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Big Mo and the Order in Which Primaries, Caucuses Fall

April 9th, 2008
By MARK DANIELS

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An eighty-six year old man told me on Sunday, “There has got to be a better way to pick a president than what we’ve got now.” He added, “It’s pitiful!”

I think he’s right.

Sean Oxendine is appalled by the Democratic nomination process, which he reports that one of his friends calls, “like the electoral college, but more random.” But, Oxendine says, the most disturbing element of this “process” is the impact of the order in which primaries and caucuses fall on momentum, delegate counts, candidate withdrawals, and nominations. He writes:

Imagine, for example, where things would stand if Georgia, Alabama and a few caucus states hadn’t moved their dates up to Super Tuesday, but Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas had, in fact, moved up. This race would likely have been over February 3, with calls for Obama to get out reaching the same crescendo that the calls against Hillary are reaching.

Of course, the whole way we got to this position was Obama’s magical “ten in a row” during February. But Maryland, DC, Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Hawai’i, Maine, Washington and Nebraska were all races that he was supposed to win — and by large margins at that — with the arguable exception of Wisconsin. Imagine if those races had instead been Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and a couple of Super Tuesday states (say, MA and TN). The storyline would be completely different.

Jeremy Pierce says:

This is a criticism of the whole process, not just of how the Democratic primary does things. It’s even clearer for the Republican primary. If Florida had been the first GOP state, followed by New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Giuliani might have been the nominee. If Iowa had been followed by certain key Southern states without New Hampshire in between, Huckabee would have had a real chance. If South Carolina had been first, followed by Tennessee and perhaps Georgia, we might have actually seen Fred Thompson doing well in other states. If Michigan had been before Iowa, Romney would have had enough momentum that he could possibly have done a good deal better, and if more Western states were early on he might have had enough to get the momentum necessary to take states he lost by a large margin.

This process is highly sensitive to small changes in the order of states, and that seems to me to be a very bad thing.

Is this any way to elect a President?

[This is being cross-posted on my personal blog.]



This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 2:01 am and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 6 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Image what is going to happen after the Republican party completes its collapse and the Democratic primary is the real presidential election. A few states will be determining who the president is and the order of the primaries will determine the winner.
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    • v
    Maybe a variation on a national caucus would be a better method. Have all the states participate within a given month (say May of the election year) and only candidates who pick up at least 25-30% of the vote overall can move on to a national Primary in July that determines the nominee for each party. Scrap delegates and apportionment - just count the votes.
    • ^
    • v
    I love Sean's argument.

    "But Maryland, DC, Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Hawai’i, Maine, Washington and Nebraska were all races that he was supposed to win — and by large margins at that."

    That's it. Throw out voting altogether! Primaries are meaningless when campaigns are supposed to win them.
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    • v
    I think most reasonable people at this point see the primaries process for the fiasco it is. Lets say we'd like them to do something different like have them all on the same day, who do I talk to about that. I'll file complaints all day long. We need to be spreading information on how to get the politicians to listen to us, who to talk to, who to get with, to make some changes and then start doing something with that info. Otherwise this is just a big circlejerk.
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    • v
    Points in the article are well taken. At the same time, putting every primary on one day has its drawback as well. Essentially it favors the famous name and the extremely well-heeled. A national election requires millions upon millions being spent all across the country at once, which rules out people spending far less on just the first 5 states or so to gain name recognition. So drawbacks either way.

    The best solution I've had so far is to rotate the primaries. Create about 10 regions with 5 states each, and you can cyle through them every 5 elections or so for who leads. It's not ideal either, but it's maybe a bit better. I'd also be open to moving to all primaries.
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    • v
    That's it. Throw out voting altogether! Primaries are meaningless when campaigns are supposed to win them.

    Pyronite, you seem to be working from a completely different understanding of Sean's argument from what I thought he was saying. I saw nothing about ignoring voting. What I saw was an observation that he'd been doing very well in the polls in those states all along, so it was no surprise that he did well in those states. If the voting had occurred at a different time, the votes would have gone the same way in those states. On the other hand, the polls in other states would have favored Hillary had they happened at other times. Thus the order of the primaries significantly affected who won in those states. Where in there is any suggestion that we stop having people vote in primaries? That's neither an assumption of the argument nor its conclusion. You're just making it up and pretending he thinks something remotely like that.
 
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