Why should voters in Iowa and New Hampshire be the first to express their candidate preferences for a presidential election that is still eight months away? And in scheduling their primaries earlier than any other state, why should these two small states have such a preponderant influence by giving the candidates they choose advantageous advertising from the start?
The populations of neither Iowa nor New Hampshire are representative of the people of the United States as a whole. They are overwhelmingly white, more rural, and wealthier than the national average. If representativeness were the criterion, Illinois, New York, and California, for example, should be the first states to conduct presidential primaries,
A closer look at the Democratic Party’s calendar shows that there is no overall rationale for the arbitrary scheduling of presidential nominating contests between January 3 and June 7. Iowa Democrats joined Republicans in making their caucuses on January 3 the earliest ever, after other states moved their presidential primaries ahead.
Iowa and New Hampshire advanced their primary dates after Michigan set its nominating contest for mid-January. To do so without its permission angered the Democratic National Committee (DNC) so much that it stripped Michigan’s Democrats of all of their delegates to the Party’s national convention. The DNC did allow Nevada and South Carolina to move their primaries to January 19 and January 26 respectively only after they requested permission for the change.
Florida advanced its primary date from February 5 to January 29. Florida Democrats, however, also were stripped of their delegates to the Party’s national convention because the state failed to obtain permission from the DNC for rescheduling the contest.
The earliest presidential primary date permitted by the DNC without its special permission is Tuesday, February 5, also known as “Super Tuesday,” when 22 states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah) and the Democrats abroad will hold their nominating elections.
If no clear winners have emerged after February 5, the media and the interested public will have another four months to watch the competition among the presidential hopefuls: Louisiana, Nebraska, Virgin Islands, and Washington on February 9; Maine on February 10; the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia on February 12; Hawaii and Wisconsin on February 19; Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont on March 4; Wyoming on March 8; American Samoa on March 10; Mississippi on March 11; Pennsylvania on April 22; Guam on May 3; Indiana and North Caroline on May 6; West Virginia on May 13; Kentucky and Oregon on May 20; Montana and South Dakota on June 2; and Puerto Rico on June 7.
Since this marathon of primary contests usually exhausts the electorate’s interest sooner rather than later, the financial costs of the drawn-out process in the 50 states--$80 million in California alone--and the drain on the contestants’ money and energy can hardly be justified. Requiring candidates to campaign for six months in every presidential primary, moreover, clearly favors the candidates who can raise the most money. Due to the bandwagon effect exerted by the winners of the earlier contests, the presidential primaries become uninteresting before they have begun for too many Americans in too many states.
Why would it not be more advantageous for all concerned to hold all state primaries and caucuses on a single day and only a month before the first national party convention? Numerous bills for a national primary have been introduced in Congress since 1911, but none passed. Old customs, however deficient, are hard to change, even in the age of television and the Internet.