By New Hampshire state statute, the New Hampshire Presidential primary must occur before any other states’ primary election. What would happen if another state enacted a statute that contradicted that? ie, if Ohio passed a law which said that its primary election must be first, or would be on the same date as NH’s primary, how would the US Supreme Court resolve the issue?
I don’t have the faintest idea, but I’m in favor of stripping New Hampshire of the privilege of holding the first primary.
There’s nothing SCOTUS could do. All NH could do is schedule it’s primary earlier and Ohio would respond in kind until the primary happed to hall after Election Day. We’re not that far from having a December primary.
If SCOTUS really wanted to, it could declare NH’s law unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment as it violates the soverignty of other states (i.e. having the first primary). I’m sure they could also argue that it violates the principle that all states enter the Union on equal footing.
It may be a tortured reading of the Constitution, but no more than some other SCOTUS rulings.
The importance of primary elections is a relatively new development. The string of presidents we’ve had since then suggests to me that perhaps we should go back to smoke-filled rooms.
Didn’t Louisiana try to move ahead of New Hampshire in 1996? I think Phil Gramm was the only candidate to compete “in respect” of New Hampshire’s first in the nation primary.
Primaries are scheduled by states within parameters set by the parties themselves. Things might have changed since 2000 but back then the Dems reserved the first places to Iowa and New Hampshire and allowed everyone else sometime between the first Tuesday in March and the 2nd Tuesday in June.
Gramm might have campaigned in an early Louisiana Republican Primary in 1996 because the GOP didn’t formally adopt a primary protocol until 2000. Before then they generally just held primaries when the Democrats did but there was no formal requirement at all. In 2000 the adopted the Democratic plan except their window for everyone else started on the first Monday of February.
As I alluded to, my info might be a bit out of date. But still, states do need to take the party rules into consideration. A state can’t just schedule a primary in December and expect the national political parties to go along.
In the 2004 primaries Iowa went befor New Hampshire. Iowa voted on January 19 and New Hampshire on January 27.
Doubtless it could be done if they (whoever “they” are…political parties?, states?, feds?) wanted to and could agree to it.
I think candidates prefer a drawn out primary process as the other way is a one shot deal. The drawn out process allows for longer media coverage and allows candidates to focus on a few states at a time rather than go all at once.
Of course you get a “first out of the gate” deal when Iowa and New Hampshire go which lends a boost to whoever won there. Further, with a drawn out process you can sideline numerous states from ever being able to have a say in the process. IIRC John Kerry clinched the primary season in March. Around 20 states or so had yet to have primaries. Why bother? Now the candidate can safely ignore those states (or rather just focus on ones he/she is interested in to win the general election).
Conversely I suppose you could get a situation where the primary is a dead heat to the end and then hand inordinate power to one state to decide it all (or a few states…Montana and New Jersey were the last to vote in 2004). I do not see that as a good thing either.
Personally I think the political process would better serve the citizens if there were a one day national primary (or caucus if that is what that state does) and be done with it.
Well, remember, they’re all competing against each other and, WRT to whatever system is in use, they’re all in the same boat. If I were seeking a party nomination for president, I think I would prefer a system where the matter can be decided all at once. Far less grueling, less expensive, and if I lose I can immediately resign myself to campaigning for the nominee. Less chance of lasting grudges and recriminations.
I’m not seeing where there would be an issue that would be justiciable before the Supreme Court.
Rather, you would have a practical problem: At some point before the primary, the NH and OH Secretaries of State would have to schedule the date in accordance with their state’s law. You would have a game of chicken as each would wait for the other to go first and then schedule their primary a week sooner. But you can’t wait too long, because it takes time to physically distribute the ballots, arrange for polling places and poll judges, etc.
My guess would be that New Hampshire, being smaller and more experienced at early primaries, would be better positioned to win that game of chicken. But we won’t know until some state tries.
There are two other considerations:
Democratic party rules don’t allow any state except Iowa or New Hampshire to schedule its primary or caucus earlier than a window which starts in early March. (There has been talk about changing this rule for 2008; we’ll see.) If a state wished to defy that rule, they would run the risk of having the national convention refuse to seat their delegates. Big whoopee: They wouldn’t get to wear funny hats and listen to boring speeches on C-SPAN. But to some people this is important.
Other states have tried to horn in on the nomination process before, usually by scheduling Republican caucuses. (Caucuses don’t require the legislature to act, and the Republicans haven’t had the “window rule”.) Iowa and New Hampshire voters have a history of “punishing” candidates who campaign in these caucuses and violate their precious primacy. So any candidate who campaigned in an early Ohio primary who probably have to blow off New Hampshire entirely. And because of the media spotlight, candidates who blow off New Hampshire don’t usually win the nomination.
As a New Hampshirite, I’d like to keep our first-in-the-nation primary. I like the fact that politicians actually have to roll up their sleeves and mix it up with Joe and Jane six-pack in ordinary, face-to-face conversations at the Waffle Iron and the Moosehead Grill for two or three weeks. Frankly, it’s kind of fun being wooed by (potentially) powerful people. It’s sort of like having the all the Homecoming King and Queen candidates constantly calling you up like this, begging you to go to the prom with them.
I can see why other states don’t like New Hampshire and Iowa getting special attention and hogging the spotlight, though. The only problem I see with a national primary day is that it further removes candidates from the rest of us, and makes money even more of a factor. Instead of getting to meet the candidates at the Moosehead Grill, we’d only get to “meet” them in slick, packaged TV ads and news soundbites.
