Chimney Rock Flag

Chimney Rock Flag by wjklos

The primary scheduling battles faced by both the Democrats and Republicans are of long standing. As Kos pointed out the other day, back in 2004 Michigan's Carl Levin tried to cow then-DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe into letting Michigan hold an illegally-early primary, only to be forced to back down by McAuliffe. (McAuliffe, ironically enough, now supports Hillary Clinton and allowing Michigan's delegates to be seated.) Even better: In January of 2000, Michigan Democratic leaders actually did schedule an early primary, in direct violation of the rules they had agreed to earlier -- and both Gore and Bradley, as is the normal custom, pulled their names from the ballot, thus leaving Lyndon LaRouche to duke it out with "Uncommitted". The Michigan Democratic Party lost no time in holding a do-over caucus in March, and were thus allowed to seat their delegates at the convention later that summer. (Michigan's continued insistence on breaking previously agreed-upon primary rules may likely be why the penalties for breaking them were upped this election cycle from merely losing half a state's delegates to losing them all.)

Things didn't have to be this way. John Nichols of The Nation described last January how we almost had a sane (or at least saner) primary scheduling system back in 2000 -- until Karl Rove blocked discussion of the proposal:

Unfortunately, even if most of the political class is disgusted, a few key players can still thwart action. After all, it was Karl Rove who effectively created the current crisis when he blocked a Republican task force proposal to restore order with a rational and competitive primary schedule. Under the so-called Delaware Plan, the smallest twelve states would have chosen delegates in March, the next smallest fourteen in April, the next thirteen in May and the remainder in June. The schedule was designed to assure that the majority of delegates would not be chosen until the end, increasing the chance that a long, serious race for the nomination would play out over four months.

The Delaware Plan was to be debated at the 2000 convention, but Rove canceled it. "It had nothing to do with the merits of the plan," explained former Wyoming party chair Tom Sansonetti, who headed the task force. "It was just that the convention was scripted, and there was no room for a floor fight on whether or not the Delaware Plan should be adopted or whether the party was going to stay with its present system." The general sense among political insiders is that had the GOP embraced the reform, the Democrats would have done the same. But when the Republicans stopped talking about repairing the process, the discussion died.

That's the bad news. The good news is that there's an even better proposal that the Democrats can adopt at their upcoming convention in Denver: the American Plan.

FairVote supports the goals of the Delaware plan, but prefers a variation of the proposal that would not always put the states in the same order. We have come out in favor of what has been dubbed the “California Plan,” but which we call “the American Plan,” as it would likely give all states an equally influential role over time.

How does it work? Like this:

Under the American Plan, the primary season would be divided into ten two-week periods. In the first period, any combination of randomly selected states (or territories) could vote, as long as their combined number of electoral votes added up to eight. The territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, which do not hold electoral votes but do send delegates to nominating conventions, are counted as holding one electoral vote each, as would the District of Columbia (The 23rd Amendment states that the District may send delegates to the Electoral College, as long as it does not have more votes than the least populous state.). In each subsequent period, the number of votes contested would increase by eight. As a result, the early campaign would feature contests in several small states or a few larger ones, becoming more and more demanding as time went by.

Because of the large gap between populations of the most populous states, California - the state with the highest population - could vote no earlier than the seventh period, while the second most populous state, Texas, as well as New York and Florida, the third and fourth largest, could vote in the fourth. California, unlike all other states, would always have to hold its primary toward the end of the campaign. To remedy this, the later stages of the California Plan primary are staggered. The seventh period (8x7) is moved before the fourth (8x4), the eighth (8x8) before the fifth (8x5), and the ninth (8x9) before the sixth (8x6). [1]

The American Plan is most strongly supported in California, even though that state would under the old thinking be seemingly screwed by voting last. But thanks to the voting being staggered by population, late primary states under the American Plan have just as much clout as early ones.

It's long past time to fix our broken primary scheduling system. The American Plan is the best way out there to do it.