Confounding Primary Rules

Back in 2014, when I first started this column, one of the early pieces had to do with Election Day and how to make it better.  I wrote, as you can see here, that we would be well-served as a country with a robust press corps and great curiosity, if we were to switch Election Day to a full 24-hour cycle beginning and ending at the same exact instant in all voting areas.

That seemed so logical to me -- 24 hours meant that no one had an issue with work schedule since there was always a long period where anyone would be away from work and could go vote.  It also meant that people in, say, Oregon, who were late-afternoon or evening voters, would not be influenced by results already being broadcast from Eastern time zone states.  Every polling place closed (and, of course, opened) at the same exact moment.

I don't think that has gone anywhere, by the way.

Now, my best girl made a comment the other day that prompted me to think about the primary-and-caucus structure we now have.  She asked why we didn't have all the primaries on the same day to get them over with and shorten the season.  And I had to think about it.

The answer, of course, differs between the consideration of "how it got this way" and "why it should stay that way."  It got that way because certain states have managed to leverage early positions in the calendar, which offset their relative insignificance in size and relevance to the rest of the USA.  Iowa caucuses have sort of always been first, then the New Hampshire primary, and you get the rest.  There is no reason on earth why it should stay that way, save for politics.

Now, why it should stay that way, at least spreading primaries out for a full season with lots of debates, rather than all states on the same date, is completely different.  Absent a focus on single states or groups of states, there would not be an opportunity to have candidates pay attention to the issues specific to certain states or regions.

The general election is prima facie evidence -- in the past few elections, the candidates from each party might as well have stayed in about five states -- Ohio, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico, something like that.  The others were so solidly Democrat or Republican that they rarely -- or never -- got visited.  No attention was paid to the needs of Idahoans or Californians or New Yorkers or Oklahomans.  Why bother?  The electoral math meant only a few swing states mattered.

But I actually didn't intend this column to be about spreading out primary and debate season, even though a discussion of that is what got it going.  No, I'm here thinking about the fact that the allocation of delegates varies way, way too much from state to state.  On Tuesday, the crucial states (at least for this Republican primary season) of Florida and Ohio will award all their delegates to the candidate with the most votes.

Last week, and pretty much for all states contested to this point, the delegates were awarded based on some type of proportionality to the total vote count.  Sure, there were some state-specific rules -- in some cases, only candidates receiving 20% of the vote shared in the delegate pool -- but none, I think, was a "winner-take-all" primary.

And now most of the remaining ones, at least including some big states with high delegate counts, have winner-take-all rules, kind of like the Electoral College.  And this is ... why?  What is different between Florida, say, which will have one candidate get delegates, and Texas, which already held its primary and apportioned them?  What benefit is there to the party or the candidates to allow that difference?

I mean, I can understand the argument for all the primaries to be proportional, or for none to be, but it doesn't seem to be beneficial to anyone that there are such distinct rules.  We just simply seem to have evolved that way, and no one has the political will to say that this is tantamount to the spaghetti-code metaphor, and it is time to start all over.

What do you think?  Is the inconsistency in the way different states award delegates, and the concentration of winner-take-all primaries in the later states, a conspiracy of some kind to ... well, I don't know what.  But after this season, the last thing we need is more to question in the process.

At least for next time, let's suppose we can fix it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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