CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--It's a national disgrace that two unrepresentative states -- Iowa and New Hampshire -- once again get to lead the way in deciding who will be the next president of the United States.
Even if these states were even marginally representative of the country as a whole -- which they are not -- they shouldn't get the privilege of going first in every single election cycle. Surely there are other states which are better qualified.
And it needs to be pointed out that there are significant advantages to being first. Part of it is money. Local economies benefit as television stations, hotels, and diners make money off of candidates and the flocks of reporters who follow them around. It's the political equivalent of hosting the Super Bowl.
But more important, the New Hampshire voter has a much bigger say in the choice of the president than you or I do. Long ago, when a little-known southern governor named Jimmie Carter figured out that winning the Iowa caucuses would give him a big jump in name recognition, he basically devoted a couple of years of his life to working Iowa, and then used his Iowa success in New Hampshire.
Was Carter really the best candidate? The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire seemed to think so. But then again, they also preferred Pat Buchanan, Michael Dukakis, and Richard Nixon. Did I forget to mention other robust candidates such as Estes Kefauver, Paul Tsongas, and Gary Hart? They all won the New Hampshire primary.
New Hampshire has developed a system in which candidates are expected to chat with each and every voter, even if it requires multiple trips and even more days spent in their tiny state. The great men of the U.S. Senate are expected to show up at diners at 6 AM to shake a lot of hands and orate on how small-town New England will prosper under their stewardship.
It's the ultimate in buying votes at retail. In a column from the 2016 campaign season, I mentioned the case of a woman who had met 10 of the Republican candidates and explained that she still hadn't made up her mind. How many of us would have liked to have a private chat with our favorite candidate? You don't get much of a chance in California unless you write a big check for one of those Bel Air soirees. But if California hosted the first presidential primary in 2020, you can bet that we would get that chance.
Yet here we are again, with the mayor of Los Angeles, numerous senators, and an ex-governor or two beating a path to places like Des Moines and Nashua.
By the way, the voters of New Hampshire are not only wrong on Democrats a lot of the time. Remember Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump? They won the Republican side of the New Hampshire presidential primaries.
New Hampshire voters like to pretend that they are particularly well suited to lead the nation in choosing who our next president will be. They like to flatter themselves that they have some kind of special relationship with the candidates and that they have a mature, well developed judgment. Their choices suggest otherwise.
In fact, they could be better described as hopelessly parochial. New Hampshire's Democratic primary voters have a remarkable propensity for choosing candidates from the immediately surrounding states. Consider: If you don't count the primaries in which there was an incumbent president on the ballot, New Hampshire's Democratic voters have selected candidates from adjoining states in six out of twelve elections.
New Hampshire is in the media area served by Boston television and newspapers. It's probably no surprise that candidates from Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont have done exceptionally well there.
Because New Hampshire has been the first primary in the nation since the '50s, it has had an inordinate influence on who gets the nomination. We might actually blame New Hampshire for giving us weak candidates like Dukakis and John Kerry,
On the other side of the aisle, New Hampshire certainly shares some of the blame for the election of Donald Trump, considering that they gave him the nod in 2016. New Hampshire Republicans chose the odious Pat Buchanan as recently as 1996 and going even further back, Richard Nixon.
This is not to say that New Hampshire voters don't have the right to vote for the candidates of their choosing. But that is quite different from giving that state a particularly privileged position in the series of primaries that eventually lead to the presidential nomination.
It's a privilege that ought to be passed around
There are substantial privileges that accrue to residents of the first primary and caucus states. Imagine that the order of the primaries was rotated from election cycle to election cycle. At some point, Los Angeles voters would have the chance to hear from presidential candidates directly.
Over the decades, there have been many suggestions about mixing up the order of the primaries so that other states besides Iowa and New Hampshire would get first crack at the presidential field. It hasn't happened. We can argue about who's to blame -- my choice is the Democratic National Committee -- but we should have long since resolved the issue. Instead, we're going into another round of ass kissing by our presidential candidates as they make time in their schedules to fly to Boston and motorcade up to Peterboro.
Damage is done to the Western States by this system
When the candidates come out on stage in one of the several New Hampshire and Iowa debates soon to come, you are not going to hear a lot about water rights or citrus growing. You are not going to hear a lot about urban issues at all. In fact, one result of concentrating the early primaries in a couple of white, rural states is to take urban issues off the table. Big city problems are not part of the menu in states where Des Moines is the idea of a major metropolis.
I guess nobody cared enough to fight the system
A while back, one state tried to move its primary up so that it would have influence equivalent to the traditionally early states. Michigan held a primary on January 15, 2008 -- one week after the New Hampshire primary. Florida also moved its primary up. Both of the major political parties retaliated by threatening to ban the states' delegations or to reduce their voting power.
Things would have been very different if one or two of the biggest states such as California and New York had treated the threats by the Democratic and Republican national committees as bluffs.
Here is my suggested approach: California should set its primary to occur on the same day as the earliest caucus or primary, whichever comes earlier. If the DNC wants to continue to give Iowa the first shot, then California should declare that it claims the same rights as them.
Something like this approach would work even better if our state's congressional delegation supported it.
Would we actually get better presidential candidates?
Probably. Maybe. It's a hard question. Some people claim that there are advantages to having the first primaries and caucuses in small states where the voters can get a closer look at the candidates. Even if we want to buy into this argument, there are lots of small states which could rotate into first place from one election cycle to the next. How about Oregon or Maryland going first? Or how about rotating so that sometimes it's a small state and sometimes it's a bigger state? Or how about giving first shot to a small group of states and then spreading the primaries out after that?
However we adjust the process, at least we wouldn't have to endure the process of watching dozens of our country's best leaders traveling to this one little place, puffed up with its own arrogance about it's right to choose first. We would enjoy the prospect of having different topics like water rights in the west being taken seriously for the first time.
A Complication
The modern internet-driven presidential campaign adds complexity to what was once mediated largely by newspapers and the nightly news. Democrats will start debates in June. You might think that this is a chance to make the campaign more of a national event. We shall see. But candidates understand that they have to survive Iowa and New Hampshire to have much of a chance on Super Tuesday, which will be March 3, 2020. That means that even in these early debates, answers will be tailored to Iowa and New Hampshire voters. For this reason, I'm not sure that holding debates this early will actually change things all that much. We will still see the same set of candidates raising money so they can open offices and hire staff in Ames and Dubuque (each with less population than San Pedro). It's going to be an interesting year.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
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