primaries

I didn’t get to catch too much of the GOP convention last night (my wife exerted executive control over the remote control, and I was busy playing with my new iPhone), so there isn’t much I can say about last night’s shindig.  (I am hoping to catch Sarah Palin’s debut this evening, however.)

But, I do note that I failed to mention one interesting, but disappointing, thing that took place during Monday’s abridged session.  Quoting Real Clear Politics:

One item of business the delegates did complete yesterday was finalizing primary dates in 2012. And if you thought that this year’s contests began too early, then this rule change is for rule.

While Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will remain the first three states to hold primaries, with no other states allowed to hold its primary before the first Tuesday in March, those three states cannot hold their primaries before the first Tuesday in February.

Well, that’s an example of treating a symptom, rather than the disease.

You’d think that after the mess of this year’s primary circus, the major parties would exercise a bit of thoughtful exercise about how primaries might be more sensibly scheduled, in order to balance these seemingly conflicting concerns:

• Certain states want the prestige (and commerce) which arise from having an early primary.
• Less well-funded/well-known candidates want the opportunity to make an impression on the public through small states, rather than drowning in the costs of advertising/campaigning in larger markets.
• The public wants its votes to be relevant, rather than being presented with ballots showing the presumptive nominee and challengers with no mathematical chance of winning.

All the GOP has done is push back the potential primary calendar one month – an improvement over this year’s circus to be sure, but not one that addresses the core challenges.

I’d still love to see a rotating regional primary system, like this one I described a few months ago.

The Dems, at their convention last week, only agreed to look at the subject, and report back in a few months.  So, I guess I can still hope to see some improvement in 2012.

So, this is it.  South Dakota and Montana have their primaries today, bringing primary season to a close.

In a normal year, this wouldn’t be a noteworthy landmark.  But this year… pundits, professional and amateur, have been waiting to be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s a shame I’m going to be in meetings all day.   There’s an expectation that a steady trickle of superdelegate endorsements will be made today and tomorrow.  I’ve got to believe that someone (probably the Obama campaign) will have a running tally going, so that the blogosphere can melt down when he clinches the nomination, this evening or tomorrow.

I realize that various talking heads, politicans, and geeks with too much time on their hands have proposed this concept before, but after evaluating the silliness of this primary season, it seems that talk of primary reform is resurfacing. Seen at CNN’s Political Ticker blog:

In a speech on the floor of the Florida State Senate Thursday morning, Nelson said he will formally introduce legislation that will attempt to fix many of the problems exposed by this cycle’s round of presidential primaries, adding the “time for reform is now.”[...]

Specifically, Nelson said he will propose six rotating interregional primaries that “will give large and small states a fair say in the nomination process.” The regional primaries would be conducted on dates ranging from March to June, Nelson also said, taking the place of the current early-voting states Iowa and New Hampshire — states which critics have long argued are not representative of the American electorate. The dates would initially be set by a lottery system for the 2012 election and would rotate positions in successive elections.

Nelson called for early voting in every state and the elimination of voting machines that do not produce a paper trail. The Florida Democrat also said all citizens should be allowed to vote absentee if they so choose, and is pushing for a federal grant incentive program to help develop voting by mail and via the Internet.

Nelson will also formally seek award the presidency based on the popular vote result, instead of via the Electoral College – a reform that will require a stand-alone bill since it would require an amendment to he Constitution.

I’m not holding my breath, as I do not underestimate Congress’ ability to kill any good idea in a stew of politicking, but it’d be nice to see leaders start to seriously consider such an idea. Planning and deal-making needs to begin now, if reform is to be in place by 2012. After all, at the rate that we’re going, the 2012 campaign will begin in November of this year.

CNN’s reporting:

Dems

• DC (98% in): Obama 75%, Hillary 24%
• Maryland (62% in) Obama 60%, Hillary 37%
• Virginia (99% in) Obama 64%, Hillary 35%

GOP

• DC: McCain 68%, Huckabee 17%, Paul 8%, Romney 6%
• Maryland: McCain 55%, Huckabee 30%, Romney 6%, Paul 6%
• Virginia: McCain 50$, Huckabee 41%, Paul 5%, Romney 3%

That loss in Virginia has got to hurt Huckabee’s hopes for a miracle.

