The Daily Background

On Tuesday night, South Dakota (15 pledged) and Montana (16 pledged) will vote. Obama will probably win both contests, though he already has an insurmountable lead.

There will likely be a sea change shift of support among the uncommitted supers towards Obama, and Clinton’s campaign will probably see a few defections as well if she stays in the race till Wednesday morning– there’s already signs of this.

Now that this is over, or will be very soon, it’s time to start looking ahead to the next (real) Democratic presidential primary season, which will hopefully be in early 2016 as Obama gears up to leave his second term in the White House. Kos has some interesting data about caucuses as party-building mechanisms and concludes that perhaps Texas has a smarter system than most thought, combining both a primary and a caucus in the same day. Additionally, Minipundit has five suggestions for how to make a better Democratic primary.

His suggestions are that the party: A) use the popular vote instead of delegates, B) no spoiler candidates allowed (instant runoffs), C) open primaries (meaning that Indys and Repubs can vote), D) a national primary day, and E) more absentee balloting.

I couldn’t agree more with the need for increased absentee balloting. As for open primaries, I tend to think that what’s more important is same-day voter registration and same day voter-affiliation changing. Growing the party is about registering more Democrats, and if a person can’t bother to check the [D] box on their registration cards, then why should they be allowed to help make the most important decision our party members are allowed? Having said that though, it needs to be a heckuvalot easier to register or re-register as a Democrat on the day of a contest, instead of a month or two beforehand as it is in many states.

As for having a national primary being held on one day, I’m not quite sold on this one. Full disclosure: both Minipundit and I are from New Hampshire (in fact we even went to the same high school), and so there’s an obvious bias there: New Hampshirites like their first in the nation primary status. But on principle, I couldn’t care less which state is first: just so long as they aren’t all at once.

Why? Well it’s because doing the primary process in a trickle pattern gives candidates a chance who wouldn’t have automatically had a chance if the vote was held on one day nationally. Huckabee would have dropped out in January instead of March if it wasn’t for his win in Iowa that made people notice him (the same is true for Obama’s early surprise win Iowa which convinced African Americans that he actually was a viable candidate and made them coalesce around him days later in South Carolina). I would even go so far as to say that Clinton would have won the Democratic nomination if all the contests were held on one day this year.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing for NH and IA’s dynasty of mega-influence to continue though. Why not try a rotating primary schedule chosen by lottery? Montana might be last this cycle but might be chosen as first the next time. Or better yet, choose states in a permanently cycling order to get a pleasing demographic mix?

(i.e. a state like Pennsylvania which is almost exclusively white could get paired with a state like Louisiana which has a signifigant African American population for voting on February 2nd 2016… The next Tuesday, a state with a sizable Latino population like Arizona might be paired with a few small mostly-white states like Montana, Maine and Vermont. They could also get creative in terms of pairing states with big working class populations with smaller and wealthier states.) Either way, the order in which states would vote would have to be regulated tightly by the DNC under this system, which is quite different from how it works now.

This brings us to the popular vote. This is a hard one. There are arguments to be made, as Minipundit makes, about how in order to be truly Democratic, the popular vote should determine the winner. But there are also arguments to be made to keep the Democratic primary system reasonably similar to the current general election system, which, as long as the electoral college is around, means that individual states have to be alloted a certain number of votes based on population.

I think perhaps the reaction that many Democrats have to Clinton’s silly, ridiculous claims that she has won the popular vote is to say that the popular vote should be counted next time, with an increased emphasis on it. But the purpose of a primary season is to determine which candidate the party wants at the top of their ticket, and in theory this would be the strongest general election candidate (for example, the candidate that has by far won the most candidates this year is Obama). So why should we deliberately make the primary process and in turn the method we use to determine the strongest general election candidate less like the general election. Then again, if we want to emulate the general election process as much as possible, why do we bother with proportional delegate allocation in the Democratic party and just switch to winner-take-all delegate allocation like the Republicans do?

Of course, in an ideal world, we would use the national popular vote in the instead of the electoral college in the general election. Surely there’s a parallel universe where Al Gore won…

I’ll be honest: I’m pretty undecided on using the popular vote. If you’ve got an opinion, convince me of it in the comments section.

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