Iowa and New Hampshire - Is There a Better Way?
It seems like we go through this every four years. People bitch and moan about the inflation of importance (and influence) of early primaries in New Hampshire and Iowa in selecting presidential nominees. According to an AP article today, neither state represents a true cross section of the American electorate…
Given the amount of time and money that presidential candidates spend in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s no wonder that we’ve seen some backlash in the past year from states that want to have some influence over who the two major political parties will nominate at their conventions later in the year. Several states have bumped up their primaries, and the “gentleman’s agreement” that allowed Iowa and New Hampshire to weed out the weaker candidates prior to Super Tuesday in February isn’t operative any longer. In fact, this might be the last presidential election cycle that Iowa and New Hampshire carry the weight that they do in the nominating process.
It’s easy to understand voter frustration around the country. By the time primaries roll around in some of the larger states (Pa., Ca., for example) the nomination will probably, for all intents and purposes, have already been locked up in both parties. The media will count the beans, and will have informally coronated the winners and ridiculed the losers. So, there is certainly merit in leveling the playing field and perhaps developing some kind of a rotation system whereby different states get to take the lead every four years.
Of course, developing such a system would require cooperation and agreement by a lot of people on a lot of levels. That isn’t going to happen (at least not in my lifetime, and without a lot of political blood being spilled). Perhaps the only solution, as some have suggested, is to hold a national primary day, say, in March of an election year. But I’m not sold on that solution, either. A single, 50 state primary election day removes the “retail politics” aspect that is so important in Iowa and New Hampshire, and would be impossible to recreate on a national level. As such, conventional political wisdom continues to dictate, at least for this year, that the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire serve as proxies for the rest of the country.
Should they?
An AP article discusses the frustration that voters in other states feel with the current nominating process. It’s clear that neither Iowa or New Hampshire are ethnically representative of the rest of the country, and that’s certainly a concern. Then there’s the question: do the national issues that the folks in New Hampshire care about reflect those of people living in, say, Oregon?
Some feel that the current nominating process is disenfranchisement at its worst, and one reason that Americans always seems to end up with the choice of voting for the lesser of two corporate-sponsored evils every four years. I’m not sure I totally agree with that assessment, but there has to be a better way of doing this thing.
Whether the states in question represent a true cross section of Democratic voters is an important question. Still, the candidates have an even playing field, and they all know what’s going on. Yeah, I might change things if I was King of all Politics, but. . . . . .
Richard, totally off-topic, but I did a post you might be interested in here.
The whole Iowa, New Hampshire thing seems really ridiculous to me. I don’t understand why the whole rest of the country is supposed to vote based on how people vote in these two states.
The only thing that seems good about it is the size, and therefore the accessability of the candidate to the people, without a lot of potentially dirty money needed.
The larger the market, the harder it is for the ideas to win over cash. After that momentum can carry ideas, though they can still be derailed by cash.
I think the internet holds the most promise of fair elections, however. It only takes a minute to vote for the candidate you think won a debate. It only takes a microsecond for the poll to record your computers IP address to prevent multiple voting, and only another few seconds to verify an address, and fill out antispam info.
On state primaries, a lottery whose chance of winning is inversely proportional to the population of the state. To participate, the states political parties would have to ante up when they put thier names in the hat.
Of course it could be much more complicated without being unfair, like the sports draft picks.
Whether our corrupt congress is capable of creating anything fair is really the question.
It’s a sad truth, but those old smoke-filled back rooms that our current system was intended to replace produced higher quality candidates than we get now.