Improvements to the Democratic Primaries

Great Debates
21

Yes Caucuses need to stay because they really build the party. Primacaucuses for everyone!

J/k… I say let the states choose how they allot their delegates.
Obviously get rid of the superdelegates. There’s probably never going to be a situation these days where people are going to allow anything like a superdelegte coup to occur. And as we saw, superdelegates are only going to go the way that the tide does because they are mainly chickenshit cowards.

I like the biggest states last idea. The only other thing that I think that could compete with that would be to work on some kind of regional aspect. It’d be nice if we could have it go by regions too. Maybe divide the country into 6 different regions and have them go from lowest to greatest popularity. It’d make it easier for the candidates to campaign in (hopefully allowing a lot of bus tours) and it’d also help solidify supporters in neighboring states.

I just made a little mockup of how it could be done! I did this quickly with an electoral vote calculator. I’m using EVs as a rough estimate of population. Of course the Democrats would put in the number of delegates per state, but I was lazy…

New England 34
Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Mass.

Bread Basket 45
North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota

Rockies / Desert 47
Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico

TX OK AR LA 56
Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana

Deep South and FL 57
Mississipi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida

Midsouth 60
Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, North, Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia

Great Lakes 79
Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan

Pacific 80
California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii

Northeast 83
New York, New Jersey, DC, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania
Now a lot of these states are difficult to categorize. Is PA in Great Lakes or Midatlantic? I don’t know. It’s a mixture really. Philly is definitely a Midatlantic town, while a lot of the state is a lot like Ohio. The Midsouth region is difficult too because it mixes Appalachia with the more affluent areas of NC and VA.

22

Why is there even a need for delegates (including super delegates)? I think a simple sum of votes is the better way to go. For the convention, send an honorary delegation that announces the actual votes from their state.

As for the order of primaries/caucuses, I’d divide the states into ten five-state blocks. Each block would vote two weeks after the previous one (giving an 18-week primary season, lasting January through May).

Order would be based on voter turnout in the previous presidential election. Highest turnout goes first. (I’d measure turnout as the ratio of votes to total population, but this is negotiable.) This would put the early votes in the hands of the states with most active electorate. Smaller states would have an advantage, since it would be easier to mobilize their smaller populations.

23

You’re saying that the order of the whole list would change for each primary season? I like it – it means that the first race (which establishes momentum) would be the most representative of those states’ populations. It’s an interesting group of states:

Oregon
North Dakota
Ohio
Vermont
Iowa
New Hampshire
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Maine
Delaware

Two of them are 15% or more away from the national popular vote percentages (left-leaning VT and right-leaning ND). Two are very close to the center (Ohio and Iowa). The rest, however, lean significantly left. For 2004, maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. Notice that some of the same states from your list show up on my proposed block of ten: Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. What happens if we take the first ten states to appear on both lists? We get:

Iowa
Ohio
Wisconsin
New Hampshire
Minnesota
Delaware
Michigan
Missouri
Oregon
Maine

which has no red states on the list at all, but has a smaller variance from the national popular vote. I’m not sure if it’s an improvement, though… the resulting list of states is fairly left-leaning as well.

24

Before I speak up with my ideas, I’d like to ask this: Who pays for the counting of votes for the primary season?

The reason I ask is because I tend to think that there are two ways to look at primary elections. Either they’re a private event for the party, alone, in which case the party should have to foot the bill; or they’re a public event, intended for the good of the public at large, in which case they should be open to any registered voter in the state, and having the state pay to count the votes makes sense. If one wants to restrict voting in primaries so that a voter can vote in only one party’s primary, that would be something I’d accept, but honestly, I’m not sure that is even justifiable.

Other than that, while I see some of the well-thought out positions of other people in this thread, I think I like Brain Glutton’s suggestion in post #3.

25

I would allow super-delegates. (why can’t a JImmy Carter be a delegate without having to commit himself to a candidate?) But I would change the rules. The superdelgates could vote for all matters except the first ballot for the presidential nominee. If it came to a second ballot then the super-delegates would come into play.

