Nomination Calvinball

The way we nominate major party Presidential candidates is laughably irrational and unfair, and in the run-up to 2008 chaos is breaking out everywhere, as the market incentives (i.e. the power of voting early) push states to move their primaries up.

Howard Dean has slapped Florida down, not on general principles but because Democrats there scheduled their primary outside the DNC's rules. The RNC, for its part, just yesterday had its own slap-fest, halving allocated delegates for New Hampshire, Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, and Wyoming.

Now Massachusetts is talking about Sec. Bill Galvin's proposal to move our primary up to the super date of Feb. 5. The alternative is probably to have nothing left to vote on.

It's obvious to everyone that we need a national solution that breaks the New Hampshire/Iowa monopoly. Well, it's obvious to the other 48 states, anyhow.

There's one thing about starting small that I would like to preserve. Confining an early round of primaries (caucuses should just be abolished; they're a ridiculous anachronism and they're too easy to buy) to a small enough place for retail politics gives an opening for an insurgent candidate. Heaven knows there are few enough of those in our elite-dominated system to give up any more.

Insurgencies only matter for Democrats. The last time Republicans nominated an insurgent was 1964, and even then Barry Goldwater was at least a Washington insider. The party fathers learned not to do that again. Fortunately for them, Republican voters follow. Democratic voters occasionally lead their timorous "leaders" in a new direction, which we desperately need now.

The problem with starting small is that small states are not representative of America. They're too white, too rural, too conservative. Problem is, once you pick a big city, you've picked a big state, and you lose the virtue of small size.

We need a nominating calendar that is representative but starts small. We also need to rotate who goes first. Sorry, New Hampshire, there's no good reason for your primacy. Since I'm not running for President, I can say that without fear of retaliation, and anyway I'm posting pseudonymously.

I'd like to see a calendar like this:

• Late winter - the retail primaries, a handful of rotating small areas not limited to entire states, say three million eligible voters all told. Partial-state primaries could be run in districts built from two or three Congressional districts.
  
• A month later - weed-out primaries, a much larger set of districts, say thirty million eligible voters
• A month after that - decision day, a hundred twenty million eligible voters
• A month after that - tie-breaker day, all the rest, about thirty million
  

If your vote comes too late to decide anything in one cycle, it'll be early in the next cycle.

To achieve this probably requires the force of law. Of course, it's a flight of fancy, and it will never happen this way.