Should we make a dedicated AOC thread at this point?
CA has also moved its primary which might really end up having a large impact:
Hopefully it will give some impetus to the idea of having a single primary date for all states in June. CA shoving its 800 lb gorilla shoulders into March makes many of the other states totally moot. It’ll be nice to have candidates campaigning here and talking about our issues, but I’d rather have democracy work better. A single primary date in June would make the campaign season shorter and less expensive and make the process more transparent.
That’s a really great idea.
A single primary date also favors establishment candidates over up-and-comers who can build up excitement and momentum after hyperlocal campaigning.
So it would have hurt Trump in 2016, but it also would have hurt Obama in 2008.
Yeah, it would have hurt McCain in 2008 as well. I remember he came from behind by winning in New Hampshire out of nowhere after being down in the polls everywhere else. I can’t remember who were the front running candidates in that one before McCain overtook them. Was it Santorum? Romney?
This.
You can make a really good argument that the last 3 Democratic presidents (Carter, B. Clinton, Obama) wouldn’t have won the nomination in a single-day primary system…and that the 3 most recently failed Democratic nominees (Gore, Kerry, H. Clinton) would have.
The slow-roll primary system is one of the few remaining things that can level the playing field a bit when it comes to money in politics.
The long primary season is enormously expensive. It’s by far the main factor in how expensive our elections are. A single primary data would allow less wealthy candidates with less support to have a chance. The long primary gives outsized influence to particular states and their issues.
I think this is actually not an easy case to make.
- We don’t have a counterfactual here, so it’s hard to conjecture.
- A sample size of 3 is not conclusive.
- The narrative of establishment vs. non-establishment candidates is highly fraught. That’s too simple a narrative to lay on top of a complex phenomenon.
- Many other countries have single day primaries, shorter election seasons, higher voter participation, and it’s hard to argue that their playing field is less level than ours.
Has there ever been a viable POTUS campaign by a black woman? Not just some rando that put her name on the ballot, but a real candidate for a major party?
The slow-roll would be fine if we could randomize the order every four years.
As it is, there’s a massive amount of kowtowing to Iowa and its farmers every presidential election cycle.
A single day primary does not mean the primary season is shorter. Most likely candidates would announce and start campaigning sooner, because they would need to cover far more territory before anyone votes. And since there is no way to eliminate a candidate before they have visited the entire US, the primary would very likely be much more expensive.
Most of those countries are more compact than the US and/or face legal limits to their campaign duration.
It is. But there’s no reason to think a single-day primary would be any less expensive. Candidates would still be forced to throw incredible amounts of money into hugely expensive media markets.
And as magnet just wisely pointed out, if the single-day primary is the first Tuesday in June or something, candidates will declare earlier, and spend earlier. Instead of spending a bunch of money in, say, Michigan or Massachusetts (Detroit and Boston media markets respectively as the biggies) until their March 3 primaries conclude (and then pulling up stakes and moving on by transferring ad buys elsewhere), you’d have the richest candidates staking out early ad territory in February and maintaining that heavy ad spend – and upping it – as we got close to June.
If anything, the unintended consequences of a one-day primary might be higher ad spending. In the current system, campaigns move money around based on the primary calendar. They’d have to stay focused on high population areas. And then there’s the ancillary but important issue of the primary calendar forcing candidates to campaign all over the country. Democrats already have a problem in rural America. A system that would allow a Democrat to secure the nomination while focusing even more on urban population centers and ignoring rural areas seems pretty disastrous for as long as the Electoral College is a thing.
Right now the rolling calendar allows for a dark horse challenger to do well early and then start to reap some fundraising momentum as things roll out – see Obama, 2008 for example.
To put it another way, a single day primary system would reward candidates who are very good at raising money without having seen their ballot box performance.
A rolling primary calendar like we have now better rewards candidates who perform with voters and (ick) caucusers.
Carol Moseley Braun, former Senator and Ambassador, put her hat in the ring for the 2004 race. She dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. She might not have been, like, in the top three Democratic contenders, but I think she ran a serious campaign as serious as anyone who runs for their major party endorsement.
Or maybe she only wanted to run to be interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/opxpdv/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-callin--it-quits
Shirley Chisholm was in the presidential field in 1972. Unfortunately, her campaign never raised enough money to compete, and she was basically seen as an “interesting” (as in, fairly condescending “human interest” style media coverage) candidate rather than a really viable one.
I agree with @Nesrie, that article was fantastic and that woman is amazing. Thank you for sharing this. There is so much in there that puts privilege (white and otherwise) into perfect context, I feel like this should be required reading for everyone.
I wouldn’t object to a rolling primary nearly as much if the states changed every cycle. It gets sickening to watch the outsized influence if Iowa and NH and SC every four years
Yeah, on that I don’t disagree one little bit.
Rolling primary with ranked balloting to avoid the clusterfuck of the GOP in 2016.
You are speaking my language.
Ranked voting today, ranked voting tomorrow.
It’s not the only answer, but holy hell is it a good one. It is also more likely to get party support than some of my other favored options, such as proportional representation in multi seat districts. Because that would weaken two party control, and empower new party structures beyond the two party system we have.
The flip side is that no longer is a 55-45 split effectively permanently disenfranchising a large minority of your population from political power. It would also curb gerrymandering, because no longer could you do things like why Texas does with Austin to prevent them from having a political voice.