National committees have bent over backwards to accomodate the early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina), but the problem is the only penalty they can enforce for line jumping–reduction of delegates at the convention–isn’t much of a penalty in these days where the candidate is 100% decided long before the convention (really, the party delegates are there on a boondoggle). The payoff to line jumping is that it allows non-ealy primary states to be more influential in the selection process, not to mention all the campaign dollars, national attention, and opportunities for state branding that come along with it.
And of course, the the early primary states are likely to respons in kind by pushing their primaries/caucuses even earlier–and IMO they’re early enough as is. I for one would hate to be in Iowa and New Hampshire during the holidays this year, with candidates making more promises than department store Santas.
So…isn’t it about time the DNC and RNC abandon the silly tradition of fixed early primary states? Left alone I think the primaries would all eventually coalesce around two or three “Super Tuesday” style dates, with perhaps some modest guidance from the committee to ensure the same states don’t go first every year. Thoughts?
The problem is getting the states to put their own interests aside and cooperate. It’s very hard to convince any state to give up influence so another state can get its due.
Isn’t there a rule now that anyone who has their primary before some fixed date has to allocate their delegates proportionately? It seems to me that should significantly reduce the influence of the line-jumpers, and I would expect would be enough to disincentivize the behavior.
At the rate they’re going, it won’t be too long until the first primary is held the Tuesday after the new President is sworn in.
I don’t support a national primary; there needs to be some type of winnowing process. But the election cycle is already way too long, and now January? Come on.
I don’t even like the primaries themselves. One of the advantages of the old caucus system was that it let more, not fewer, dark horse candidates through. The newer system is a basically a cross between a circus and a popularity contest, with the winners usually well known in advance.
I saw somewhere on television today - great source, I know - that campaigns put 75% of their money into the first few primary/caucus states. That’s tens of millions of dollars. Every state wants both that money and the daily intense pervasive media coverage that goes along with it.
So they’re going to do it every chance they get until the parties can invent some reasonable incentive not to do so. Which nobody can seem to do. It’s the tragedy of the commons.
A reduction in the number of delegates from line-jumping states could potentially prevent that from happening and lead to a floor fight. Interesting political theater, and the networks would probably love it, but not helpful in uniting a party behind a candidate.
Yes, and like Smiling Bandit, I’m not 100% sure that’s a bad thing. We had a lot of great presidents chosen by party elites. We haven’t had a great president since the primary/caucus system really took off. We’ve simply replaced the frequent mediocre and bad Presidents with constant mediocre and bad Presidents.
No, the Republican rule is that states that hold their primary too soon lose half their delegates. They stuck by that rule in 2008 at their convention.
The Democrat rule is that states lose all their delegates, but they chose to ignore their own rules at the last convention and count the delegates from those states, anyway.
The modern convention system was put into place by the Democrats in 1972 after the 1968 Chicago fiasco. There were primaries and caucuses earlier but they were not in all states and the rules allowed for gamesmanship among the state bosses. However, you might argue that television was the real game changer. No president took more than one ballot to win the nomination since tv came into existence. The last losing candidate to require more than one ballot was Stevenson in 1952. You can argue all night whether Stevenson might have been a great president but the sole test is performance in office.
Keeping modern to 1972 or later, therefore, we can examine whether the party elites picked great presidents.
1968 Nixon - no
1964 Johnson - sitting president. The President always is the nominee. You can make some kind of argument that vice presidents are picked by the candidate and therefore by the party elite but it stretches the definition until it snaps. I won’t go there.
1960 Kennedy - no
1952 Eisenhower - no
1948 Truman - sitting president
1932 FDR - great
Today’s rules call for a simple majority of votes to win. It used to be two-thirds, an impossible hurdle created to get the most deals and horse trading out of the party elites. That’s why you used to see conventions taking so many votes while negotiations took place in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms. Roosevelt easily won a majority of the votes on the first ballot. As governor of New York State, whose population and power dominated the country and House of Representatives, he was the leading candidate and really the only candidate. His main opponent was former New York Governor Al Smith. Smith had lost the 1928 election badly and had turned against Roosevelt - he would be a vocal opponent of New Deal policies - but kept some support among the party elites. Roosevelt crushed them on the third ballot and Smith never had a bit of power in the party again. So much for party elites.
