A sensible answer to the primary elections mess
The early states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, for example—disproportionately influence the primaries. Win in these states and you look more “winnable” in the November election, so you are more likely in other states to get votes. But this is causing a problem: politicians only campaign in these states, ignoring the others. If the primary race is decided early, most of the country is totally left out. So South Carolina moved its Republican primary up to January 19th, Florida is probably going to go even further back, and before you know it, we will have election campaigns lasting two to three years. Already, many candidates appear to be in perpetual campaign mode; everything is a glory train of publicity for the next run for office, no matter what year it is.
There is a simple, easy solution to this: rotate the order of the primaries each election year—and don’t start any earlier than the first week in February. That way, California, Oklahoma, and Ohio can be the first states one year, and in the next election Mississippi, Alaska, and Massachusetts go first, for example.
How could this be done? Much in the same way the NBA does the draft lottery. In the NBA, the worst team has the best chance at getting the first pick, but still only a 25% chance. The second worst team has a 20% chance, and so on diminishing. Even if the worst and second-worst teams don’t get the first pick, they still have an excellent chance at getting the second or third, for example. The lottery, while not guaranteeing anything, is weighted in favor of the worst teams.
This could be applied to the primaries as regards the last election: the last states get to vie for the first spots next time around in a similar lottery. Every year, the order of states could be shuffled based on their position during the primaries in the last election. Those states that went last the last time around would get the best chances to claim the first spot in the next election.
Some small states like New Hampshire might complain they will get drowned out by the bigger states (which is one of the reasons for the electoral college system). In order to combat that, a rule could be put in place that would protect every state: only three primaries allowed per week, with no two primaries on the same day—which shouldn’t be a problem, given that good, hard-fought primary elections routinely last at least into June historically. A nice, long primary season would force candidates to pace themselves and take more things into consideration, and it might make primary elections more interesting than just a super Tuesday slugfest.
This is all, of course, up to the party bosses. But whoever professes to be a champion of democracy would do well to give some serious thought to retooling the meaningless free-for-all that primaries have become.
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