now run into the billions.
Inertia and money are the biggest reasons. Oregon, for example, has had its primary on the third Thursday of May since before I moved here 42 years ago. I imagine there’s been some proposals to move it forward, but I can’t remember any.
The thing is, no matter what date we put it on, we’re not going to get a lot of candidate interest. I understand the parties won’t allow another primary before Super Tuesday and, as you say, by Super Tuesday, the candidates have been effectively selected. So that leaves moving it to STuesday. Doing that will not get us any more attention. There’s so many states already on that day that the candidates can’t cover more than a few in the week or so between it and the previous primary. California did move theirs to STuesday a while back, but they’re the 800-pound gorilla of states. They get attention; we would not.
So the only chance we’ll have for attention is the extremely rare case of two candidates still in the hunt by the tail end of the season. Yeah, very unlikely to ever happen, but we still have to run the state and local position primaries on that date. So to save money, run the presidential one then too.
1968 was weird, as Johnson- the favorite and winner of several early primaries- dropped out, telling everyone to vote to HHH. HHH hadnt even been a candidate, so he had favorite sons run for him in several states. (Young, Lynch, Branigin, Smathers, Kelly)
When RFK was killed HHH had 561 ESTIMATED pledged delegates, McCarthy only 251 and RFK- who had been assassinated- 393. Everyone knew that the Favorite sons were pledged to HHH.
However, HHH did win Az, MD, De, WY, Vt, M, MO, Mt.
At the end, McC had 310, HHH only 239, but there were 351 other and 383 listed as “uncommitted” but mostly pledged to HHH.
So, it wasnt “smoke filled room” so much as Main candidate pulls himself, most popular- killed. There had to be deals. No system to primaries could have fixed it.
Not in 2020- Super Tuesday is what made Biden the clear winner.
In 2016 one dem candidates refusal to concede even after mathematically losing cost us 4 years of trump…among two other factors at least.
Sorry, I meant by the end of Super Tuesday.
I think a better solution would be to rotate the primary calendar. Instead of everyone fellating New Hampshire and Iowa every four years, it would change. Next year might be Oregon and Wyoming. Four years later, Idaho and Rhode Island. Let every state reap the benefits of going first, eventually.
To do this, you would probably need to make the parties responsible for organizing the whole thing from top to bottom, which would almost certainly result in it being harder for people to vote in many places. The RNC and DNC don’t have a free hand to change the schedule so long as they’re piggybacking off of state election authorities in most states.
It would also almost certainly result in greater domination by establishment candidates and a steeper hill for outsiders and up-and-comers to climb, through participation rules that are either implicitly favorable or explicitly slanted toward those insiders, because political parties don’t like being invaded and upended by unpredictable upstarts.
I have long opposed primaries. Especially open primaries.
Allowing Joe Sixpack to determine who a party’s nominee is makes no more sense to me than allowing a non-stock holder to determine who a large corporations CEO is just because the non-stock holder shops there.
The party is an entity itself. The internal mechanisms and higher ups of the parties themselves should determine which individual best represents the party platform, values, and mission at the time and present such person as their candidate for each particular office.
Just realized I’ve been debating politics on here for almost 20 years as we head into the 2024 primary season.
I do think there is some benefit to starting small and having candidates do speeches at a Kiwanis Hall and meet and greets in people’s homes. It gives the candidates time to refine their message and see what works. Also, it does give an opportunity for the candidates to meet the average person face to face.
A national primary would mean pouring almost every dollar into California, Texas, New York and Florida and bombarding the airwaves. All of flyover country would basically be ignored outside of a few big cities. People like Steyer and Bloomberg would buy every single second of airtime out of their pocket change.
Also, as a Democrat, I do like that the primaries give people in the Deep South, which are solid blood red nationally, a small voice in the political process during the primaries.
There’s no perfect system. I expect the Democrats will try something different in 2028. Biden has bent over backwards to give Jim Clyburn everything as his endorsement pushed Biden over the top in 2020. So, I think SC will be an even more important primary in 2028.
