Just What Democrats DON'T Need in 2008

By DHinMI 

I saw this earlier on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, and I have to say this would be an awful change for Democrats:

A bill to make Alabama a key player in selecting candidates for president in 2008 is still alive going into the final day of the Alabama Legislature's session.

The proposed legislation would move Alabama's presidential primary from June to the first Saturday after the New Hampshire primary. That would make Alabama the third state in the country - and the first in the South - to take part in the process of choosing Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

The DNC has a commission examining the presidential nominating process, and I hope they recommend trying to rearrange the primary schedule so the early states aren't almost all heavily Republican, competetive but either unlike any other competetive states (NH) or with much smaller smaller African-American populations than the country as a whole (NH, IA, NM, NV and WI).  In 2004 John Kerry was nominated on the strength of his performance in the early primaries, where he won 7 of the first 9.  But of those nine states, he won only 2 in November (NH and DE, with a total of 7 EV), while Bush won the other seven (IA, AZ, MO, NM, ND, OK and SC, for a total of 51 EV). 

Another problem that would only be exacerbated by Alabama being an early state is that none of the early states are strongly Democratic.  Strongly Republican states would have exerted influence in picking the Republican candidate, presumably ensuring that to be successful the Republican would have to appeal to large numbers of strongly partisan voters.  But the Democrats who gave Kerry his early momentum were very unlike the majority of Democrats nationwide; the were disproportionately white, disproportionately rural, and disproportionately centered in places where their party seldom delievers their state's electoral vote.  (The only early state won by both Gore and Kerry was DE, with its whopping 3 electoral votes.) 

There are plenty of problems with IA and NH casting the first votes, but the strength of tradition may mean that even discussing changes are off the table.  But the DNC commission must look at the order of states that come after IA and NH, and ensure that the Democratic nominee isn't chosen almost exclusively by a small number of rural and southern Democrats whose states almost certainly won't support any Democrat in the November election. 

Comments

[Sandals]

Good points, although I wonder what downsides there would really be to running for 'nationally standardized primaries' as a national platform item.

[Sara]

Yes but Iowa and New Hampshire are both "in contention" states and both in their own way empower indipendents to either vote or caucus, and this is critical.

I also happen to think that the emphasis on a tradition of retail politics is important in the first sorting out of possible candidates. If Iowa could be done with TV and Marketing -- Dean would have won it.

If I were writing DNC rules for 2008 I would insist that states + or - 3-5 points either side of 50% vote first -- then follow that with the 5 -8 points states, and lastly the more than 8 states.

We Dems would be much better off with candidates who know how to fight for the center.

I'd even change the "roll Call of the States" at the convention -- states that had the best margins in 2004 would go first in voting their delegations.

[Incertus]

Thanks DHinMI. One of the things I railed about post-November election was the fact that Iowa and NH had essentially chosen our candidate and then NH was the only one with the decency to go out and actually carry the state for him. I don't know if the solution lays more in rotating the states who get first pick, changing them completely, or just stretching out the nominating process so we don't have a clear field after three states have voted--though I think I'd like that last one best--but we do have to at least consider making major changes in the way we do things as a national party.

The only reason I shy away from national campaigns is that it automatically favors the Washington insider who can raise tons of money up front a la Lieberman in 2004 or, looking ahead, Hillary in 2008. I'd much rather see a grassroots wave sweep someone to victory after a long and drawn out process where we get to see the candidate over time.

[DHinMI]

Sara, the problem with your proposal is that Dems don't control the process by themselves, as most states vote for both Dems and Repubs on the same day. Now you raise another important point, which I discussed in the earlier post linked in this one, that being the openess of the process in various states. The next round of states after the first 8 included MI, WA and ME, but while MI was by far the largest state to have voted by that point and WA had the same number of EV's but more delegates than MO (the largest of the first 8), the total number of votes cast in MI, WA and ME was less than the votes case in NH, even though NH's population is only about 4-5% of the combined population of MI, WA and ME.

The other problem I see in picking just those states that were close last time is that it might skew the results the next time around. The battleground in one election may not be the battlegrounds the next time around, especially depending on the regional appeals of the candidates. Imagine if we chose another milquetoast candidate from New England but the Repubs had a moderate candidate from PA or OH? We'd probably get slaughtered, because we would have someone unlikely to have appeal in the border states or the south, who most likley couldn't make AR or LA or FL competetive, and probably not NC or TN, but would most likely lose too many states in the industrial Midwest.

I don't think you can calibrate the primaries too precisely, but I think it's ridiculous to have states that almost never vote Dem picking the Dem candidate, while states that lean Dem (other than DE) getting no say in the process.

[emptypockets]

Back in the dark days immediately after Kerry's concession, I proposed prioritizing future state efforts by a "Swing Index," where:

Swing Index = (Electoral Votes)/(Winner percent - Loser percent)

which might also be a good way to order the primary calendar. (I don't want to change the primary calendar every 4 years, but some longer-term average of this measure (or something like it) is a useful way to think about which states should be treated as "more equal" than others.)

For the non-maths like me out there, a HIGHER swing index means a state is relatively purple for the amount of EVs it has and should be fought for; a LOW index means a state is safely blue or red for the amount of EVs it has to offer and may not be worth fighting for.

My DailyKos diary on this index I made up, along with further analysis and a complete list of states ordered by Swing Index is at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/93614/4225