C ertainly, there are many other ideas for reforming the Presidential nominating process besides the national primary. Many political experts agree that major changes need to be made in how we select our presidential candidates, even if they do not agree on what types of changes are needed. One reason to be skeptical of any of these attempts to reform what I believe to be a flawed system (instead of changing to a national primary) is that, as many political experts over the years (for recent examples see Tolbert, Redlawsk, and Bowen, 2009; and Atkeson and Maestas, 2009) have pointed out that the reforms often have the unintended consequence of making the problems they hope to solve even worse. To be fair, I will present some of the more popular ideas and later give my comments on them. I will show why the national primary is still the best choice.
| Grouped Primaries: |
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There are other variations on the grouped primary plan. Geer (1989, pg. 129-134) proposes groupings that instead of being based on regions, are based on political ideology. Though Geer admits "determining which states are liberal and which are conservative is extremely difficult," he believes it is possible to determine a state's ideology (pg. 129). In addition, to ideology, his plan would have "similiar amounts of delegates at stake," "the major media markets of that cluster," and balancing "major demographic characteristics" (pg. 129). His plan has five different regional groupings. Manatt (in Grassmuck, 1985, pg. 118-119) proposes "time-zone primaries" where the order of such primaries "should be determined by lottery." He would still allow states to hold caucuses but only "in the week following the primaries" (pg. 118). A newer plan being talked about is the "California Plan". Gangale (2004, pg. 81-86) proposes a plan that "features a schedule consisting of 10 two-week intervals (pg. 82)," where each week has "a randomly determined combination of states..." "weighted as an ascending scale based on each state's number of congressional districts" (pg. 82). Under his plan, larger states would not participate in the first few weeks. A more drastic version of this "small states first" plan is the "Delaware Plan" (Mayer, 2009, pg. 65) which "would always give the decisive first crack at the candidastes to a set of sates that are more rural and less racially diverse than the rest of the country." If this keeps up, someday we will have a "reform" plan named after every state in the Union.
| Back to the Conventions: |
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| Postconvention Primaries: |
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| Other Ideas: |
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DiClerico and Uslaner propose that "candidates of the two major parties should be nominated by their parties' membership in the Congress" (1984, pg. 194). They point out that "prior to 1824, Congressional parties did make Presidential nominations" (pg. 194).
Many critics of the current "front-loaded" trend are calling for a return to a more spread out, state-by-state nomination system of the past (see Shapiro, 1998, pg. 25, Bartles, 1988, pg. 289, and Cook, 1994, pg. 124). Most recently Mayer proposed an "incremental approach" of moving the start date to March and having only one primary or caucus per week (2009, pg 66-67). He intriguely proposes "counter-blackmail" against Iowa and New Hampshire to stop them from being first everytime. In 1996, the Republican party took steps to persuade states to hold their primaries/caucuses later in the campaign by promising them more delegates (see Plissner, 1999, pg. 202). States rejected the idea (little wonder, since early states benefit financially, as I discuss in the "Problems" section), and the frontloading trend has continued
Some do not propose radical change to the current system, but merely some modifications. There are so many minor proposals that I will not elaborate on them here.
| My Comments: |
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Since the grouped primary plan is perhaps the most talked about reform, I will spend the most space commenting on that plan. As an opponent of "Super Tuesday", for several elections a mainly Southern State primary/caucus event, I think a regional primary system would merely multiply it's problems. Davis (1997, pg. 209) argues "an impressive candidate performance in the first regional primary might have the same powerful impact on subsequent primaries as the New Hampshire primary has under the existing system." I might add, Super Tuesday has a similar effect. He goes on to say "the adoption of regional primaries "could heighten regional tensions or sectional rivalries" (pg. 209).
Haskell shows why the regional plan is perhaps the worst reform idea. In his analysis (1996, pg. 128-131), regional primaries would violate all six of the criteria of fairness as discussed in the "Overview" section. Undifferentiatedness would be violated because "some voters would still be very likely to have more influence...than others" (pg. 128). Neutrality would be violated because "some candidates are better positioned than others in certain regions" (pg. 129). Monotonicity violations would happen "as it does in the current process" (pg. 129). The Condorcet criterion would be violated because "critical determinations are made in large fields of candidates in the small early states" (pg. 129), given the way most regional plans are set up. Consistency would be violated "since delegates still would be allocated according to state rules" (pg. 129) which vary from state to state. Finally, there is violation in the Independence criterion "as the field of candidates would change with regional primaries, as it does in the current process" (pg. 130).