26

Yes, in my plan the order for the presidential primary season would be recomputed each time. My intention was to prevent a few states from monopolizing the early going by giving an objective, quantitative means for the ordering. And I think voter turnout is an excellent metric–the state whose voters care the most get to go first. And if a state wants to move up in the order, improving its voter turnout is an obvious social benefit.

I hadn’t considered if this would put a left-right bias in the order. This could matter if the primary/caucus is open to independents. Personally, I think open primaries are good since they give more moderate candidates a chance, but I can understand if a party wants to have more control over the selection of its candidate. (I’m a Republican in the libertarian wing, so I tend to oppose strict party controls.)

Also, I think it would make the party more responsive to swings in the electorate. A party who ordered its primaries/caucuses based on voter turnout and allowed independents to participate will be in much better tune with the people. And I think that would translate into better results at the ballot box.

27

When considering the primary calendar, the first thing you have to ask is, what goals are you trying to accomplish through messing with the calendar? (If you’ve already got a favorite approach to the calendar, you might ask yourself why you like that approach, and work from there.)

My two goals are:

  1. Have an orderly winnowing-down of the primary field, so that we have a decent amount of time to consider the more serious contenders without the Mike Gravels of the world cluttering things up; and

  2. Have a process that, over a period of years - and to the maximum extent possible, within each Presidential cycle - gives the voters of each state a real voice in the selection of the Dem nominee.

Let me talk a bit more about #1. In 2007, we had a seemingly endless cycle (OK, it only lasted most of a year) of Democratic debates (15-20 of them, IIRC) with 7-8 candidates involved. (I think some of the later debates arbitrarily excluded Gravel.) Then we knocked the field from 7 down to 2 in a few weeks, then it was 2 candidates for over four months more. In 2004, we went from a large field with no clear favorite to Kerry as far-and-away frontrunner in about a week and a half.

The next time we have a wide-open field for the nomination, my sense is that it would be preferable to winnow the field down gradually, so that there was still time for the survivors to distinguish themselves in that endless round of debates.

That’s why, if the campaign’s going to be going full-bore already during the year before the election year, we might as well have a few small-state primaries scattered over that year to winnow the field down somewhat. Suppose, this past cycle, we’d had Iowa in June 2007, NH in September, and SC in November (as I proposed early last year)? Whether or not any candidates dropped out along the way (though some low performers surely would), the results would have given debate organizers legitimate grounds to uninvite candidates who’d been unable to attract any votes in the early primaries.

I’ll post more on the calendar in a bit.

28

This is actually what I expected the OP to say, & sweet screamin’ monkeys it’s a bad idea. If there’s a clear front-runner, a proportional system will find him. What happened this year was a function of the two candidates running, not a systemic flaw.

29

Because it would make TV ads so much more important, and thus favor the rich candidates.

30

The only thing i would change is make super delegates declare for one candidate or another by the end of the primaries or they lose their vote. Actually i would make them declare for a candidate at the latest one week after their state primary is done. That was the only problem i had with this years primaries.

31

What about the case where a Rovian ballot initiative – something like a gay marriage referendum – ends up on the ballot? That year’s turnout would be abnormally high and packed with issue voters, and the state parties would be rewarded with an earlier primary date in the next election. I worry about a scenario where two or three states with high delegate counts all have firebrand issues in the same year, and then end up setting the momentum for the entire primary season. Should abnormally high voter turnout in California (or Texas) really winnow down the field for the Republican (or Democratic) nomination, respectively? One solution to cross-party contamination could be to base the order on per-party turnout, so the two parties had different primary schedules… but that means that independents would likely be underrepresented in the second contest in a given state. I worry that your suggestion would result in the two parties choosing more radical candidates, because the momentum-setting first contests would be settled by passionate and partisan issue voters.

I think my suggestion of mirroring the general electorate gives the momentum to more centrist candidates, and prevents a late move by any candidate because the late states are evenly divided between far-left and far-right. If you think centrist candidates in the general election are a good thing, then I think my plan is more effective.

On the other hand, after a decade of conservative dominance, perhaps a primary schedule that leans left isn’t such a bad thing. A centrist candidate who stays in the race will catch up slowly as time goes on if they are truly the stronger candidate.