The Smith Plan
The Smith Plan |
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In June 2000, Senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire proposed an alternative to the NASS-endorsed Rotating Regional Primary Plan and the Delaware Plan backed by the Republican Party Rules Committee. Like the Rotating Regional Plan, it maintains the historic prerogatives enjoyed by Iowa and New Hampshire, and like both the Rotating Regional Plan and the Regional Lottery System proposed by Larry Sabato the following year, it divides the nation into four regions of nearly equal population. However, Smith’s plan contains two lotteries. The first determines the order of voting for the regions, as in the Regional Lottery System. A second lottery provides a mechanism for spreading out the timing of the primaries within each region (Smith 2000; Hirsch 2000). Table 22 and Figure 49 show a possible schedule for 2004. Figure 50 and Figure 51 are corresponding political and geographic maps.
With the exception of maintaining preferential treatment for Iowa and New Hampshire, the plan treats states and regions equally in a random manner from one quadrennial cycle to the next. This plan makes more of an effort to smooth out the campaign season into a continuous process rather than a handful of blockbuster regional primaries.
The ability of this plan to enhance grass roots campaigning and increase “competitiveness by fostering a system where lesser-known and lesser funded candidates can compete” is marginal. While it goes some way toward achieving these goals, it does not do all that might be done. If fact, the Smith Plan only smoothes out the stair-step function of the Rotating Regional Plan and the Regional Lottery System into a trend line. The overall pace of the campaign under the Smith Plan remains the same as these other two plans. It is very likely that only the most well-funded candidates would be able to compete a few weeks after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, thus the field would be very quickly narrowed to two or possibly three candidates in each party.
Any system of regional primaries, whether random as in the case of the Smith Plan and Larry Sabato’s Regional Lottery System, or rotating as in the case of the NASS plan, would mean that a regional favorite son would move into the White House every four years, not necessarily the best candidate in the country. One also wonders whether such a system might not lead to an ever-increasing sense of regionalism that would prove divisive to the nation as a whole.
Compared to the Smith Plan, the Graduated Random System allows a much more gradual ramp-up in the extent and expense of campaigning. Grass roots campaigns with shoestring budgets would be competitive through several election intervals, giving them time to gather momentum. This opens the process to the widest field of candidates, giving the American voter more choices and a longer time to deliberate.
The Smith Plan gives an overwhelming advantage to one particular region in a given presidential year. On the other hand, the Graduated Random System picks individual states at random rather than whole regions, bringing more regional balance to the system.