Posted by
Andrews on Friday, January 04, 2008 2:50:06 PM
I am not entirely convinced a two-party system is ideal, and I am definitely a bit skeptical that the two parties' primaries should be run as quasi-official undertakings, but as long as both of those are true, I think we can agree that our primary system needs to change.
Why, you ask?
1. Iowa: The fact that Iowa gives an early push to the winner means every politician with
presidential aspirations make every effort to rack up the farm subsidies to guarantee a good result in the caucuses. Without Iowa's position as the first primary state I doubt ethanol would be pushed quite as hard, as ADM only has so much lobbying money.
2. Some states just don't count: While technically primaries could occur in such a way that the last few states decide the question of who will run for each party, it is very rare for that to occur. In most primary seasons the first half, or fewer determine the outcome. There are a number of states whose primaries almost never have any real impact on the outcomes. In most election seasons, any primaries after Super Tuesday are very unlikely to have any real impact on the outcome.
So, what do I suggest to make Iowa have a bit less influence and to give some other states a bit more prominence in the primaries?
I would like to see a system of rotating primaries. Every primary season we could set up in advance a calendar of 8 weeks during which all 50 states would hold their primaries.
To keep the primaries relatively evenly balanced, and interesting, we should ideally have a balanced mix of large and small states each week, and a relatively equal number of electoral votes up for grabs each week.
To do that I would propose we break the states up into 3 groups (large, medium, small).
In the large group would be the 8 largest states (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA, OH, MI) for a total of 226 electoral votes.. In the medium group would be the next 16 largest states (GA, NJ, NC, VA, MA, TN, IN, WA, MO, AZ, MD, WI, MN, AL, CO, LA) for a total of 181 electoral votes. The remaining 26 states and the District of Columbia would then form the small group.
Well in advance of primary season we would draw up this list based on the electoral distribution current at the time, and then select states for each of the eight weeks.
For every week we would randomly select one large and two medium states. We would then randomly select small states one at a time until the total electoral votes was greater than 64 votes*. For the eighth week, all remaining small states are used.
Here is an example:
WEEK 1: Select IL, then NC and AZ. Total votes: 46
Small states: AR total 52
VT total 55
CT total 62
AK total 65
WEEK 2: MI, GA, NJ total 47
Small states: NE total 52
MT total 55
KY total 63
IA Total 70
You get the idea of how it works, so here are the 8 weeks I randomly generated as an example:
WEEK STATES
1 IL,NC,AZ,AR,VT,CT,AK --7 States, 65 Electoral Votes
2 MI,GA,NJ,NE,MT,KY,IA --7 States, 70 Electoral Votes
3 CA, MA,MN --3 States, 77 Electoral Votes
4 PA,IN,MD,SC,OK,WY,OR --8 States, 67 Electoral Votes
5 TX,LA,WA,KS,WV --5 States, 65 Electoral Votes
6 FL,VA,MO,NH,ND,DE,NM --7 States, 66 Electoral Votes
7 NY,TN,CO,NV,HI,RI,SD --7 States, 67 Electoral Votes
8 OH,WI,AL,MS,UT,ID,ME,DC --7 States + DC, 61 Electoral Votes
As you can see the weeks come out about equal, with the weeks containing the California and Texas primaries having fewer states, but about the same number of electoral votes.
And as this scheme shifts every year, the states each have a chance to be first in the nation, making no single unduly influential in primary elections, year after year.
I still have to think about this some more, and run a number of sample sets of states to make sure that there are no ways the numbers can be combined to shift far too many or too few into a single week. However, for the moment I think that, even with the possibility of some unbalanced weeks, this system is much better than the primary system with which we are currently saddled.
--------------------------------------------------------------
* Why 64 votes? Easy. There are a total of 538 electoral votes. Spread over ten weeks, that leaves us with 67.25 votes per week. The small states average out to 4.85 electoral votes per small state. Since we need an equal number to fall high and low of the 67.25 mark to get a relatively even distribution, I divided 4.85 in half, got 2.425. 67.25 - 2.425 gives us 64.825, which rounds nicely to 65. Thus as soon as the number of electoral votes go above 64 we stop pulling small states. Although, as I said above, there may be some fine tuning if the numbers allow certain configurations where too many or too few elections all fall on the same day.