GELFAND’S WORLD - Earlier in the week, the Democratic National Committee did something good. Mind you it wasn’t great, and it wasn’t even entirely logical, but it was an improvement over the status quo and a move that might possibly help the good guys in the 2028 national elections.
What did they do?
They abolished the system by which Iowa and New Hampshire get to go first in the presidential primaries. Iowa and New Hampshire, by asserting this right (which they basically did not earn, but stole), had gotten away with monopolizing political talk and presidential primaries over the past century.
The DNC established an order for the preliminary presidential primaries that opens with South Carolina and goes, week by week, to Nevada, New Hampshire (had to put them in somewhere), New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia. Notice that this ordering does not provide for early participation by the big states which provide a substantial number of convention votes (California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania etc) but it is at least a start in reforming a system that has been a national disgrace for way too long.
Following these primaries, the Super Tuesday mass primary election will take place. This is the one which does include big states and liberal states and enough convention delegates to create some sort of trend.
One argument that has been made in favor of this reshuffling is that it provides for a more racially balanced set of voters, one more in tune with the overall national ethnic numbers. Or to put it bluntly, Iowa and New Hampshire are about the whitest, most rural states that still have a Democratic Party. It’s long since time that somebody else got a chance to nominate a front-runner.
There are a couple of problems that this action did not cure. The first is that New Hampshire is likely to attempt to screw things up in order to defend its status as the first primary election state. In fact, New Hampshire law establishes its primary as at least 7 days prior to any other state’s primary. That issue can be dealt with, but it would require some actual spine on the part of Democratic Party participants and leaders. (I’ll provide a solution below.)
The other problem is that – unlike English and European elections which come and go in a few weeks -- this primary system begins on January 22 and continues almost forever. The American system, even under mild constraints, will drag out the presidential election campaign for 9 long months.
What can we expect, and what can we hope for in terms of the new primary system? Let’s begin by reminding ourselves that presidential candidates traditionally established a presence in Iowa and New Hampshire at least a year in advance, they attended the state fair in Iowa, and they made sure they visited every diner and breakfast place and town plaza that was willing to host them. People like to meet presidential candidates up close. The downside for all this is that the major industrial states, and the states with large cities, and the states out west were ignored for most of the campaign because candidates had to front load so much into those two usurpers.
By the way, the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire like to tell us that small states are a good place to begin the campaigning because their people get to meet and evaluate the candidates directly. They claim some special relationship with the candidates based on the close contact they make. As the primary results over the past 50 years or so will show, that claim is hogwash. Iowa and New Hampshire voters manage to find bad presidential timber in either party. At least when it comes to Democrats in New Hampshire, there is a remarkable ability to find candidates who go on to lose the nomination. (The exceptions are of course incumbent presidents and one or two who got a solid head start coming out of Iowa.) And of course New Hampshire nearly always supports candidates who come from the immediately adjacent states (Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont) whether they are competitive candidates or not (remember presidents Paul Tsongis and Bernie Sanders?)
So whatever happens in the early primaries, we probably can’t do worse. What would be most useful would be that several good candidates come out of the first 6 primaries in fighting shape. They can gain name recognition and help the voters to learn about who they are during the earlier rounds, and then they can go for convention votes on Super Tuesday. Note that Super Tuesday happens in March and includes several of the big states with large numbers of convention delegates to pick.
So what do we do about New Hampshire? In the past, the Democratic Party has dealt with state primaries that went before New Hampshire – and therefore broke the rules – by pretending to penalize those state parties by reducing their numbers of allowed delegates. Of course the Party being what it is, it tended to gave in and give back the delegate seats right before the convention. So we cannot trust the Democratic National Committee to show a spine or enforce its own rules if that is the only arrow it has in its quiver.
And historically, New Hampshire voters like to punish candidates who don’t kiss their butts by supporting the New-Hampshire-goes-first rule. It is supposedly the way to lose votes in the New Hampshire primary. No, you don’t win this argument by threatening to punish the Democratic Party of New Hampshire.
