…it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Don’t forget, the use of primaries as the method of picking a candidate nationally is less than 50 years old, and the Iowa caucus system only dates to 1972. In all that time, only one non-incumbent has finished first in Iowa and gone on to the White House – George W. Bush in 2000, and don’t forget, he had three times as much money raised by caucus night as any candidate in history. In 1980, Iowa went for Bush over Reagan; in 1988, they picked Pat Robertson and Dick Gephardt. Seriously.
Here’s the thing: the Iowa caucuses were never meant to be dispositive. They were meant to be the first cut that winnows the field to 5 or 6 (or maybe fewer) via the 15% “viability” rule. New Hampshire would take a whack a while later, purging some more, and by the time you hit the South, you’d probably be down to 3 candidates battling like hell.
If you need somebody to blame, blame the Democrats. In 1988, they concocted a system of Iowa in January, New Hampshire in February (during the Olympics no less) and Super Tuesday in March, meant to find a winning candidate who wasn’t too far left and crown him well before the onset of a prolonged death march like the Mondale-Hart fiasco of 1984. What they got was Jesse Jackson, who ended up with 7 million primary votes to the nominee’s 9 million (Mike Dukakis, as if you cared). So they kept compressing the schedule over and over with hopes of simultaneously getting a centrist candidate and not burning through all the money before the general election – and then Clinton got in in 1992, was the incumbent in 1996, and had a designated successor in 2000, so much good it did them.
Anyway, because of the continued compression of the primary season, we now find ourself in a situation where the game could be over in 4 weeks. Iowa and New Hampshire will be done before we even have a football champion, and the Gold Medal Double-Double MegaUltraDeathStar Tuesday voting on February 5 should settle the deal just in time to give us a NINE MONTH GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN.
This is no way to pick a President, folks. And I’ll tell you something else – the only thing worse than having this done by February 5 would be NOT having it done by February 5; if one party is still picking between 3 or more candidates by then, they’re in for a world of pain.
Birmingham-born Californian, age fifty-two, cannot return to his native state…there are 651,972 reasons why
I think it’s unfair to put all the blame on the Democrats (or the Republicans, who, in a year like this, get just as much out of the early caucus system as the Dems do). How about the media. I found it *fascinating* last night to watch CNN and to see them talk in such dire tones about what everything meant. It’s *one contest*. By rights it should be what you said – one whack at the field so that the Dodds and Bidens drop out (btw, I didn’t even realize Dodd was running until he *dropped out*. Good going, Chris) and then you pass it along and there’s another whack. It’s not the voters (of any party affiliation) who create that expectation, it’s the media, who are reporting that Clinton’s campaign’s in a tailspin and she’s ruined blah blah blah. Now – that might be music to my ears, but it really didn’t ought to be true after *one contest*.
The one virtue of the caucuses is that they get rural issues on the table early. Without that, I can’t imagine that they’d get a look in for being crowded out by big, primarily urban states. *That* said, let’s get to a system where everyone votes on one day – it’s the only way that everyone will consider things fair.
You know what I wanted? I wanted someone to give Wolf Blitzer a freaking thesaurus. I think he used the word ‘devastating’ to describe Clinton’s loss way too often.
And Cath, really, everyone vote on one day? Please let’s not do something that might make some sort of sense. Then however would the politicians spend all of their time and money? Though I think the problem with everyone voting on one day will make small states non-entities in the grand scheme of things. No one would ever dark New Hampshire’s door again. Who needs NH’s delegates when California has 50x more?
Having said all of that, I’m currently doing calculations in my head and talking to people trying to figure out if there’s a way I can snag a civics job at the middle school next year.