The primary primaries: game over?
I’ve seen a lot of comments around the blogosphere from people who feel angry because the present primary system so often leads to the nominee being chosen (de facto, anyway) quite early on. The complaint goes like this: Why should a few stupid little states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina decide the whole shebang?
But every New Hampshire (or South Carolina, or to a lesser extent Iowa, because it’s done there by caucuses) voter stands for many thousands more. Each state isn’t typical of the whole, of course; state primaries are not the same as a poll in which the sample is carefully selected (and even those polls and samples are often flawed, sometimes deeply flawed). But I’d bet that when you average out the results of the first three or four or five states to vote, then the results become more and more typical of the entire country. And if the earlier results point pretty powerfully in a single direction to a single winner—which doesn’t always happen, of course—it’s a good bet that this will probably continue to be the trend unless some fresh scandal erupts or some new events emerge to change the picture.
My talk of cumulative representativeness in the early primaries doesn’t mean I like the way the primary system is set up at the moment; I don’t. I think it lends itself to a bandwagon effect, and that having so many primaries on a single day (“Super Tuesday“) favors the candidate with the most money (but then, just about everything about campaigns favors the candidate with the most money). I also think primaries lock in a candidate too soon and make it impossible for a party to retain enough flexibility to react to changing circumstances and events, as well as allowing a less popular candidate to be nominated when the vote is split on the other side by the entry and persistence of a large number of candidates from one faction of the party.
I think the latter is one of the reasons many conservatives are so angry at the growing sense that Romney may run away with this thing. Ah, if only more of the others would drop out, they say. Then the conservative vote would unite behind one candidate who could defeat RINO Romney and be nominated instead. While that argument may have some merit, I’m not at all sure it would work that way. I see all the alternative conservative candidates as having disqualified or marginalized themselves in the eyes of too many voters, and I think a substantial number of their votes would go to Romney.
Wiki lists a number of proposals that have been made in an attempt to improve the primary system. After a quick look, I lean towards one called a “balanced primary system“:
Under this plan, primary contests would be held during 13 out of the 18 weeks, starting in late January and ending in late May. California would vote about halfway through the process. Before California votes, each week’s contest would choose about 12% of the delegates necessary for the nomination, from a single state, or a group of contiguous states. After California votes, the contests would award more delegates in larger groups of states, since the positions of the hopefuls would be better known by then.
To provide balance, diversity in each contest would be maximized. Liberal states would be paired with conservative states; urban areas would be mixed with rural areas. The contests would move around so that each region of the country would award some delegates before California votes. In subsequent years, groups of states could trade off dates, so that the same states did not vote early in every election.
The advantages of this system include the feature that lesser known candidates could still have a chance by using retail politics in small states early, without giving those early small states too much influence. Travel time and advertising cost would be minimized by requiring that groups of states be contiguous, thus saving the hopefuls’ time and money.
Like many election reform ideas, though, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Many states have too vested an interest in being first. What’s more, it’s the sort of proposal that keeps falling by the wayside once the primaries and the election are over and we’ve got a lot of other and seemingly more pressing things on which to focus our attention.
Open voting doesn’t help either. Spoilers from the other party may well exert undue influence.
Open voting in generals is great. In primaries, not so much.
I liked open primaries – I believe in voting for the best person, not by party line.
But seeing what it has devolved into – which is more partisan warfare, playing games with the votes to disrupt the process, and deny one side any hope, I am no longer a supporter.
Like so many things, it is only as good as the people participating – and vicious partisanship ruins everything. I think partisanship is likely to be the downfall of the nation, as we are divided into “sides” and instead of actually working on catastrophic problems, like the budget, instead the elected officials figure out how to stymie the other “side.”
Yet – much as I detest partisanship, this year, I will be voting strict party line, because for all their failures, Republicans are the only ones standing up to say, “STOP!” Stop the spending, stop driving the nation, and the nation’s businesses into the ground, stop taking away our freedoms – they hold the fate of the nation in their hands, and they must live up to the challenge. And we have to support them. You can vote Democrat again AFTER we restore fiscal health and sanity.
Tesh: I agree about open voting; I forgot to mention that.
The problem, however, is that I’m not sure what the remedy should be. Certainly people need to be able to change party affiliation, and there would have to be rules about that. How close to a primary should it be allowed? Would this avoid the problem of gaming the system and voting in one primary when you’re really a member of the other party?
And what of true independents? Should they not be able to vote in primaries? Perhaps not, but I’m not sure that’s a good solution either. It could lead to party nominees who are very very extreme (and that’s true of both parties).
Perhaps some of those independents would stay in a party and help it moderate its platform.
I’m not sure any reform would be better than the system we’ve got. If we look at it from a functional standpoint, then I think the relevant question to ask would be, what candidate, clearly superior to the eventual nominee, has the present lineup of caucuses and primaries kept from winning? For me, at least, nobody comes to mind.
Although there are a lot of theoretical questions and criticisms one could raise about the current system, as a practical matter, I think the parties tend to end up with the nominee they want, given the available choices. It may seem odd that Iowa and NH get so much early influence, but I don’t know that the choices these early states make are that different from what a larger segment of the GOP electorate would make.
Conrad: exactly.
Oddly enough, Iowa and New Hampshire represent two distinct wings of the Republican Party, so they somewhat average each other out. Iowa is socially conservative, New Hampshire fiscally conservative but socially rather liberal.
And then South Carolina is a southern state, another representative wing of the party.
What I find disconcerting about voting in primaries is that you’re trying–somewhat–to vote for somebody you think someone else (the general electorate) will like. Maybe we should have left it to the pros in the smoke-filled rooms!
These little useless primaries gave us McCain who rightfully was not elected giving us Obama. It is beyond stupid to allow two or three little states to push viable candidates out of the race. We should have 50 primaries on the same day.
Primaries are party functions. If a party chooses to restrict participation in selecting a candidate, they must also live with diminished participation in the general election.
A better remedy, I think, would address the two-party dominance. The tyranny of the majority would be better checked by increasing minor-party power and participation in elected government.
The current Republican AND Democrat party systems were in reaction to their respective former primary systems.
The system then was the so-called “smoke-filled rooms”, where party kingpins chose party nominees in secret, with little real say-so from the hoi-poloi.
Or so we characterized the process at the time.
After 30 years of “the solution” though, the question that is being voiced more and more is: was the cure worse than the disease?
To the several reasons neo mentions, I’d add an honorable mention of one she doesn’t: the length of time for opposition research (by both parties) in the current mode, which allows for too long a duration to poison the well, and results in the emphasis on wholly negative campaign strategies that leave disengaged AND engaged voters with non-useful and outright untruthful information.
…frustrated voters end up being unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will (or unwilling, due to the time and effort involved).
Jay Cost wrote about it a short while back (I included the link in an earlier thread …but here’s the column again).
GoneWithTheWind: did you actually read the article or just the title?
Game Over Man, GAME OVER!
I think it’s a great system. Living in New Jersey, I’m saved from so many of those robocalls and campaigners when the contest is decided early on.
Not all primaries are uncontested, either, as Obama and Hillary can confirm. This primary would not be, either, if any of the anti-Romney’s were strong enough to attract the votes from other candidates as they fall out of the race.
A few states deciding the nominee is really just an illusion.
Very well said.
Personally, I do not vote in primaries. This is due to my many years living in Illinois. By declaring myself as a republican I was placed on the jury duty list and served on a jury each year for ten years.
After my first Illinois primary a friend told me about this unspoken truth so I stopped voting in primaries after my first. Didn’t matter, I was tagged.