But you can win the argument by punishing candidates who treat that New Hampshire primary as the first and only primary worth fighting over. There are two ways to do this. The first is for journalists to ask questions which make clear the distinctions between the interests of New Hampshire voters and the interests of voters in other places such as the Midwest and the far west. Ask questions about water rights and national funding for water distribution. Ask about Pacific trade. And, if you want to be a wise guy – since New Hampshire loves its tax structure – ask about using federal tax policies to assist states with their own income taxes, such as California and most other industrial states.
The other way to deal with New Hampshire for once and for all would be to bar candidates from competing in the national convention if those candidates (by the evidence) act as if New Hampshire is their first and only primary. The Democratic Party is a private entity. It can do so.
The thing that we want to avoid is for New Hampshire to set its primary for a day that is prior to the now-established date of South Carolina’s January 22 primary. So if New Hampshire sets its primary day for January 15 or January 8, then the Democratic National Convention should outlaw the participation of candidates who campaign in New Hampshire in anticipation of the earlier primary, and their delegates’ votes should not be counted. This approach would seal the deal.
Addenda
A few days ago, I criticized Karen Bass for setting what is probably an unrealistic deadline for the removal of burned and rotted food from the warehouse in Boyle Heights. This is not to say that there isn’t a problem, and we should make clear that we have nothing but sympathy for the people who have been enduring the smell and the flies and the rats. It’s not a pretty picture and it needs to be fixed.
But the fact that something needs to be fixed does not mean that we have to return to the days of George III. It’s not a monarchy. But those of you who notice a certain resemblance between all those presidential orders and Karen’s latest pronouncements aren’t wrong.
But now Nithya Raman comes to the party and guess what? She planted herself in almost exactly the same place as Bass and she gave what was essentially the same speech. She ordered the owners to get things cleaned up according to a government schedule. Now let me make one thing clear here. I’m not arguing against government schedules per se. Sometimes they are well thought out and make sense. No. What I’m arguing against is a schedule that is not based on engineering actualities or on achievable goals, but is based on political expedience. The speech Raman gave was calculated entirely to score political points against an easily identifiable bad guy.
So as of this week, we have a couple of mayoral candidates who have adopted opportunism as their approach to campaigning.
I’d like to take a moment to point out that there are some real questions to ask, but they are not the questions that our political establishment is asking.
So let’s consider what some of these questions ought to be:
1) What sort of engineering, construction, architectural, and zoning rules should we have?
2) Was this warehouse built in a way that is inherently unsafe when it comes to fire danger, and at the time it was designed, were there better and safer designs available?
3) Was there any approach or technique that the fire department could have used that would have resulted in a better outcome?
4) What should the rules for such construction be in the future?
5) Should there be a limitation or a ban on such warehouses within the city limits?
6) Did the solar cell arrays atop the building have anything to do with the extent of the fire or with difficulties in putting it out?
You get the drift. Engineering and architecture are complicated and sometimes downright hard. Were there mistakes made early on that should have been caught through the zoning process and the building code? If so, what would be the right way to fix them?
Notice that none of our candidates for L.A. city office – including City Council candidates – has weighed in on these questions. To do so would be to assume responsibility.
And going back to the presidential primaries:
New Hampshire has rallied around its state law that says that its presidential primary has to be prior to every other state’s primary. For those who like math and logical puzzles, consider the following: Suppose California were to pass its own law, saying that the California primary will be on the same day as the first primary held by any other state. This creates a logical paradox for New Hampshire, because it cannot hold a primary that’s a week before the California primary if California establishes its election for the same day. It’s even worse than that – California could wait until New Hampshire announces its primary date, and then (and only then) California would set its primary for that exact same day. The result would be that presidential candidates could fight for a few delegates from New Hampshire or a whole lot of delegates from California.
Notice that California has already established a precedent by redistricting its congressional districts to block Texas from stealing the 2026 congressional elections. We’ve shown that we are willing to fight on matters of substance. The choice of our next president is certainly a matter of substance.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
