That would make for a shorter primary season, in better weather (as one who has trudged through the streets of Manchester, NH, in January I would call that an improvement). It would also be closer to the party conventions (usually in August or September), so there would be a more or less continuous level of political energy from May to November – a period not quite long enough for everybody to get sick to death of it.
It would make for a shorter primary season, but it wouldn’t neccesarily make for a shorter campaign season. If anything, people would get more sick to death of it, because there’d be more “empty space”, where not much is happening substantially with delegates, for the press to film.
Look at the Dean campaign in the 2004 election. The first primary/caucus in 2004 was Iowa, on January 19th, 2004. Dean announced his candidacy in June of 2003. In the six months before Iowa, Dean became the “front runner”. He was getting the money, he was getting the endorsements, he was getting the news coverage. But he was the “front runner” before he had any delegates, even before the first states had chosen delegates. Then Iowa comes, he does terrible, and his campaign dies. I think it’s things like that six month buildup that people are sick of, and that’s not going to change whenever you hold the primaries.
Besides, you know that if everyone decides to have the primaries in May, some state will decide they want to be first by setting their date on April 30, and it will progress from there.
No, but it could at least make the whole process six months shorter. If the first primary/caucus were in May, it might be considered bad form (and certainly it would be far less urgent) to announce any sooner than November. That still leaves us a full year to get to know the candidates.
Well, like any proposition for rescheduling or reordering or systematizing the primaries, it’s not going to happen at all without some kind of national interstate agreement that would, presumably, include some provisions precluding any state from messing with the results.
Pity Congress can’t just legislate it, but we’ve got to work with what we’ve got.
That’s pretty much what happened historically. Most states had May/June primaries and New Hampshire decided to hold one in March to get an early jump. Things ended up where they are now because of it…