The media and the blogosphere has been full of talk recently about the emergence of a Mega Super Tuesday on February 5 of next year.with recent discussion fueled by California deciding this week to jump on the February 5 bandwagon.
I’ve mentioned previously that if I were omnipotent, I’d have the primaries done in waves, with roughly one-sixth of the country voting in each of February, March, and April, and the remaining half voting in a Super Tuesday held in May.
Just for yucks, I’ve taken a stab at fleshing that scheme out a bit more.
Here’s how I’d group the states:
- Traditional first states: Iowa & New Hampshire. Their position at the front of the calendar seems all but guaranteed by political realities, as much as it might annoy me. However, I can’t imagine any serious proposal changing that.
 : - Group A, California & the Southwest: Arizona, California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Utah, and any Pacific Island territories granted delegates by the parties such as American Samoa and Guam.
- Group B, Texas & the Plains: Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.
- Group C, New York & the Northeast: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, as well as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Expats if granted delegates by the parties.
- Group D, Florida & the Southeast: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
- Group E, Illinois and the Great Lakes: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
- Group F, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northwest: Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia
Each group would take its turn in the February/March/April/May primary slots. For example, one election cycle would see A in February, B in March, C in April, and D/E/F in May. The next cycle would see B in February, C in March, D in April, and A/E/F in May. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
This isn’t a scheme that is immune for criticism. For example, I opted to try for geographic cohesiveness rather than attempting heterogeneity in each state grouping. I realize that one of the issues with the 04 and prior primary calendars was that the first states weren’t necessarily representative of the country-as-a-whole, or of the big parties.
However, a major criticism with the ‘08 calendar is that it is most unkind to less well-funded candidates. In the 2008 cycle, it seems likely that it will take money to get your message out, rather than candidates with a good message being able to attract funding to help get it out.
I figure that attempting to have geographically limited waves of primaries will give adequate opportunity for “message” to matter just as much as being able to finance the campaign. I tried to arrange the groupings of states so that you would get a relatively wide range of views chiming in before the May Super Tuesday vote.
Each of the groups is intended to represent very roughly one-sixth of the U.S. population. I didn’t attempt to get the one-sixth balance within partisan delegates, for simplicity’s sake.but presumably my primary goal of having roughly half the delegates elected in the final wave is met.
The top six states by population are in different groups. For groups C through F, those large states aren’t so large as to preclude campaigning in the other states in the groups. I couldn’t guarantee that with A and B by virtue of California and Texas being so darned big.
I realize that group F is actually made up of two distinct groups of states - the Northwest and the Mid-Atlantic. That’s an unfortunate byproduct of trying to balance geography and population, and to keep the biggest states segregated from one another. There were going to be some “leftovers”, so I tried to make them semi-contiguous.
There are some state pairings that I wish I could have made, but other constraints prevented me from making it happen. For example, Southern Illinois is “culturally dominated” by St. Louis, so it would have been nice to keep Illinois and Missouri together. However, when you consider that a stronger case can be made for keeping Missouri and Kansas together (think KCMO/KCKS).Illinois and Missouri ended up apart.
Similarly, an argument could be made that New Jersey should be in the same wave as both New York and Pennsylvania. However, New York and Pennsylvania are both “top 6″ states, and I would have run out of “room” in that sort of a group to keep New England intact in any sort of geographic grouping
If we designated primary dates by television market, rather than by state, perhaps some of these oddities could have been avoided. However, such a division seems politically impractical, and I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of Nielsen being able to influence the conduct of an election.
And that, folks, is my bad idea of the day.