“Actually this is one of the nine states where Mr. Bush claims residency.” – Lisa Simpson
Mitt Romney lived to fight another day last night. One of his three home states, Michigan, popped for him to the tune of almost 40%, allowing Romney, and his fire hose of money, to continue to bless the advertising and direct mail industries from coast to coast. It’s been a great primary season, hasn’t it? Three significant Republican contests and three different winners; two significant Democratic contests and two different winners with the white man waiting in the wings. I love this country. I really do.
It’s now been a week since New Hampshire and tomorrow will be two weeks since Iowa. Campaigns in both parties have had to engage each other directly and pander to diverse crowds of voters for that entire time. It’s fantastic. And yet, there’s a rather sudden, and completely unnecessary, deadline coming up in only three weeks. That would be the February 5th cluster fuck of primaries.
Clustered primary seasons are the reigning fashion in both parties. The accepted conventional theory about how this came about boils down to the usual trope of blame the twenty-four hour media. National coverage starts early and crowns a prohibitive favorite months before any votes are cast. The conventions, once open contests of party strength, are now so valuable as promotional tools that they have become mere coronation ceremonies. Therefore, if you want your state to have any say in the nominating process you’d better schedule the primary as early as you dare. The Democratic Party of Michigan apparently dared too much and ended up utterly sidelined despite representing a large and reliably blue swing state.
The process is fouled. Like the Bowl Championship Series in college football though, it’s so fouled that it can’t possibly last, but changing it could easily cause more problems than it solves. The problem is as old as the Union. Everyone wants to have a say, but we’re divided into big states and little states, which can’t be changed, and early states and late states, which can be changed. The result is chaotic jockeying and that leads to things like a Democratic primary in Michigan that, despite it being the most wide open Democratic field in sixteen years, wasn’t worth printing ballots for, so small is the effect it’s likely to have on the outcome.
I don’t know enough about the structure of either party to make intelligent suggestions about how this process should work, but I’d like to offer up the last two weeks of campaigning as Exhibit A of how things ought to look. The campaigns are under scrutiny from the unwashed masses, instead of just the political nerds, and we’ve learned a great deal about the candidates. The steady pace of primary votes means that we regularly get real data, in ballots and delegates, with which to keep score. This is vastly preferable to using poll numbers and fundraising totals.
Of course it’s all (probably) going to come to an end two days after the Super Bowl. Super Tuesday will settle the nominees and we’ll go back to poll watching for five months. It’s a pity. We’ve had open and competitive races this year on both sides. That’s unusual, but since one party is always going to be out of power and challenging there should be at least one real race per election. The nominating process needs to accommodate prohibitive favorites as well as fierce bloodbaths.
Overloading one day with primaries means that little states get shit on at the expense of big ones. Frontloading primaries means that later states get shit on at the expense of earlier ones. It can’t be that hard to design a process that’s reasonably fair to everyone and not stupid and convoluted.
