Hell-Bent for Election
The Mad Rush to Nominate Presidential Candidates

The Rush to Judgment

Just about when you were born, in the late 1980s, our nation changed in a way you may now realize was not the best way to go. We allowed our traditional presidential primary schedule--one that had long existed by custom--to be successively battered down as states rushed to schedule their presidential primaries earlier and earlier. Each sought to exert greater-than-ever influence over the presidential campaign process.

What has resulted is one hell of a mess! Our presidential primary schedule has now become so front-loaded the anointed "front-runner" in each of the major parties, i.e. he who has the most money, is the de facto nominee. The primaries have become mere pageantry, as the national conventions have been for several decades.

The first break with tradition came in 1988, when a bloc of southern states decided to hold their primaries on the second Tuesday in March, which became known as "Super Tuesday." But any state or region of the country can play that game, and in the years since, many of them have.

In 1996, California (a region in its own right) moved its presidential primary from the first Tuesday in June to the second Tuesday in March, and not content with that, the most populous state in the union moved its primary to the first Tuesday in March four years later. California was joined by eleven other states, creating a "Mega Tuesday" in which a third of all convention delegates were awarded on the same day. Also in 2000, a bloc of western states moved their primaries to the Saturday between Mega Tuesday and the South's Super Tuesday.

As I forecast accurately in an opinion editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer on April 13, 1999:

Don't for a moment believe that it will stop there. New Hampshire already has had to move its primary to February to stay ahead of the pack. Clearly, March Madness will eventually give way to February Frenzy, and I invite you to come up with your own alliteration for January. In this brave new world of the 21st century, the word campaign will be obsolete in the political lexicon, to be replaced by blitzkrieg.

Killing Competition

Front-loading extravaganzas such as Super Tuesday and Mega Tuesday are weapons of mass destruction in presidential politics. They kill candidacies by the score. In the last three contested Republican presidential nominations--1988, 1996, and 2000--the campaign season began with six, ten, and twelve candidates respectively. In each case, the race was conceded to the front-runner by the Ides of March. The system may be producing more candidacies, but they definitely have shorter life spans.

Until 1972, New Hampshire held the leadoff primary of the season on the first Tuesday in March, an event that began the campaign in earnest. By 2000, however, the first Tuesday in March marked not the beginning of the campaign, but the end. The day after "Mega Tuesday" 2000, Bill Bradley conceded the Democratic race to Al Gore, and John McCain conceded the Republican nomination to George W. Bush. The Western Primary, Super Tuesday, and all the primaries to follow were rendered meaningless. It was all over but the shouting, and more than half of the American people had not gotten their say.

For 2004, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) "lifted its window restriction on protecting New Hampshire and Iowa," meaning that states were free to schedule primaries and caucuses before these two traditional events. The predictable result was that 17 states moved their primaries and caucuses to February, and to keep their "first in the nation" status, Iowa and New Hampshire moved their contests to January.

Even so, we have yet to see the worst of it. It does not seem all that outlandish to predict that some year (perhaps 2008 or 2012) we will recover from our New Year's Eve hangovers to find that we have already nominated our presidential candidates!

The Best that Money Can Buy

Front-loading disenfranchises millions of voters by presenting them with a nomination that is already a fait accompli by the time they get the opportunity to vote. It also cheapens the value of the votes that are cast by the fortunate few at the front of the process, because many of the starting candidates are forced out of the race before the first vote is even cast. During the twelve months leading up to the first actual selection of delegates, candidates contend not for votes, but for dollars.

The year before the primary season has become known as the "money primary." In every nomination campaign since 1980, in both parties, the eventual party nominee has been the candidate who had raised the most money by December 31 of the year before the general election. In other words, since 1980, the American people have had the best presidents money can buy. Awesome influence has gone to those who can deliver suitcases full of cash.

The Rise and Fall of the Delaware Plan

While a number of ideas for reforming the presidential nomination process have been put forward, none has come as close to being implemented as the Delaware Plan, developed by Delaware Republican Committee members. Under their plan, the states would have been grouped into four “pods” according to population, as determined by the decennial census. The smallest twelve states, plus federal territories, would have gone first, followed by the next smallest thirteen states, then the thirteen medium-sized states, and finally the twelve largest states.

