With all the attention that has been paid lately to our next presidential election, it can be difficult to remember that it is still almost two year away. That is a long way away on paper, but in reality, the presidential campaign has already begun. By now, several candidates with realistic chances of winning a nomination have formally entered the race. Republicans Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, and Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have formed exploratory committees or filed for the election, which still lies twenty-two months away. All but two of these candidates currently hold elected office and even the ones who do not win the nomination will spend at least a year with their attention devoted to presidential runs.
The blame for the absurdly early start to elections season falls on our primary system. The reason we hold primary elections, of course, is to let each party choose its best candidate for president. Put simply, the problem is that our primaries begin too early, end too early, and are unduly influenced by a few small states. These flaws are not irreparable, but before proposing a solution it is best to take a look at our current primary system.
For the 2008 presidential election, the primary season officially begins on January 14 with the Iowa caucuses, and is followed soon after by the New Hampshire primaries. Winning either of these first two contests provides a huge boost to a campaign, and a candidate who wins both can virtually clinch the party nomination.
However, both of these early states have several characteristics that make them unsuitable to play such a large role. One is racial: both states are disproportionately white. According to the Census Bureau, 91.5 percent of Iowans and 94.1 percent of New Hampshire residents are non-Hispanic whites, compared to 67 percent of the U.S. as a whole. Also, the votes of Iowa caucus voters are inordinately swayed by a candidate's stance on ethanol subsidies. This is a local issue irrelevant to most other states, but one able to doom the chances of a candidate who holds a position at odds with Iowan voters.
Americans realize that it is both unfair and unwise to have those two small, politically idiosyncratic states play such a large role in presidential elections. California, Illinois, Florida and New Jersey -- all highly-populated states -- are working to move their primaries to the first week of February.
Any candidate that can win a clear majority of the first handful of states will be nearly impossible to defeat. Effectively, then, only a month into the 2008 primary season, and without the votes of many states, both parties will already have chosen their presidential nominees.
Highly populated states and smaller ones both have valid concerns. States with larger populations believe they should have a bigger role in candidate selection. Less populated states, on the other hand, do not want the votes of their citizens to be ignored by presidential candidates. Therefore, to address the concerns of all the states, we should adopt a population-based primary system.
In this system, states would be divided equally into four groups based on population, and all states within one group would hold their primaries on the same day. The smallest states' group would vote first, next the second smallest states' group, until the largest states' group, which would vote last. This would ensure roles for all states of all sizes. Smaller states, by virtue of their earlier primaries, would provide an early boost to candidacies.
However, since the twelve largest states hold more than half of the electoral votes, candidates would still need to campaign for their votes. These votings rounds would be separated by a reasonable amount of time -- perhaps two weeks -- and would begin in March and end in May. This would cut down on the amount of dead time between the end of the primaries and the beginning of the real campaign.
As a conservative, it's rare for me to recommend stronger federal involvement. This is one of those situations. Left to themselves, individual states' interests (having more power to pick nominees, garnering national attention to local issues, etc.) lead to competition to be the first to hold primaries. This race to the front impedes the primaries' purpose: selecting competent, nationally appealing presidential candidates.
If states and the national parties are unwilling or unable to fix the madness that threatens our primary system, then Congress should take this problem into its own hands. Some believe that change of this sort is unconstitutional and would require an amendment. Constitutional amendments are not something to be passed lightly, of course, but there are few things more important in American politics than selecting the best president we can.
Stephen Parsley is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. He can be reached at sparsley@cavalierdaily.com.
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