I don’t like the idea of a provincial populus routinely determining who the rest of us get to vote for. I know that sounds like I’m slamming Iowa and New Hampshire–and maybe I am just a little. But I think I’d feel the same way if it were, say, California and Georgia who got first dibs. I think in a national election, all party members (or voters) should have the same amount of say in who gets the party’s nomination. Let candidates campaign over lots of states before folks start voting. And if this is impossible to do, then the states hosting the first primaries should change on a regular basis. Draw names out of a hat each time there’s a presidential election coming up. Upholding tradition for tradition’s sake is stupid.
It would be cool if states with large, diverse populations could be involved early in the process.
Martin Sable made a good point though. The personal contact would be lost in too large a state. I’m not certain that that is important, though I feel as if it is.
Perhaps a combination of caucuses and a national primary. The states would all have a caucus, and then those candidates who have demonstrated a certain level of support (at least 30% in at least ten states? or something to be determined) are in the nationwide primary.
Certainly. Try a Google search for “national presidential primary”.
The mechanics of such a change aren’t very complex. The last major change which created the current system was the McGovern-Fraser reform which was a Democratic Party rule. The Dems changed their rules and the states fell into line. It would be a bit tougher now that the GOP has formal rules as well but basically the ball is in the parties’ court. The point of a primary is to elect delegates to a party convention. States can hold a primary whenever they wish. Louisiana could hold one today for the 2008 election if they wanted. But the parties wouldn’t seat delegates chosen there at their national conventions.
That, BTW, likely provides the practical answer to the OP’s question. If Ohio passed a law providing for a primary on the same day or before that of New Hampshire the latter state would, in all likelyhood, do nothing stronger than protest. Since the Ohio delegates wouldn’t be seated there would be no point in moving New Hampshire’s primary forward. Especially considering that if they did so the NH delegates wouldn’t be seated either. Contrary to what alphaboi867 said we aren’t moving toward a December primary. Primaries are becoming more frontloaded, it’s true. But only within the “window” after New Hampshire.
The change to a national primary might also be enacted by law. I haven’t read the precedents myself but supposedly the high court has ruled that Congress has the power to regulate presidential elections.
This turns out not to be correct. New Hampshire holds the first primary. That is preceded by the Iowa caucuses which are not the same thing and only cover the presidential race. Iowa holds a primary later in the year to pick candidates for other offices. In 2004 the Iowa primary was on June 8th.
I won’t quote the rest of your post but it does make some solid points about the primary system. Keeping the state primaries seperate creates momentum for winning candidates and winnows out candidates before voters in other states get a chance to go to the polls which wouldn’t happen with a national primary. And if a race was close it could come down to a handful of voters in one of the last states to go to the polls.
My own prefered system is designed to prevent those problems. I would divide the states into five groups of ten geographically and demographically diverse states and let them take turns being the early primaries. Each election ten states would get to hold early primaries where the candidates could get out and engage in retail politics. The rest of the states would vote together in a pseudo-national primary. There would be time for campaigns to develop but no handful of states at the end to make a decision. There would be individual early primary states to target but they wouldn’t all be rural-oriented, lily-white states. And everyone would have a chance to vote in an early primary once every twenty years.
That’s the best I’ve come up with, at least. Though I am not sold on the idea of primaries themselves. If we have to hold them I think that is the way to go about them. But I haven’t come up with a solid explanation for why the taxpayers should foot the bill for parties to choose their standardbearers. Why not just chuck the whole system and tell the parties to do it on their own time and their own dime?
But wouldn’t that mean that the state’s delegates wouldn’t get to vote on the nomination at the convention? I thought that the purpose of the primary was to select delegates bound to vote for a particular candidate. If the delegates don’t get seated, how could they vote? If they can’t vote, why would the state run the risk of depriving its residents of that influence on the nomination? And why would any candidate even run in that primary, since there would be no votes for the nomination as a result?
Granted, it’s been a long time since any convention went to a second ballot, but that’s because the delegates are all locked up through the primary process. But if it wasn’t clear if a particular state’s delegation would be seated, that would create some uncertainty, depending on the size of the particular delegation, wouldn’t it?
It would. But no convention has taken a seriously contested vote on anything since about 1976, and there hasn’t been a multi-ballot convention since 1952. In today’s environment, the losing candidates withdraw long before the convention.
My premise is that candidates would contest an early primary for publicity and momentum, even in the face of a possible credentials challenge at the convention long after the race for the nomination was over.
Or at least, they might. The one attempt to date to challenge NH’s primacy with another early primary was a colossal failure. In 1996 Delaware determined to hold its primary four days after NH, in defiance of NH law which schedules its primary for seven days before anyone else’s. Here we had the conflicting dates envisioned by the OP.
As it happened, NH didn’t get involved in a game of chicken that year, because the challenge was so weak. Delaware is even smaller than New Hampshire, and NH simply intimidated most of the candidates into avoiding it. The one who didn’t, Steve Forbes, performed very poorly in NH, got no momentum from winning Delaware, and saw his campaign sink without a trace. Of course, it might have sunk anyway.
The Democrats had no contest that year, with Clinton running for renomination, so the “window issue” on their side never came into play.
A stronger challenge involving a contemporaneous primary in a larger state might have a different result.