The advantage of the plan was that it would have delayed costly, high stakes campaigns in large states until later in the season, with the intent of allowing a wide field of candidates to run inexpensive campaigns in small states in early contests. In theory, this would have opened the political process to more candidates, a fuller debate of the issues of the day, and a more competitive nomination process. The plan was adopted on May 4, 2000 by the Advisory Commission on the Presidential Nominating Process, headed by former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Bill Brock.

However, a major criticism of the Delaware Plan was that states would have been locked into the same schedule in every quadrennial cycle. The larger the state, the later it would always have been scheduled. This was inherently unfair to voters in large states. Although recommended by the Brock Commission, the Delaware Plan was rejected by the RNC Rules Committee at the July 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia due to opposition from the Bush campaign and large-population states. Like the noble character in a Greek tragedy, the Delaware Plan had a fatal flaw.

The demise of the Delaware Plan is an example of the political complexities of our federal system. The interest of the whole nation must be balanced against the interests of the states and the people. Finding the proper pivot point for these contending interests is no easy task in a world that changes every day.

The California Plan

An alternative to the Delaware Plan is available, and it warrants your careful consideration. A handy way to conceptualize how the California Plan would operate is to compare it to the Parker Brothers board game Risk, a strategy game probably familiar to you.

Risk lets you conquer the world. Each player starts out with a small number of armies, so no one gets blown out of the game early. However, every time a player turns in her cards, she gets more armies than the previous player did when he turned in his. The winners get stronger, the losers get weaker, and one by one players are swept from the board.

The game cannot go on forever, though, because as increasingly massive forces scythe across the continents, it eventually becomes mathematically improbable for two players to remain on the board. The game is designed to produce a winner in about three hours of play.

The California Plan would work in much the same way. First of all, it takes into consideration the fact that in our federal system, representation is based on two types of geographic entities: states (the Senate) and congressional districts (the House of Representatives). The states are like the continents in Risk; each has a different point value. The number of congressional districts in each state determines its point value, just as in Risk continents with more countries have more value than small continents.

There are 435 congressional districts. Five federal territories also send delegates to the national party conventions to nominate presidential candidates, although they do not have representation in Congress: American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Each of these is counted as one district in the California Plan, for a total of 440 districts.*

This turns out to be a very useful number, because it is the value of the following mathematical expression:

10
Σ 8n
n=1

The expression reads, "the sum of 8n as n increments from 1 to 10." It's the short way of writing 8 + 16 + 24 + 32 + 40 + 48 + 56 + 64 + 72 + 80, which equals 440. This expression leads to the design of a presidential nomination system that starts out with small contests and becomes larger with each successive round in an arithmetic progression.

In the California Plan, the primary/caucus season would be divided into ten rounds of "play," and each round would be two weeks apart. For the first round of play, any combination of states or territories totaling eight districts would be randomly selected. For the second round, the "eligibility number" would increment to 16. For each successive round, the eligibility number would increment by eight, until the final round there would consist of states or territories totaling 80 districts. Every two weeks, the delegate prize would get larger and larger, until nearly one-fifth of the delegate total would be at stake in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Small states like Iowa and New Hampshire would be eligible for the entire primary season. They might get lucky and be first, get stuck with the last interval, or end up somewhere in the middle. Not every state would have a chance to go first, but every state would have an opportunity to be last. No one region of the country would consistently have an advantage over all the others, while there would be equal advantage in being a large, small, or medium-size state.

This arithmetic progression makes for a simple, perfect, and graceful curve, as you can see in the figure. Unfortunately, we do not live in a simple, perfect, and graceful world. Any design, if it is to be successful, must take into account the complexities of the real world. Or, as H. L. Mencken put it, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." The big problem with the California Plan as I have explained it so far is… California.

Because California is so much more populous than the other states, this baseline design would allow the Golden State, which has 53 districts, to vote no earlier than the seventh interval, in which the eligibility number is 56 (8 x 7). In the best case, California would not be able to hold its presidential primary until more than 45% of the nation had already voted, and on average it would have to wait for 59% of the country to vote ahead of it (see Table 1). This stands in stark contrast to the California Plan's treatment of other states. Texas, the second most populous state, is eligible in the fourth round, as are New York and Florida. It is this same sort of grossly unequal treatment that shot down the Delaware Plan.

