Minister Al-X

Rendell mounts push to move Pa. Presidential primary

Governor Rendell proposed earlier this week to move PA's presidential primary voting from April to January or February, in order to give PA a bigger say in who becomes the Democratic nominee. As Rendell noted "We're one of three key states in the general election, and we have no voice in the primary process".

Now, it seems obvious to me that the bigger blue states should get a bigger say in the selection of the Democratic Presidential nominee, but I have a few problems with this move. First of all, this would continue the trend of pushing the primaries earlier. In the past we might not have known about the candidate until June. This year we knew Kerry would be the nominee in Early March.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that New Hampshire, since 1977, has claimed the right to have the first primary. This means that whenever another state moves its primary back, New Hampshire moves theirs even further back. Over the course of the last three presidential primaries New Hampshire has moved its primary back almost a full month, from February 20 in 1996, to February 1 in 2000, to January 27 in 2004. If Pennsylvania was to move its primary into late January, New Hampshire law would force the state to move its elections even further back- maybe even into the previous year.

My question is: why shouldn't the national party decide when each state can vote in the primaries? I'm not sure I like the idea of every state voting on the same day, as it would be a logistical nightmare for those trying to campaign, but there has to be a better way to give the bigger states a bigger say without constantly moving the primaries further and further back.

One idea would be to use something along the lines of the Delaware Plan the Republicans came close to using. Basically this plan would create four voting blocks, each block consisting of similar sized states, and would allow the smaller states to vote first, with the bigger states voting last. For the Democrats this seems highly unlikely though, since the bigger states (CA, NY, PA, FL, IL, OH, MI)would continue to vote last.

Another plan, advocated by Chris Bowers of MyDD is the so-called California Plan, which basically still allows smaller states to vote first.

I've seen a lot of ideas with how to fix the primary system being floating around the blogosphere, but the one which seems to make a lot more sense to me is breaking up the country into 'blocs', with each one containing small, medium, a large states, and each bloc voting 1-2 weeks apart. The blocs would rotate each Presidential cycle to allow different states to vote first.

My real hope is that this move by Rendell is a bargaining ploy, to force the states which are resistant to primary reform into a deal. If not, we can expect the backwards march of the primaries to continue.

posted by Anonymous @ 10:07 AM