1928 Hoover - no
1924 Coolidge - sitting president
1920 Harding - no
1912 Wilson - ?
Wilson used to be considered one of the great presidents, mostly because Americans love their war presidents. His idealism at Versailles once made him look saintly. Today it looks narcissistic, if not megalomaniacal, and history shows that every other world leader despised him and out-maneuvered him. We also know that he was the most racist president of the 20th century. And his hiding his stroke and incapacity for the last year in office is strike three. Wilson no.
1908 Taft - no
1904 T. Roosevelt - sitting president
1896 McKinley - no
1892 Cleveland - no
1888 Harrison - no
1884 Cleveland - no
1880 Garfield - no
1876 Hayes - no
1868 Grant - no
1860 Lincoln - great
There are many stories about how Lincoln won the nomination. For our purposes, though, the important point is that Seward was the candidate of the party elite. He was also a former New York Governor and a New York Senator as well. He had it all, fame, power, and backing. But he was a radical firebrand at a time when the country was on the verge of war. History tells us the response to the election of Lincoln, who went through the campaign as a moderate. The party leaders were afraid that Seward would drive people away by his extremism. (Not much ever changes.) In addition, he spent most of the time before the convention on a nearly-year-long tour of Europe so he would be out of reach of reporters and inflammatory quotes. Lincoln used that time to connect with local politicians. When Seward couldn’t win the ballot quickly, support moved to Lincoln and he won on the third ballot. Not really a triumph for the party elites.
I’m not going all the way back, because conditions are just too different to compare and there are arguments over which Founding Father after Washington was truly great. You can argue that party elites nominated every one of them after Washington, I suppose.
The score therefore, after the era of the Founding Fathers, is party elites nominating great presidents: 0.
I’m not sure why they don’t just switch to a rotating calender, so a different state gets to be first each year. Seems like this would keep the advantage of letting candidates with fewer resources be able to focus on just a few states and still have a chance, while not giving a few small states like Iowa and Nevada dominate the election every four years.
Recent national presidential campaigns–with one exception–have tended to coalesce around one candidate early in the process, such that later primaries all tend to be won by the same candidate. Because of this, the eventual winner essentially grabs enough of a margin later in the process that even if he/she discarded all delegates won in the early primaries he/she would still win.
The one exception–the 2008 democratic primary, which as we all remember was a real battle between Clinton and Obama–actually shows how little line jumping matters in the primary process. The pledged delegates didn’t really matter because the difference between the two candidates was less than the superdelegate total (20% of total delegates). Furthermore, the penalties imposed on the two states that did jump the line–Michigan and Florida–were suspended prior to the convention, and in any event there was enough slack in those states’ results to “fix” the results and avoid embarassment (Clinton won both primaries, but many MI delegates were uncommitted because Clinton was the only one with her name on the original ballot, and in FL the delegates ended up voting on the floor anyway–for Obama of course).
In short, in the one recent case where a line-jumper might have skewed the results, it didn’t matter at all. If anything, this example showed how toothless and unimportant the early primary rules are.
If you assume that a given party will have an incombancy about 1/4 of the time, this means that it will take 300 years for the last state to get it’s turn to go first. Ain’t going to fly.
If you only have one state first each cycle. But you could let four go first on the same day, and then its only something like 60 years, which is better then the current model where everyone but Iowa waits forever.
Well, you could take a few large states out of the mix. I would like to preserve the small state first tradition so that you can have candidates going to coffee shops and talking to the locals, etc. I just don’t think it should be New Hampshire and Iowa every single time.
Plus it should be swing states as well. No sense in having a First In the Nation Washington D.C. Primary because the GOP won’t give a damn. Same way with a Mississippi primary first. The Dems can’t win there, so it’s lackluster.
Maybe have 4 individual primaries on a semi-rotating basis (no hard and fast rules, but try to mix it up) one a week for 4 weeks. Let the candidates run small, manageable campaigns to gauge support, build momentum, increase funding, etc. Then have 3 regional “super-primaries” for the rest of the states.
How do you get the states to vote against their own interests by gifting other states with all the advantages of the earliest primaries? Until you can answer that question, no scheme means anything at all.