Variations on the regional primary still do not work as well as a national primary would. I respect ambitious plans, but Geer's has obvious problems. In looking at his map (pg. 130), most of the groupings are actually regional and at least two do not look ideologically balanced in population. In responding to Geer's proposal Bartles (1988, pg. 278) believes "primary outcomes will continue to differ significantly and systematically by region, even after controlling for the effects of ideology." Manatt's idea would help combat regional tensions and would mix ideologies, but would be bad in that our time zones differ from each other in size, population, and how that population is dispersed. Although I like the idea of a longer, more consistant primary schedule, I have problems with the "California Plan". Being from a large state, I admittedly have a bias, but states with large populations, and usually greater diversity, should not be shut out of the nominating process. Gangale seems to believe larger states will still have a say simply because they are large (2004, pg. 83), but he ignores the reality of a false "momentum" a candidate gets from winning early contests. If the media and political experts already pick a "winner" after Iowa and New Hampshire as they clearly did in 2004 with Democrat John Kerry (see for example Fineman, 2004, pg. 18-22), they certainly would do so after a small-state group of primaries.
While the postconvention primary would have the advantage of both a national primary and keeping the political parties involved in the process, it has many drawbacks. With the parties picking candidates for a national primary, it is unlikely that a candidate out of favor with the party establishment would have much of a chance of being one of the finalists. Crotty and Jackson (1985, pg. 225) point out that if there would be no national primary if candidates received enough convention support, as Cronin and Loevy's plan details, "the conventions would be under some pressure to nominate a candidate with over 70 percent of the delegates' votes to avoid the postconvention primary." I might add, what if one party did not have a candidate with 70 percent and the other did, thus only one would be involved in the national primary? Would the extra attention help or hinder the party having a national primary? Either way, this would be unfair. Davis (1997, pg. 219) argues the process of several steps in a postconvention plan "is too complicated to be understood by many rank-and-file voters." Pomper believes "party delegates would become irresponsible" under a postconvention system, and "this system would promote party disunity". Obviously, this overly ambitious plan would bring as many problems to the table as it would solve.
One may be surprised to hear me say this, but returning to the convention for choosing nominees, if delegates included a greater cross-section of America and the parties, as was suggested above, may be better than our current system. At least all states would be represented at the same time and in theory, more factions of people would also have a say. But as compared to a national primary or some of the other ideas, it is a bad and unworkable idea. There would be no guarantee that true representatives of the people would be present at the convention. As Davis (1980, pg. 254) says, returning to the convention for nominating presidential candidates "is almost unthinkable in this era of greater participatory democracy." Nelson (1983, pg. 42) calls the idea "nostalgic" and points out that "party pros" actually did not have a great track record for peer review or choosing strong candidates in the past (pg. 43). For those who say taking the power away from the conventions in the post 1968 reform era has hurt our parties, Bartles (1996, pg. 142) contends "had the parties not opened up, they most certainly would have met their demise by now in U.S. politics."
I also disagree with the plan to have Congress choose the nominees, although one advantage may be Congress would re-assert some of its constitutional power that it has relinquished to the President in the last century. This idea might have worked well when the nation was much smaller and more homoginized, but in today's large, divere nation, it would not work. There may be a danger of "groupthink" where various regions of Congress all voted for someone in their area, or all a party's congresspersons all voting for someone from their state (what used to be known as a "favorite son" candidate). These scenarios would surely cause party factionalism, which would be especially bad for the country since the members of Congress would have to go back to trying to work with themselves to pass laws after perhaps a bitter nominating election. Again there is no guarantee that members of Congress would vote for candidates that would please voters on a national level.
While I see some merits with so called "approval voting", I believe it would not make much difference when placed within the current unfair system. In a national primary, the direct democracy of approval voting should not be needed. Plus, ranking several candidates in a primary may be confusing to voters and may still produce a "winner" voters nationally would not accept (what if a candidate had many second place finishes, and two others had a lot of first and third?).
Going back to the old state-by-state method would just bring back the old criticisms that the nomination process is too long and certain states are left out of the decision making. These types of criticisms brought about the frontloaded system we have now. Clearly, neither of these approaches has worked.
It seems obvious to me, when reviewing these different plans carefully, that none of them are equal to the national primary in solving are Presidential nomination problems.