If I had to guess, NH will kick things off for the Dems in 2028 for the Dems followed by SC. NH is swingy and does have two Dem senators.
I don’t think that’s insurmountable. The calendar would be known years in advance, so there would be plenty of time for the state election apparatus to prepare. It’s no more effort to have an election in January than in May. For those states which have other races at the same time, and really can’t accommodate that early primary, they could opt out of their turn at the front.
I don’t see why changing the order of the primaries would change which candidates would tend to do well, except for those years when states like California or Texas go first. The size off those states would make campaigning more expensive, so candidates with a high national profile, and the corresponding fundraising, might be favored.
I think my plan would lead to greater diversity of nominees. As it is now, with New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina leading the order, candidates who do well in those states get an early boost. That favors candidates who hold positions which appeal to the voters in those states. What issues are important to the voters of Colorado, or Washington? Until their votes matter, we’ll never know.
I think any party that did that would get regularly slaughtered. Suppose the National League picked their winner just as they do now, and the American League picked their winner by committee. The AL would get clobbered in the World Series. The regular season and the playoffs show you which team does the best job at winning games. The presidential primaries show you which candidate does the best job of getting votes. That’s who you want on the ballot in the general election.
Your post is beyond apples and oranges. Comparing sports champions to politics is ridiculous.
And, BTW, my suggestion is exactly the way it was done for over a century and it worked just fine.
The primary system allows for DINO’s and RINO’s to get elected and water down the party message. My county had a Sheriff who was an obvious right wing Republican but always ran (and won) as a Democrat because a Republican wouldn’t get elected in this county. He took full advantage of the open primary here and it made a mockery of the entire system.
You are aware that the primary system gave you a Trump Presidency, correct?
I wasn’t commenting here on the schedule per se, I was responding to the idea that fully centralizing control of the primaries in the national parties would be a prerequisite to enforcing a synchronized calendar. That centralized control would indeed facilitate a coordinated schedule, but my point was that it would also lead to other consequences as the national-level parties defend their interests over the interests of local party groups and less-beholden candidates.
This is the way it works up here in America’s Hat. We used to go the party convention route, with delegates selected at the local constituency level. Current practice is one party member, one vote. Party memberships are free or cheap (under $20/year), but you have to be motivated enough to sign up.
Donald Trump is the perfect illustration of my point.
If the nominating process was left up to party officials, they wouldn’t have chosen Trump. They’d have picked someone who had paid their dues within the party, someone like Jeb Bush. But that’s not what happened. Donald Trump won the most delegates in the primaries because he got people to vote for him. And then he won the general election because he got people to vote for him. I think Bush would have lost to Clinton.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the primaries put forward the candidate who will do the best job of governing the country. I’m saying that the primaries put forward the candidate with the best chance of winning the general election. Even a disaster like Trump.
Sure. I agree with that as well. My suggestion was meant to cover only the end of the primaries, so that the whole thing isn’t over by Super Tuesday with the late states not mattering. Rotating the beginning would of course be a great idea as well. Something like two states at the end of February, four or five the first week of March, around 10 to15 or so during mid-March (fewer if the big states go on Super Tuesday, more if the big states go on Final Tuesday), and all the rest all in one shot in late March or early April. Rotate which state falls where each cycle, with the biggest states (California, Texas, Florida, and New York) not being allowed to go until Super Tuesday or Final Tuesday.
I’m with you on open primaries. Either the parties mean something or they don’t. All you have to do is register for one. No other obligations. You don’t have to vote for them - or at all.
But:
It worked, sorta kinda - Harding? - until it failed so badly that the screaming of the public actually made change happen. How many times in American history have we seen that?
Trump wasn’t the fault of primaries; he was the fault of Republicans. He could not happen in Democratic primaries.
Either way, trust in government, politics, and experts is so low today that having party insiders pick a candidate is as likely as teleportation.