The preferred modification (Mod 2A) to the schedule makes a number of adjustments in order to accommodate California. First of all, the seventh round is inserted before the fourth, the eighth round is inserted before the fifth, and the ninth round is inserted before the sixth. Secondly, the interval between the third round (8 x 3) and the now much larger fourth (formerly the seventh) round (8 x 7) is stretched to three weeks to give candidates more time to prepare, while the interval between the eighth (formerly the ninth) round (8 x 9) and the now much smaller ninth (formerly the sixth) round (8 x 6) is shortened to one week. In the end, this doesn't change the shape of the curve by much, so the original goal of the design remains intact.

By incorporating these modifications into the design of the California Plan, the four most populous states are eligible to vote in the fourth of ten rounds. Since only eleven percent of the American electorate votes in the first three intervals, these large states can figure early enough in the delegate selection process to have as meaningful an input as any state. In fact, the California Plan treats all states with surprising even-handedness; on average, the smallest states are scheduled at random to vote after 32.5% of the country has voted, but for the largest states this figure is no higher than 45.5%, a spread of only 13 points (see Table 2).

Retail Politicking

The unique and innovative design of the California Plan achieves the goal of preserving what the pros call "retail politicking" in small, early venues where they can campaign literally door-to-door. At the same time, the plan does not impose an unacceptable handicap on large-population states. For instance, Virginia (with 11 districts) could vote as early as the second of ten intervals, whereas under the Delaware Plan it would always vote in the very last round.

The California Plan is designed to begin with contests in small-population states, where candidates do not need tens of millions of dollars in order to compete. A wide field of presidential hopefuls will be competitive in the early going. A "minor candidate's" surprise successes in the early rounds, based more on the merit of the message than on massive amounts of money, will tend to attract money from larger numbers of small contributors for the campaign to spend in later rounds of primaries. This is politics on the installment plan, the way it used to be. Thus there should be more longevity of candidacy, and more credible challengers to the "front-runners."

However, as the campaign proceeds, the aggregate value of contested states becomes successively larger, requiring the expenditure of larger amounts of money in order to campaign effectively. A gradual weeding-out process occurs, as less-successful candidates drop out of the race. The goal is for the process to produce a clear winner in the end, but only after all voices have had a chance to be heard.

Empowering Diversity

Within the proposed system's static structure of escalating stakes, the scheduling of presidential primary elections in specific states is random and dynamic from one quadrennial cycle to the next. Thus Iowa and New Hampshire are not always first. Any state or combination of states amounting to a total of eight congressional districts could be in the first round of primaries and caucuses. This could include such ethnically diverse jurisdictions as American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, and Maryland. These jurisdictions have large proportions of people of color, and 17 of the 38 "first round eligible" jurisdictions have poverty rates above the national average. Opening the first contests to this field of jurisdictions would empower demographic groups the current system marginalizes, for Iowa and New Hampshire are mostly white, rural, and middle-class.

Summary

We urgently need to reform the presidential nominating process. A new system must be designed to enable the widest possible political debate in the early stages of the presidential primary schedule. And yet it must also provide a gradual winnowing process, as the price to stay in the game increases with each successive round.

A successful candidate need not start out well-heeled. But he or she will cross the finish line fully vetted. They need not hail from any particular region of the country, but they must appeal to the whole nation. America deserves such a president, and America deserves a rational, systematic presidential nomination process for the 21st century.

A few years from now, you will be eligible to vote for president, so you have a vested interest in how candidates are nominated in the future. The California Plan is just of one of many plans to choose from. The "Presidential Primary Reform" website at http://www.ops-alaska.com/index_primary.htm describes other reform proposals, and includes an email discussion forum. The website also has a polling station, so I invite you to vote for the presidential primary system of your choice. One of these may be the system of the future, and you can start shaping the future today.

* The actual number of delegates from each state or territory would be set by the political parties themselves, as they always have been.