David Broder argues today in WaPo that the ongoing consolidation of the primary calendar is No Way to Choose a President.
Well, for one thing, it is about choosing a nominee, not a President. Still, I will agree that the system isn’t ideal, but I will deviate from Broder’s general tenor, which suggests that the calendar as it is currently forming is inferior to recent processes. I will state that that is not the case. The current calendar convergence at least allows voters in numerous states to actually have some say in the choosing of the nominees–the old calendar shut a large number of voters entirely out of the process.
Quite frankly a major part of the problem (as I have noted before) is the fact that New Hampshire has somehow acquired a privileged status in this process. This fact always asks me to wonder why this is the case. Why are the parties so afraid of upsetting New Hampshire? Sot they get their feelings hurt–they’ll get over it. There is no good reason that the entire nomination process should be linked to a specific state, let alone a small, unrepresentative one.
Indeed, NH’s favored position in this process is one of the most absurd elements of contemporary American politics:
New Hampshire is unhappy about the competition from two caucuses planned even earlier in January, in Iowa and Nevada. So its secretary of state, William M. Gardner, who has unilateral authority to set the New Hampshire voting date, is threatening to jump the rivals, even if it means voting before New Year’s Day.
As it stands, the entire calender is ultimately dictated by one state–indeed, one man in one state. How is this a good idea?
Of course, the linkage of the nomination to the utterly anachronistic infomercial convention system is part of the problem. If the parties want to have conventions as official endorsements of their nominees, fine. But they ceased being real nominating mechanisms decades ago. They have even ceased being television events of great consequence. (And the fact that the federal government subsidizing these things continues to be a crime, in my opinion).
Why the two parties can’t have national, multi-round primaries to nominate their candidates is beyond me. Why, aside from the fact that this-is-the-way-we-have-always done-it, do we have to have state-based campaigns for nominations? The notion that flapjack flipping and coffee shoppe campaigning produces the best candidates is countered simply by looking at the quality of candidates that the system has produced over the life of this process.
Broder endorses the less radical (than my suggestion above) and timeworn (it has been around for a while) rotating regional primary idea:
The mandate for the next pair of national party chairmen should be to agree on a sensible national agenda for the primaries — either a rotating regional system that gives all states a turn at being early or a plan that allows a random mix of states to vote, but only on dates fixed in advance by the parties, and separated at intervals that allow voters to consider seriously their choices.
This would be better than what we have, but again I ask: what real advantage does a state-based, convention-linked system do for the process?
A two-round process would allow for a large field that would be winnowed to two candidates on each side and then a run-off between those two. It would allow voters to vote their preference in round one, and to then have the two go at one another to determine which is best for the party.
Note: in the past I have advocated a national primary with an instant run-off provision. I could live with such a system (and would do so gladly), but the more I think about it, the more I would like to see an early round with time for campaigning between it and a later round. The instant runoff does have the advantage of being cheaper, however.
May 10th, 2024 at 10:19 pm
I like the idea of a national first round based on approval voting, with a threshold allowing through anyone who appears on 15-20% of the ballots (perhaps coupled with a minimum of 3 or 4 qualifying for the runoff), followed 4-6 weeks later by a national single-ballot ranked-preference primary of everyone who survives round one using either IRV or some sort of Condorcet process. Schedule weekly debates during the interround period: 1 in IA, 1 in NH, and the remaining 2-4 with some regional balance (i.e. 1 in the southeast, 1 in the west, 1 in the mid-Atlantic & New England, and 1 in the midwest – each party having its regional debate in a different state on a rotating basis).
Or if you want to make the conventions meaningful again, allocate delegates via PR (make them state-based if you want) to the candidates in round 2.
May 11th, 2024 at 3:12 pm
And I like the idea of having the parties fund their own nominating process. You want to have state-by-state elections? Fine, but the parties are going to print the ballots and mail them to their party members themselves. The states will not run the thing and pay the huge bills.
The parties don’t like that? The parties don’t think they’ve got the money for that? Then why is each state responsible for bailing the parties out financially? It’s not the state’s nominee, why is the state responsible for picking him?
Of course this would reduce the number of times per year that California can put ballot initiatives in front of the voters, but I don’t think that’s a negative.