The ‘08 Race Sizzles While the Process Fizzles: Rotating Regional Primaries Are a Better Way to Choose Our President

It has been a long year for the 2008 presidential campaigns as candidates dashed across the country raising record-setting sums of money preparing for the gauntlet of early primaries they will soon face.

The 2008 presidential nominating schedule is already the most frontloaded in U.S. history. Thirty-five states plus the District of Columbia will vote in January or February—three times the number that had done so in 2000. Twenty states alone will vote on February 5, the first date that non-early voting states are allowed to hold their contests, including the delegate rich states of California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Many experts believe the nominations will effectively be decided by this date.

Meanwhile, the political parties are vowing to strip some early voting states of their convention delegates if those states hold their primaries in January, which is a violation of party rules.

As a native Kentuckian, I appreciate a good derby, but this is too much. The states keep jockeying for influence and position by moving their presidential primaries earlier and earlier, and it has morphed our process into a two-year campaign-a-palooza driven by big money and shallow rhetoric. The process has gone awry, and it needs to be fixed.

In this new era of yearlong campaigns and national strategies, the pressure for states to hold early presidential nominating contests has had an unsettling effect on the process. More than twenty states have chosen to buck the system and move their 2008 contests earlier this time around.

Some states object to the influence that Iowa and New Hampshire seem to have in the process, arguing that their populations are too small and too homogenous compared to the rest of the country as a whole. Others simply seek to have more influence in a system that has traditionally bestowed media attention and economic benefits upon a handful of early voting states. They also argue that candidate policy discussions center around issues of importance in early voting states, but not necessarily in the rest of the country.

How does frontloading affect the quality of our presidential selection process?

In addition to pitting the states against each other for primacy on the calendar, the current presidential nominating system and the increasingly frontloaded calendar negatively impact our process as a whole.

Too Much Money
Candidates are forced to establish enormous war chests to compete in the primary gauntlet. They must buy expensive advertising and develop a large campaign operation to help them run just about everywhere at once. Those who cannot keep up with the pack are shut out of the race.

Too Little Voter Interaction
Because of the financial demands of this primary process, the principal focus of candidates will not be discussing how to govern and lead our nation but rather raising the campaign funds necessary to compete. Ironically, the prolonged primary will provide voters with fewer details about a candidate’s plan for our country’s future and instead, will produce more sound bites via staged political events. All this will be an effort to free up more time for the candidate to garner the almighty campaign dollar.

Finishing First
Whether it is February 5 or the week after, the furious frontloading effectively condenses the primary contest to the point where voters don’t get to take a hard look at the candidates before casting a ballot. The schedule is particularly frustrating if you are part of the roughly forty percent of the American electorate that will not vote before March next year, essentially rendering their votes useless. And this schedule leaves us all to endure a general election campaign that lasts an exhausting nine months.

These problems only scratch the surface of the potential challenges a front-loaded primary presents. What might be the most unnerving impact of all is that some states will start voting in December of this year. Regardless of when Iowa and New Hampshire hold their contests, a number of states that are at the head of the pack will begin balloting before 2007 is over due to early voting laws designed to make voting more accessible to citizens.

Rotating Regional Primary: A Solution for All States
Naturally, focus now turns to a solution for this problem. Unfortunately, it is too late for 2008, but steps can be taken for 2012. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) is hoping to generate support for rotating regional primaries. The association’s bipartisan proposal, created by the nation’s chief state election officials, divides the country into four regions (with the exception of Iowa and New Hampshire, which retain their early status to allow lesser-known, under-funded candidates to take advantage of the tradition of retail politics in those states) and establishes primary windows in March, April, May and June. The regional order rotates every four years, with each section of the country eventually voting first.

By staggering the voting over a period of four months, the rotating regional plan provides a more reasonable timeframe for campaigning that can alleviate some of the pressures—financial and otherwise—that quickly drive presidential candidates out of the race. It also forces our presidential nominees to pay attention to issues of regional concern, not just those taking priority in early primary states.

At the same time, more states get a reasonable say in selecting the candidates before the nominations are decided, and each region of the country has the opportunity to lead off the process every sixteen years. In turn, voters get a longer look at the candidates and how they perform.

Although they are not without potential problems, rotating regional primaries remain the best solution for our ailing presidential nomination system. The Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, endorsed the NASS plan in its 2005 report, “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections.” Numerous respected political pundits, campaign operatives, newspaper editorial boards and academics have followed suit.

Adopting a new system will not be an easy task. The Republican Party does not allow revisions to the presidential nomination process outside of its conventions, which currently limit reform discussions to one short window of time every four years.

Solving this problem may require our national parties to change party rules, require states to take collective action on the issue, have Congress pass a new law, or a combination of these ideas. Any option will take time to implement, and as such, we do not have the luxury of waiting to address this issue.

U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut), Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) kick-started the reform debate by introducing and receiving a hearing on federal legislation to establish a rotating regional primary system in 2012. Hopefully, this move will serve as the impetus for action on presidential primary reform.

The frontloaded 2008 calendar and the resulting presidential nominating process are a recipe for chaos, but the states fighting for a voice are right when they argue that our process is unfair and must be changed. Under a regional rotating system, all states can play a part and remain relevant to the selection of the President of the United States. States should lead the call for that change.

Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson is the co-chair of the National Association of Secretaries of State’s Subcommittee on Rotating Regional Presidential Primaries.