A couple more thoughts while they’re percolating in my brain:

On putting a fork in the Romney and Huckabee campaigns

According to the tally at CNN, Romney has 268 delegates to date, while Huckabee has 169.  The number of delegates required to win at convention is 1,191.  I believe there are still 1,035 delegates up for grabs.  Do a little math, and you see that unless either Romney or Huckabee  start sweeping the remaining states, they’re on the verge of being eliminated unless other deal(s) are made.

CNN shows McCain at 615 delegates.  He needs 56% of the remaining delegates…and it’s worth noting that several of the remaining states are not winner-take-all.

On the Impact of Early Voting

I noticed something interesting in the California results (with 92% of precincts reporting):

• Dems — Clinton 52%, Obama 42%, Edwards 4%
• GOP — McCain 42%, Romney 34%, Huckabee 12%, Giuliani 5%, Paul 4%, Thompson 2%

California is one of the states that has early voting, and there were expectations that the fact that folks could cast ballots before some of the recent drop-outs dropped out, and before some of the recent changes in perceived momentum occurred could mess with the accuracy of pre-primary polls.

When I went to bed last night, Edwards and Giuliani were showing double-digit results in the early returns, and Thompson had a total in the high single-digits, admittedly with admittedly a relatively small portion of the vote in.

While I haven’t heard that the apparent early strength of dropped-out candidates may have been a manifestation of the early votes… I do wonder about that.

So, a thought — perhaps a supporter of “preference voting” or “instant run-off voting” ought to investigate that phenomenon, and use it as a basis to argue that the fast pace and tumultuousness of the primary campaign this cycle provides strong evidence that early voting needs to be linked to preference or instant-runoff voting.

On the Compressed, Early Timeline of the Primary Campaign

The experience of the past six weeks has me more convinced than ever that the Presidential primary game needs to be reformed.

While I don’t mind a couple of non-representitive small states serving the role of weeding out nonviable candidates, I do worry that the whirlwind campaign means that money could be playing too big a role (e.g. what if Edwards or Dodd had had more money to get their messages out; or what if Obama and McCain hadn’t had their recent fundraising successes?), and that Joe Average voter isn’t getting a great opportunity to make informed choices.

I stand even more strongly behind my idea of a rotating system of regional primaries, to allow more time for voters to learn about the candidates, to permit candidates to have a bit of geographic focus when campaigning (hopefully reducing expense and wasteful travel), and in order to make everyone’s primary vote potentially relevant (by having about half the delegates decided in the final wave).

So, Super Duper Tuesday is almost upon us.  As you might expect, the media and the blogosphere is awash in polls.

Electoral-vote.com has a nice wrap-up, showing:

Dems

• Alabama: Hillary +3
• Arizona: Hillary +15
• California: Hillary +11
• Colorado: Obama +2
• Connecticut: Hillary +3
• Georgia: Obama +16
• Illinois: Obama +24
• Massachusetts: Hillary+15
• Minnesota: Hillary +7
• Missouri: Hillary +4
• New Jersey: Hillary +12
• New York: Hillary +22
• Oklahoma: Hillary +25
• Tennessee: Hillary +33

GOP

• Alabama: McCain + 19
• Arizona: McCain +20
• California: McCain +9
• Colorado: Romney +19
• Connecticut: McCain +19
• Georgia: McCain +1
• Illinois: McCain +11
• Massachusetts: Romney +27
• Minnesota: McCain +24
• Missouri: McCain +4
• New Jersey: McCain +19
• New York: McCain +31
• Oklahoma: McCain +18
• Tennessee: McCain +15

Of course, given the uniqueness of this primary season, I wonder about the accuracy of many of these polls.  However, I’m inclined to believe that McCain will be close to being the presumptive nominee for the GOP, thanks to the winner-take-all nature of the Republican primaries.

Over on the Dems’ side…it could remain interesting, given the proportional delegate allocation used (plus the superdelegates, plus Hillary’s desire to get her delegates from “boycotted” Michigan and Florida seated…)

Seen in PowerLine, the text of a robo-call in Michigan:

Hi. This Senator Joe Lieberman. I’m calling for John McCain.

As you may remember I was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 2000. But this year I’m supporting Republican John McCain for President because he is the person best qualified to lead our country forward. He’s a straight talker who will always do what’s right for our country regardless of partisan politics and he’s the only candidate prepared to be commander-in-chief from day one.

There isn’t a competitive Democratic primary in Michigan this year and all registered voters are able to participate in a Republican primary. So I’m calling today to urge you to vote in the Republican primary on January 15 for Senator John McCain. He’ll break through the partisanship and make our government in Washington work for all the people again.

