If you ask people around here why we have the first primary in the US presidential elections, they’ll say that it’s because we have a state law that says our primary must be at least a week before any other primaries. This is true.
But why is New Hampshire allowed to impose a restriction like this on other states? And if it’s not a legal restriction, why do the other states abide by it anyway?
Are there other examples of state laws dictating actions other states take?
That doesn’t sound like a restriction on other states but a kind of automatic amendment of New Hampshire’s election law. In other words, if another state picked a date before NH’s primary, NH’s law already provides that NH’s primary is moved to one week before the other state’s date, without NH’s legislature having to do anything.
And what happens if some other state passes a similar law? The law is inherently nonsensical.
It’s only nonsensical if another state passes a similar law. Until then, it’s no different from calling dibs, or calling shotgun. Which, of course, is totally reasonable and must be respected by everyone else in the group.
What would New Hampshire do if another state suddenly and without warning arranged to have its primary in three days time? It’d be physically impossible to hold the NH primary a week before that.
If it’s Vermont or Rhode Island, invade.
Anyone else, appeal to the Supreme Court to uphold dibs.
The New Hampshire primary used to be held on the second Tuesday in March. Other states tried to jump over them several times. New Hampshire just keeps moving the date earlier.
First off, you can’t schedule an election “suddenly and without warning” in the U.S. There are filing deadlines, official voter notifications, arrangements for absentee voters, assembling of poll workers, etc. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that any attempt to hold any election with just three days notice would generate of blizzard of lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act charging all sorts of voter suppression rules.
Secondly, the major parties could simply announce they won’t accept the delegates selected by the super-sped-up primary. They would almost certainly do this after all the candidates, the media, etc. all cried foul over the date of the election being changed.
Primaries are for the sole purpose of nominating a candidate for a political party. The political party have full control over them. Therefore they get to say what primaries count and which don’t.
The Republican and Democratic National Committees have agreed that New Hampshire gets to be first and Iowa follows. When other states have tried to move their primaries earlier than New Hampshire, the Committees decreed that they would not recognize the results. New Hampshire’s law affects other states only because the Committees are the true overseers.
It’s a truly weird artifact of our political system that states use official means to settle the affairs of private interests. As long as we have two parties that permeate all elections from the federal to the local level, that weirdness will remain.
Whether New Hampshire will stay first is more doubtful. The pressure to move the early primaries to larger states and states that are more demographically representative of the country as a whole has been mounting for several presidential cycles.
My prognostication is that it will happen soon, although it’s probably too late for 2020. States require many months to organize a formal election. The notion that a state could set up a primary overnight is not realistic. Even a caucus would take more time.
I can’t believe we’re having a serious discussion about this, but it wouldn’t need to be sudden, as Chronos says any other state could pass their own law that just contradicts the NH statute. It isn’t the really the NH statute that maintains this state of affairs, it’s a tradition that nobody who controls the process has yet seen any compelling reason to violate.
In 2008, two states (FL & MI) held their primaries earlier than they traditionally did. (i.e. before the nominee was already locked in.)
The Democrats, in response, shortchanged them to a half-delegate each at the convention.
If they hadn’t pulled that shit, Clinton would very likely have been the president in 2008, and Obama would have been in a much better position to follow up than she was.
Even with those delegates, Obama would still have had more delegates. And Florida and Michigan both knew the Democratic rules when they scheduled their primaries.
Also, Obama pulled his name from the Michigan ballot.
I think the idea may have been that those states voting earlier pulled public sentiment towards Obama, as primaries are often decided more by momentum than by convincing people to vote for you.
The point still stands. The law is non-enforceable if another state passes a similar law. By default, each state’s primary would automatically leapfrog each other until the primary was required to be held tomorrow in each state, and even then neither state would be in compliance with its own law.