I guess the topic speaks for itself. Why don’t all states hold primaries on the same day? That way voters may not be influenced by the results seen in other states ("Hey, if California went to Obama then maybe I should jump on that band wagon and vote his way too) . It would (should) reduce campaign costs/time. Then this shit wouldn’t be dragged out for 3 months while each state gets their day in the sun waving their votes.
We are a country and we should vote as one for national elections, not as a bunch of seperate states.
One reason to not have the primaries on the same day is that it only allows candidates with enormous financial resources (enough to campaign in 50 states) to have any chance whatsoever.
Having the first primaries in small states gives poorer candidates a chance to win.
If you assume all of the candidates start with a level playing field, that’s a great idea. The reality is that the long primary process gives the voters time to meet the candidates; front-runners get scrutinized and underdogs have a chance to be heard. One of Obama’s biggest weaknesses was that nobody believed anyone else would vote for him, so having a series of elections was a huge benefit to him.
In a national primary, to generate enough votes to win, you would either need to be from Texas, California, New York, or Florida (in order to win a big delegate state) or be able to mount a simultaneous campaign in every state of the union. This would make the race for the nomination (and the Presidency) even more dependent on money than ever. Also, it doesn’t allow the field to be winnowed down by the early primaries. On the Republican side you could have a candidate like Huckabee – who I would argue is unelectable in a general election – take the Republican nomination by grabbing a strategically large block of southern states (assuming winner-take-all) while the other candidates each grabbed one or two medium states. On the Democratic side you could have (e.g.) Edwards and Obama split the “change” vote (which is the clear majority this year) and Clinton could walk away with the nomination.
Obama is an incredibly well-organized candidate with a grassroots campaign that has broken funding and turnout records everywhere, and it has taken everything he could do (and several screw-ups by the Clinton campaign) to pull even with her name recognition and big donors. If Super Tuesday had been three or four states larger, I believe Clinton could have easily defeated him by focusing a little more money where he was squeaking by. If he had not had the advantage of being visibly able to win in a white state, then a black state, then a caucus state, then some primary states, etc. etc., each while the media looked on and said “mayyyyybe”, he would not be nearly as strong a contender.
A national primary would serve incumbents and special interests far better than it would represent the will of the people. A rotating primary system would be nice, too – perhaps let the state whose vote came closest to representing the national popular vote go first each year. So if the popular vote goes 51% D / 48% R / 1% I, then whichever state matches that ratio gets to go first, with the other states paired up (a 60/40 state and a 40/60 state could be paired, for example, or all of the 30/70 and 70/30 states could go on the same day).
We are a nation of states. We tend to forget this a lot these days.
I gather you are not the resident of a small state. If you were, you would abhor the concept of a national primary day: you’d be as irrelevant in the process as you often are in November.
The system is so complex now that few people even understand it. Coming out of school, I thought it worked like this:
Each state has an primary election day where every voter can choose among the party’s entire slate of candidates. Delegates are chosen based on the popular vote.
There’s a national caucus, where the delegates vote for whomever they people told them to vote for. The candidates are chosen.
There’s a national election, where electors are chosen based on the popular vote.
The electoral college meets, the electors vote as they were told to vote. We have a President.
As it turns out, that’s not even close. I think I’m beginning to grasp how it all works. Let me know if I got anything wrong here:
Each state has its own different system for each party. Some have caucuses, some have primaries, some (e.g., Texas) have both. There may be one or more than one election day (e.g., Montana’s Democrats and Republicans vote four months apart).
Some voters (e.g., New Hampshire) get to choose among their party’s entire slate of candidates. Most have limited choice (candidates this year started dropping out when 98.5% of registered voters hadn’t even had an opportunity to vote yet). Many voters have no say whatsoever, as their selection has narrowed to one single candidate by the time their state holds its primary.
Some states select delegates based on distribution of the popular vote, and some are winner-take-all. Other delegates are picked by party leaders, with regular party members having no say whatsoever.
The delegates all get together and vote for whomever they choose. They have no obligation to pay any attention to the will of the people. Candidates are chosen.
