Let’s Keep the early states
Let’s keep the early states. We need retail politics. Even for Presidential candidates. Especially for Presidential candidates. Michael Bloomberg would have been ready for a debate if he had already mixed it up a little. If he had heard some of the questions people asked him. In town halls. In coffee shops.
Everybody has suggestions. Here’s one I don’t like. Rotating regional primaries. 2024: All the northeastern states go first. Then the Midwest. Then the Southeast. Then the West. No chance for retail politics there. New York is in the northeast. Never mind Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Florida is in the Southeast. Georgia, too. Illinois is in the Midwest. Ohio, Michigan. And the West. California, Texas. These are the states where candidates will focus for regional primaries. No retail politics here.
I love the caucuses, too. I don’t mean everything should be done by caucus. I mean it works for a couple of states to have people move around the room, talk each other out of one group into another. Move from a group that didn’t get fifteen percent.
Chaotic? Bound to me. Incoherent. Only if you allow some well connected character to create an App to use for the caucus, don’t test it, and discover the night of the caucus that it is not working. It gets a little worse if the Republicans (instigated by the Russians, Or not) make wave after wave of phone calls to block caucus chairs from calling in their results. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure that who ever counts has math skills so there aren’t many addition errors on which the reporting is based.
Let’s preserve genuine retail politics? Let’s ensure that the caucuses and the primaries are in places that represent the diversity of the political parties, particularly of the Democratic Party – the party that I am interested in. Iowa is 91% white, New Hampshire is 94% white. These two states should not start the selection process for the Democratic nominee for president. Not alone, anyhow.
Harry Reed has a suggestion. Replace Iowa with Nevada. You get a diverse state. You punish Iowa for screwing up. You cost Iowa quite a lot of revenue. Earn their enduring resentment. My suggestion is coming up.