So, a little bit of Jomentum added to the campaign, yes?

I’ll remind politicians of my promise to vote against any candidate who robo-calls me. Politicians are welcome to make a sales pitch to me over the phone, but only if there’s a real, live human on the other end of the line.

In case you’ve been under a rock in the past few hours, Romney won the Michigan primary (Romney 39, McCain 30, Huck 17), thereby causing punditry in the mainstream media and online to shift into spin mode…or ignore their pre-primary predictions…to dance around predictions of a close race / possible McCain victory.

The folks over at Daily Kos are ecstatic over the Romney win and continuing pachydermic chaos, even if exit polling suggests that Kos’ call for Dems to cross party lines to support Romney may have had little effect. (Only a tiny portion of GOP primary participants reported to be Dems, although I imagine the Kossack army would be more inclined to misrepresent their affiliation in any such poll.)

I did, by the way, catch bits and pieces of the Dems’ debate, being held in Las Vegas as Michigan votes were being tallied. Unfortunately, since I had been up since 4am due to an early morning flight, much of the content was lost on me, because I kept drifting off. However, cutting the invite list down to three did help immensely with making the whole affair seem less rushed.

(Sorry Kucinich…but you aren’t a viable candidate. At this point in the campaign, that much is clear, and MSNBC was probably right in withholding its invitation.)

With the Michigan Democratic primary having been neutered by the DNC due to the state’s cutting in line, there are various ideas floating around about what Michigander Democrats should do on primary day.

Yesterday, I wrote about calls for Michigan Dems to come out anyway and vote “Uncommitted” if they wished to support Obama or Edwards (who withdrew from the ballot).

Then, we have the idea that Kos is floating:

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state’s Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes. In 1988, Republican voters again crossed over, helping Jesse Jackson win the Democratic primary, helping rack up big margins for Jackson in Republican precincts. (Michigan Republicans can clearly be counted on to practice the worst of racial politics.) In 1998, Republicans helped Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer — quack Geoffrey Feiger — win his Democratic primary, thus guaranteeing their hold on the governor’s mansion that year.

With a history of meddling in our primaries, why don’t we try and return the favor. Next Tuesday, January 15th, Michigan will hold its primary. Michigan Democrats should vote for Mitt Romney, because if Mitt wins, Democrats win. How so? [...]

[P]oor Mitt Romney, who’s suffered back-to-back losses in the last week, desperately needs to win Michigan in order to keep his campaign afloat.  Bottom line, if Romney loses Michigan, he’s out. If he wins, he stays in.

It’s evil.  I like it. 

Seriously, I do see a downside here — encouraging such sabotage will make it more difficult for folks like me, who advocate open primaries (assuming they’re operated by the regular state election mechanism).

It would be far more appropriate for Dems choosing not to follow the “uncommitted” path to vote for the “least of the evils” on the GOP side — a kind of “if I have to have one of these jokers for President, here’s who I’d chose” vote.

And, if you were going to cross party lines to cast a strategic vote, wouldn’t you want to vote for the candidate it’s easiest for your guy/gal to beat?   In that case, wouldn’t a vote for Huckabee be the most strategic choice?  (Presumably his evangelistic Christian stance would make it easier for secular moderates to be wooed over to the D column….)

Seen in the Detroit News:

Top Michigan Democrats made another plea Wednesday to coax supporters of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards to vote “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s Michigan primary, rather than staying home or crossing over to vote in the Republican contest.

Obama, Edwards, and Bill Richardson yanked their names off the ballot here, leaving New York Sen. Hillary Clinton as the only leading contender for Democratic voters.

U.S. Sen. Carl Levin and state Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer said Michigan Dems can still have an indirect say in the nominating process if they check the “uncommitted” box on the ballot. State law prohibits write-ins for candidates who have not authorized write-in campaigns; Obama, Edwards and Richardson have not.

If “uncommitted” draws at least 15 percent of the vote in a congressional district, delegates not bound to any candidate could be sent to the national convention, possibly enabling Obama and Edwards supporters to play a role in the nomination.

Again, this weirdness is a result of the DNC’s edict that states holding unsanctioned primaries before the 5 February starting line would see their delegations stripped of their votes…as well as agreement among the major candidates to boycott the state.

So, unless something happens, Hillary stands to win by a landslide in Michigan, receiving no delegates for the showing.

The story above would seem to be the Michigan Dems saying, “Come out and vote anyway.  You don’t have to vote for Clinton.  Here’s how….”