Moulitsas: Time for a better primary

The primary system is broken. 

From low-turnout exclusionary caucuses with their lack of secret ballot to confusing voter registration and eligibility rules to superdelegates that could potentially usurp the will of the voters, the fact is, any effort at reform would need to be dramatic and wide-ranging. 

{mosads}But nothing is more problematic than the calendar itself.

For starters, we need to eliminate the first-in-the-nation status long enjoyed by Iowa and New Hampshire. Neither state is representative of the nation, nor of the Democratic Party coalition in particular. And given that just 14.9 percent of Iowa’s voting-age population even bothered to caucus this year, the state can’t even claim high citizen engagement. So throw both states into a big pile with the other states and let’s come up with a new calendar. 

The easiest tweak would be to merely swap out Iowa and New Hampshire with more representative states. Illinois, for example, most closely matches the demographics of our nation, not just in race but also economics and the rural-urban split. Democrats would also want to lead with states with high percentages of Latino and African-American voters. Still, there’d be dubious value with swapping one monopoly for another. 

We could have a national primary, where all voters get to decide at once. That would be tough for small, under-funded insurgent candidates catching fire, though not impossible. Bernie Sanders has proven the ability of an inspiring candidate to raise money and win votes despite a near-dearth of traditional media coverage and establishment support. But generally speaking, a single primary day would favor the (already) well-known and well-funded. 

The Delaware Plan would split the nation into four groups, arranging states by size. The 12 smallest states and D.C., totaling 15 million people, would vote first; the 12 biggest states, totaling 160 million people, would vote last. This would likely prolong the primary season, giving all voters a chance at casting a meaningful vote (though early states would still whittle down the candidate field). Problem is, of those 12 smallest states, only D.C., Delaware and Hawaii have significant non-white populations, and most are predominantly rural. Once again, non-representative states would set the national agenda. 

We could also move to a rotating regional primary system, splitting the nation into four or five regions, with a region voting every month or so. In the first cycle, the calendar order would be decided by lottery, but in following cycles everyone would move up a date, with the first region sliding back to last. That would remove the power of a few early states to skew policy on matters of local concern (like ethanol) and let everyone go first every 16 or 20 years. This would likely lessen the impact of retail politics, though Donald Trump proved this year that such a thing doesn’t matter much anymore in this social media era. It would also likely render entire regions meaningless during most cycles, as candidates will have been mostly chosen by the time the last region gets to vote. But many states are already rendered meaningless under the current system. This way, every region will eventually rotate back to the beginning. 

These aren’t the only proposed plans (if you want something really complicated, look up the Graduated Random Presidential Primary System, aka the American Plan, or Sandy Levin’s Interregional Primary Plan), but each and every one would be an improvement over the status quo.  

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.