New Hampshire votes tomorrow, why can’t I?

[bolson]

Being home sick from work today, I turned on the TV news. I don’t usually, and special for tonight I got a big dose full of New Hampshire primary coverage and speculation. I’ve been following this and the Iowa caucus by my favorite internet sources, but it’s different seeing it on the screen that presumably millions of other people are seeing too. I guess this is the reality most people are seeing.

It sucks, let’s change it.

I don’t want a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th class vote. I want a vote just like everyone else, but I don’t get one. People Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina get better votes than I do, and I’m bitter. It’s not their fault, except perhaps through complicit silence. If I had the same opportunity I’d sure take it.

But I’m still sick of having my vote compromised. I want to vote for Dennis Kucinich, who is in my opinion the best kind of person to have as our next President. But I was just thinking that depending on how things are going after IA, NH, SC and NV, I might compromise and vote for the best of the rest, John Edwards. That sucks, I hate it. It’s a stupid system. There are better ways. Grr!

In 2012 can we have a one-day national primary? Please? Also, let's collapse this insanely long campaign season and have it in June or July.

Comments

[cos]

A one day national primary would be better than what we have now, but it's not my favorite option. My favorite would be to go back to a slow state-by-state process, kind of like what we used to have, though it could be improved. See, with a national primary, the big population centers count most and candidates can (and do) ignore more dispersed voters. Going slowly, state by state, gives smaller states a chance to matter somewhat, without shortchanging the bigger ones with big cities.

The main problem we have now is a much too short, compressed primary season, where each primary happens in the media shadow of the previous ones. Gone are the days when a candidate could lose the first N primaries in a row and still come back to get the nomination, because we no longer really have separate campaigns in each state: we have one rolling campaign that starts in Iowa and New Hampshire and keeps on moving.

My ideal system would start with very small states whose delegate counts don't matter much, and space them more than two weeks apart, then move towards a big national "Super Tuesday" sort of election with all the big states, that actually decides it. Ideally that would happen after a few months, when lots of small states have voted, but with only 1/4 or fewer of elected delegates selected; then we'd select the 75%+ remaining delegates on one big day. Smallest states should go earlies. And that one big day should come at least three weeks after the most recent other primary.

[soong.livejournal.com]

I don't think I would be satisfied with any system with anyone voting before anyone else. I think early votes dilute the value of later votes because later voters go along with bandwagon effects. I've heard some people say that the bandwagon effect is a good thing in a primary system because it builds support for the eventual winner and nominee. I think it's bad because I want people voting their own conscience undiluted by strategy and other pressures.

You could have state results not released until they're all released, but there would still be exit polls with probably about the same effect. Pre-voting sampled polling has a bad enough effect currently.

If we're going to retail politics for a national office, people will just have to remember which candidate they liked when he came around to their town 6 months ago. Ultimately, maybe it's just going to have to be wholesale politics for a national office. 300,000,000 people are involved, can't shake hands with all of them.

[cos]

I think you missed my point, perhaps because you don't believe it to such an extent that you just assumed it can't be. But for whatever reason, you ignored it. If you space out primaries enough, what you call the "bandwagon effect" gets very weak except in special circumstances. That's why it used to be possible for candidates to lose multiple early primaries and still get the nomination. But it's those special circumstances that I want to preserve: the cases where a candidate written off by the press and lacking heavy fundraising manages to take advantage of the smaller scale campaign offerred by a small state to show that he/she is worthy of attention.

If we went to all-national, small state voters would matter less than large state voters (unfair), rural voters would matter less than urban voters because many candidates wouldn't visit them (unfair), and the ability of candidates to highlight their worthiness in "retail politics" and get some money and some media respect would be lost (both unfair and damaging to our democratic system). There are flaws in having some states vote earlier than others, but those flaws are overshadowed by the greater flaws of having a single national primary IMO.

Where we've broken the system, primarily, is in compressing the primary season, creating a super-heightened bandwagon effect where each primary happens in the media shadow of the previous one. We need enough time between primaries for other things to become big stories, rather than having the previous primary always be the big story on the day of the next one.

"I want people voting their own conscience undiluted by strategy and other pressures."

That is 100% impossible. I don't know that it's desirable, but i do know that it's impossible even in approximation. Perhaps what you want is for people's votes to be undiluted by the specific pressure of who won some other primary, but what if their votes are then correspondingly more affected by some polling organization's poorly-understood national poll? (All national polls for primaries are poorly understood, if for no other reason than that they combine answers from places where candidates are visiting often and people are paying attention with answers from places where candidates aren't visiting as much and people are therefore paying less attention - that would remain the case if we had a national primary). Why isn't a primary a better thing to "dilute" people's votes with than some highly publicized polls?

