Philip Bump: ‘California Should be the First Primary State’

GELFAND’S WORLD-Nobody decided to give New Hampshire's voters the right to hold the first primary election. They just took it. They can enforce the monopoly because presidential candidates know what's bad for them. Candidates know that if they were to speak out against New Hampshire's unfair power, the NH voters would retaliate against them. So decade after decade, since the middle of the last century, we've had the New Hampshire primary mystique. 

One candidate, Jimmy Carter, figured out how to do an end run around the New Hampshire hegemony (photo). He ran really hard in Iowa, figuring that other potential candidates weren't taking that state's weird caucus system seriously enough. He used Iowa to make a name for himself, rode it to the presidency, and now every candidate figures he has to do the same butt kissing in Iowa that used to be reserved for New Hampshire. 

Neither of those states is remotely representative of the country as a whole. This is just one of several reasons why Iowa and New Hampshire should be made to give up their primacy in favor of other states. 

It's easy for me to make this argument because I've made it at approximately 8 year intervals for a couple of decades. But now I have found one other political writer who is making the same case. This week's Washington Post ran an op ed  titled Enough with letting Iowa go first. The first primary state should be California. Author Philip Bump, writing for the online opinion section that the Post calls The Fix, points out that Iowa once resembled the rest of the country, but time has moved on, and it no longer does. He mentions California as a substitute, because California includes urban and rural populations, and California has a diverse collection of different political groupings. 

I'm not especially dedicated to a California First primary, although it would be fun. I'm just annoyed that the presidential nominating process is skewed by New Hampshire and Iowa. It's not just a sense of irritation at their arrogance and egotism, although that is part of it. 

There is a strong case that giving these states first bite is doing damage to western interests. The same argument also applies to the mid-Atlantic states and to the south. 

The reason is that candidates have traditionally collected votes in Iowa and New Hampshire by making promises that are particular to those states. If you raise hogs, you are going to get a lot of attention over the next year, but when has a presidential candidate talked about water rights, so important to the southwest, in the early going? You won't see it. This means that for the next year, conversation is going to be concentrated on the Farm Bill and the deteriorating state of the old manufacturing sector of the northeast. Whatever the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire want, they are going to be promised. 

As the Washington Post piece points out (along with hundreds of other analyses over the years), the effect of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary is to winnow the field of candidates. There may be a dozen or more candidates on the Republican side going into Iowa and New Hampshire, but the field will be reduced by about half after they are done. Some candidates won't make it official right away, but they will be candidates in name only. Just the top two or three candidates will continue to be able to raise money and collect supporters thereafter. 

The problem for us here in the southwest is that our needs will be ignored as candidates cater to the desires of pork producers. 

There is another reason to be resentful of New Hampshire and Iowa. The presidential candidates have figured out over the years that you get votes in those states by dealing with potential voters personally. Serious candidates set up offices a year or more in advance, and they make hundreds of visits to diners and coffee klatches and Rotary Clubs. The voters of Iowa and New Hampshire get face time with the future president. 

I sure wish that some of that face time were shared with Californians and Oregonians. 

Still, at one time, New Hampshire at least generated winning presidential candidacies. Back in the day, second place finishers in New Hampshire didn't go on to be presidents. Republicans who won the New Hampshire primary in the 1950s through 1980s often won the presidency (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr), a trend that was also seen on the Democratic side (Kennedy, Johnson). 

Things have gotten worse. Now, the Iowa-New Hampshire system has added political destructiveness to its inherent unfairness. As analysts have pointed out, the two states sop up a significant fraction of the total presidential campaign expenditures and candidate hours. But in recent years, the two-state system has become more effective at destroying candidacies than creating them. 

The current trend is that to become president, you have to finish second in the New Hampshire primary. This may just be a random correlation, but consider Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all second place finishers in their initial runs. I'm not counting years when there were incumbent presidents, which don't really count in this discussion. It's the years when the race is up for grabs where the primaries are important. 

In fact, on the Democratic side, you have to go back to Jimmy Carter in 1976 to find a non-incumbent winner of the New Hampshire primary who went on to win the presidency. 

There are a long line of recent NH primary winners who failed even to win their party's nomination (Kerry, Tsongas, Hart, Hillary Clinton). 

Iowa voters are even stranger than New Hampshire's. Just consider that the past two Iowa Caucus winners on the Republican side were Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. This is seriously weird, and seems to show that Iowa Republicans are considerably more conservative than the American average. 

So we now have a system which kills off the candidacies of some good people, elevates the candidacies of flakes, and fails to deliver the presidency to the winners. Iowa is destructive of moderate Republicans, and New Hampshire has shown a long trend of voting for Democratic candidates who are losers on the national stage. And it all works against our western interests and the interests of the other industrial states. 

One little secret I will repeat from a long-ago essay: New Hampshire officials like to say that their people have a special relationship with presidential candidates, and that this gives their voters a superior level of wisdom in choosing future presidents. But if you look at New Hampshire Democratic choices over the years, you will notice that the voters are strongly partial to candidates from the immediately adjacent states such as Massachusetts and Maine. We got John Kennedy this way, but we also got Edmund Muskey, John Kerry, and Paul Tsongas, not to mention Michael Dukakis. There isn't one elected president in the last bunch, but they were all within a bicycle ride of the New Hampshire border. New Hampshire's Democratic primary voters are regionalist, elevating small time politicians to the national stage rather than demonstrating an eye for political talent. 

It certainly would be an improvement if the west coast could get a little interest among the candidates, and it would also be useful for the industrial states along the eastern seaboard to get a chance. New Jersey and New York come to mind, or if you must insist on a small state leading off, how about Connecticut or Washington? Or if you must insist on the midwest, how about Illinois? 

In other words, there are lots of other states that have interests that are very different from the self-selected royalty of Iowa and New Hampshire. It's time that the rest of us got a chance to meet the candidates personally and to get their promises regarding our own issues. 

Of course when you make this kind of an argument, it is made with the clear understanding that when it comes to 2016, you are crying out in vain. The change is not going to happen in this electoral season. But there are some halfway measures that are better than nothing.  The most important one, another paradox of modern politics, is supplied by the intense media coverage of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests and, with increasing importance, by internet sites. 

The intensity of the media coverage has traditionally been given credit for creating momentum for the winners. But it has become a mixed blessing in the age of the internet, because every nuance is magnified, and every gaffe is blown sky high while being communicated to the rest of the country. Just think of Mitt Romney's comments about the 47% -- a leaked video taken on a cell phone that wouldn't have even existed in past decades. That video created a firestorm after hundreds of websites picked it up and never set it down. 

What this also means is that candidates now have to be careful about over-promising to the pig farmers in Iowa and to the tax protestors in New Hampshire, since everything they say, can and will be repeated to Ohio voters and North Carolina voters and Florida voters. The candidates will still cater to Iowa's particular special interests, but they will try not to go so far as to lose votes in other places. This limitation doesn't help the west coast or the industrial east, but it does limit the hurt to a certain extent. 

Since we are not going to win the battle over who gets the first primary this time around, we should be doing our best to design a better system for the long term, and in the meantime, trying to negate the effects of Iowa and New Hampshire. We can do this by magnifying and repeating what the candidates say in these two states. It seems a little paradoxical, but it's actually just the process of communicating to voters that they shouldn't be led in their own political views by the usurpers.

 

[(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 11

Pub: Feb 6, 2015