So, yeah. Looks like the Democratic Primary debates will begin in six months.
Um. Yeah.
I know what’s driving this. The way the primary calendar is front-loaded we’ll know the outcome and the nominee by March this time. But this is really beginning to get silly.
By the time the election happens we’re all going to be fried to a crisp.
Yep. I’m tired just thinking about it.
I wouldn’t call the primary calendar front-loaded, given that there’s over a year’s worth of campaigning before Iowa. It’s really too back-loaded, compared to the way campaigns have been run during the past few cycles.
It’s stupid to have that much campaigning, and a sequence of debates, without any way of winnowing the field, then all of a sudden, the whole thing will be over in a few weeks of February and March next year.
Move Iowa to June of the year before the election, IOW 2019 in this cycle. (I’ve been saying this for awhile.) NH in September, SC and NV in October and November. Then all the other primaries/caucuses in the election year itself.
This calendar would also put an end to all those campaign pieces about candidates tramping through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire. I’ve never been to Iowa, but I bet it’s actually pretty nice in May and June. I can attest personally that New Hampshire in September is quite nice. (Have the primary the week before foliage season traffic gets serious, though. Timing is important. :)) Ditto SC in October.
What, and deny the “Election-Industrial Complex” their billions? There are lots of people who make a very nice living off of perpetual campaigning.
The debates are a way of winnowing the field. People will watch the debates themselves, and the opinion polls after the debates, and funding for various candidates will increase or decrease, and a lot of them will drop out when they see the various indicators going against them.
If you’re a vanity candidate who doesn’t really expect to even contend, but you want to be up on that stage with the big boys, you don’t need a lot of money or poll support to keep going. Hell, if I wanted to borrow against my TSP account and run a campaign like that, I’ve got the dough.
You need millions of dollars to run a campaign with a chance of winning. If you don’t care about that, low six figures would probably do you.
One significant change from 2016: California’s primary has moved from June to Super Tuesday. As I have posted before here, this could affect the Republicans more than the Democrats, as Republican party rules say that Calfornia’s Republican primary can no longer be winner-take-all, although since it’s at Congressional district level and California does not qualify for any “bonus” statewide delegates (so each district gets 3 delegates and there are 10 statewide ones, not counting the three party officials (one male and one female national committee member, and the head of the state party) who I think go to the convention uncommitted - it’s a state-by-state decision).
The sooner the better. We need to winnow the field and when the early debates separate the wheat from the chaff, money will dry up quickly for 3/4 of the field and we’ll be down to a manageable number. Get an early nomination and unify to kick serious ass next year.
If anything, that accentuates the problem. If Super Tuesday winds up effectively marking the end of the primary season (i.e. there are still more primaries, but essentially no doubt of who’s won), then we’ve got 13 months of active campaigning with no means of winnowing the field, followed by a caucus/primary season that’s been shortened from at least the possibility of 4 months down to a single month.
Does this actually happen? I don’t recall the debates winnowing down the Republican field last time but I might have missed something.
Rick Perry forgetting that he wanted to shut down the Department of Energy - yes, the same Department of Energy he is now secretary of - during a debate didn’t exactly help him.
But did his funding dry up? It certainly didn’t make him drop out early. That stumble happened in November and he stayed in the race until the next January after Iowa and New Hampshire.
Things get a lot less active after a candidate wins enough delegates to secure the nomination. Everyone else drops out of the race the presumptive nominee dials things back to save money for the general election. Things start picking up again shortly before the convention. Potentially that gives us a bigger lull if someone has locked up the nomination earlier than normal.
Of course, the potential of a busload of candidates for the Democratic nomination plus proportional delegate allocation presents an uglier option. We might come out of March with the leader not having a majority of the large share of delegates awarded. Since it takes a majority of delegate votes to win the nomination at the convention that could get really, really ugly. We could be looking at the strong likelihood of a contested convention as early as mid to late March depending on how those front loaded races go. If that happens the race gets shoved down our faces potentially all the way to the convention.
CA at least has Congressional District allocation for most of their delegates. It might split a more towards the leading candidate than statewide proportional representation. Of course CA early voting starts before the NH primary happens. Some candidates without a lot of money might try to only target their most favorable district. That means the potential for the overall winner to get less delegates than a statewide proportional representation would give too as districts get cherry picked out from under them.
This cycles schedule and large candidate field could yield very interesting results. That’s for a definition of interesting that includes things like being near a truck jackknifing on the highway.