However, even though you can't get your wish of truly "undiluted" votes, or even come anywhere close enough to that goal to even see what it might look like, you *can* get much reduced effect of previous primaries by spacing them out by more than two weeks. History has demonstrated this effectively. It works by giving space for new events to become the big stories.

[soong.livejournal.com]

I think you missed my point, perhaps because you don't believe it to such an extent that you just assumed it can't be. But for whatever reason, you ignored it. If you space out primaries enough, what you call the "bandwagon effect" gets very weak except in special circumstances. That's why it used to be possible for candidates to lose multiple early primaries and still get the nomination.

You're right, I had forgotten that, probably due to my overwhelming conviction that the current condition is not that.

Still, why did so many states move up? It must have been desirable. Earlier votes are more desirable than late votes. Later voters get shafted by being given less desirable votes to cast.

"small state voters would matter less than large state voters"
Are you assuming winner-take-all-per-state Electoral College style allocation, where candidates would only bother to campaign in valuable large states? That's not the case currently and I wouldn't expect it to change right away. California, the most populous, allocates delegates roughly proportionally to candidates that get more than 15% of the vote.

"rural voters would matter less than urban voters because many candidates wouldn't visit them"
I'm again guessing this is 'matter' in the sense of where candidates bother to campaign in person or in ad-buy. Everyone still gets one vote (one equal-to-all-the-others vote). National media ad-buys potentially get to everyone. Some people complain that a national primary will need even more Big Money to make those national ad buys, but maybe in other ways it would make the grassrooots people-powered campaign more important for all the places the candidate can't get to directly.

I'm still not convinced that the modern news channels, seemingly always starved for real news to report, would let the story drop, and would always be hyping expectations between primaries. There is indeed an unhealthy obsession with the horserace. I'm not sure if they're constantly trying to 'scoop' the story about who's winning. If I'm feeling specially cynical I imagine they're actually trying to affect the process and make the news.

--

I'd prefer that people weren't affected by media polls either. Part of that is the current need to strategize your vote (like my Kucinich/Edwards problem), and part of that is some sort of satisfaction from voting for a winner.

I guess I'm being a cranky idealist about this, and I implicitly have categories of valid and improper influences on voter choices. And maybe it's just me and it's a pornography-know-it-when-i-see-it test.
* Valid: candidate policies, rhetoric, character.
* Improper: what shapeless masses of other people somewhere else think, what questionable-methodology statistics tell you, media filtering due to fuzzy not-a-credible-candidate tests, how much money a campaign has.
* Kinda-Valid: what specific people you trust think (but celebrity endorsements will make me cranky again because I'd mistrust anyone who puts their electoral trust in someone who looks shiny on screen).

[cos]

"Still, why did so many states move up? It must have been desirable. Earlier votes are more desirable than late votes. Later voters get shafted by being given less desirable votes to cast."

A combination of reasons. Partly, states are misguided, they think earlier is inherently better when it actually isn't. If you're state #3 following a few days after NH, and there are no more primaries for a few weeks after than, then state #4 is actually in a much better place than you are. But it's not a simple rule, and "earlier is better" sounds simple and plausible so it's beguiling. Partly it's because some states were trying to play chicken with IA and NH hoping they could be first, and first clearly is a good place to be. And partly, it's because there's a prisoners' dilemma aspect to it: If you're a single state, with control over your own date but not the calendar as a whole, moving up may be the one thing you can do that has a good probability of improving your position, even though the more states move up, the worse it is for all of them.

"I'm still not convinced that the modern news channels, seemingly always starved for real news to report, would let the story drop, and would always be hyping expectations between primaries."

The news cycle is short in the traditional media. If they focus on a story, they concentrate it temporally, overhyping it for a short time and drowing everything else out, but after a while it's time to move on to the next thing. In the case of a primary election result, "a while" is unlikely to be more than a week. By next week, something new has happened and they'll latch onto it. Something someone said at a debate; some shift in the polls; a weird new campaign ad from an outside group; a "sexy" story some newspaper dug up about a candidate's past... these things are always coming up, it just takes a week or so before they can break through.

If a story is going to be kept alive for significantly longer than about 4-6 days, it's going to be kept alive by nontraditional media like blogs, or word of mouth, or "most emailed" meters, or YouTube. But those sources are able to focus on many things at once, to view primary results in better perspective, to filter analysis through better, and to carry over more material from before the last primary.


Regarding your meter of proper and improper influences:
1. I have to extrapolate which things you think are improper because you leave a lot out
2. I believe the influences you consider improper are always going to be important
3. I'm quite sure that having a national primary would make things worse, not better, according to your meter

For #3, consider: If we had a national primary last week, chances are very high that Hillary Clinton would've won, not because people voted "their conscience, undiluted", or based purely on issue positions and rhetoric, but mainly because she was considered the heir apparent and was ahead in all the national polls. State-by-state primaries can often be an antidote to that kind of effect.