A national election is held, where electors are chosen based on the popular vote. The candidate with the most votes does not necessarily get the most electors.
Candidates can call for recounts, and final elector counts may be chosen by state governments or by the Supreme Court.
The electoral college meets, and its members may vote for whomever they choose (although they usually do vote for the one they’re supposed to).
It has its problems, but every system does. Some people see something as a problem, and other see the same thing as an advantage. What would you replace our system with that the minimum number of people would be dissatisfied with? Personally, I’m not convinced that, for example, any other country’s system is better overall.
Delegates must vote for the person they were chosen by. Superdelegates to be used only as tie-breakers
Electors may not change their votes
All primaries held on the same day
All electors chosen on a percentile basis instead of a winner-take-all basis, with rounding to favor the highest vote-getter(s). If a state has 10 electoral votes, and candidates A, B, and C get 54%, 31%, and 15%, then A gets 6 electors, B gets 3, and C gets 1. This eliminates nonsense like candidates garnering double-digit percentages of the popular vote without getting one single electoral vote.
Um, Invisible Wombat, what is the point to your changes? We’ve not had an election in the history of the country (since we started choosing the majority of electors by popular vote) where the electors chose someone other than the person predicted by the popular vote on the day of the election in November. Further, we’ve not had a national party convention choose someone other than the person predicted on the basis of the voting during the primary/caucus process since the 1960s, when primaries took over as the method for selecting party convention delegates. So why bother “fixing” that?
As for national primaries day, as I pointed out above, it is a very bad idea. The candidates would simply focus on the big states, ignoring the smaller states with small delegate counts, much the same way that they do in the run-up to the November election. That is not a good thing. Further, the illusion of having more choice would be just that, an illusion, because the cost of mounting a campaign nationwide from the get-go for a national primary day would be staggering. Indeed, it is quite possible that Barack Obama would not have been able to survive such a system; his current position is quite clearly the result of having had the advantage of “proving” to the voters that his political philosophy and campaign organization are worth supporting at the polls.
As for your last proposal, shouldn’t that be up to Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/etc. to decide? I mean, if the people of the state of Colorado want to select their delegates on the basis of how many people farted the loudest at a caucus, shouldn’t they have that right? :dubious:
Actually, we had an election where that happened a mere 8 years ago. (Granted, it was the first time the popular and electoral votes failed to line up since Benjamin Harrison over a century ago, which hardly strikes me as the hopelessly broken system InvisibleWombat’s describing.)
No, you mis-understand what I said. I didn’t say that we have always elected the person with the highest popular vote (it’s happened more than once that the highest vote total getter didn’t win the election). What I said was that the person elected by the College was the person we would predict the College would elect, based upon the results from the popular vote on Election Day. Thus, the electors don’t just randomly decide to vote for whomever they damn please (with the occasional odd exception). Why, then, make it mandatory that they vote for the person who won the popular vote in their state on Election Day?
This is a separate issue. Only the Democratic Party uses superdelagates and only for the selection of its own candidate. Nothing to do with the laws of the land. And they are used as tie-breakers now. They are only meaningful if no individual gets a majority from the caucus/primary process. This is only possible if the delegate count is very close.
The original idea was that electors would vote for the best candidate from all those in the field. After political parties (and the Constitution) evolved, electors were pledged to party candidates. The number of unfaithful electors in over two centuries is trivially small. No election has ever been affected by one. The question of whether electors can be bound against their wishes is constitutionally suspect anyway. If Senators can change parties after being elected in a different one, it’s hard to see how electors could be prevented from doing so legally.
This is not the first thread on this. I find the idea of a national primary to be an extremely bad idea, and so do many other people. There are many good arguments against it, some already mentioned in this thread, and no good argument for it.
Proportional representation is another bad idea. Since this is GQ, this is not the place to go into a full argument. However, it’s safe to say that it simply brings up another whole set of problems that probably haven’t occurred to you, and some that won’t occur to anyone until they happen in practice.
Your not understanding the system does not mean it is broken.
