Alec MacGillis has an interesting post yesterday arguing that the national nature of the GOP presidential campaign this cycle hint at a "declining legitimacy" of Iowa and New Hampshire.
That may be true if the justification for the current system is primarily based on the advantages of retail politicking. It's clearly in decline, for this cycle at least (and MacGillis quite properly is cautious about extrapolating out from current trends), or at least if we assume that there won't be a late Santorum surge in Iowa and a Huntsman surge in New Hampshire. Which could, of course, happen.
But I don't believe that retail politics is the real reason to have the current system. No, what is really important is having a sequential system of primaries and caucuses rather than a national primary. And the case for sequential is certainly a lot stronger after this year's clown show during the invisible primary. At least, that's the case if you believe (as I do) that what we've really seen is that practically any candidate can get a temporary bubble.
The problem, of course, is that if that bubble happened with just the correct timing for the national primary, a party might well be stuck with a Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, or even Donald Trump. Indeed, that's basically what happened in last year's GOP primaries in Nevada and Delaware; a candidate who couldn't hold up to serious scrutiny peaked at the right time and wound up winning a one-shot primary.
Sequential primaries are a good way to prevent that. And if you're going to go sequential, then sticking with the traditional small states at the beginning of the process seems as good a plan as any, whether or not the supposed benefits of retail politics are real.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
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As with most things, retail politics seems to help on the margins. Bachmann, for example, will likely perform better in Iowa than she is doing nationally. But candidates still need a spark (money, positive press) to catch fire and win Iowa and New Hampshire. If retail politics made all the difference, Chris Dodd (D-Iowa) would have won last time.
ReplyDeleteWould a sequential nominating system in which different states rotate through the the early slots from cycle to cycle be effective?
ReplyDeleteScott,
ReplyDeleteI think it could work, but I just don't see the transaction costs in setting it up as worthwhile. But that's mostly because I believe the quirky effects of the particular states are overstated.
And if you're going to go sequential, then sticking with the traditional small states at the beginning of the process seems as good a plan as any
ReplyDeleteHm. It seems to me that, if you were going to set up a sequential primary system from scratch, there's no way you would have the same two states start the process every single time. I mean, that would just be obviously and outrageously unfair to the other 48 states.
So the IA-and-NH-centric system we have now isn't "as good a plan as any," it's just the one we're stuck with. (Kind of like a house of Congress giving the same representation to Wyoming and California... but I digress.)
That said, would the "transaction costs" in setting up a random system really be so steep? Every state's already got a primary or caucus so it should just be a matter of shuffling the schedule every four years. Doesn't sound so difficult.
The problem, of course, is that if that bubble happened with just the correct timing for the national primary, a party might well be stuck with a Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, or even Donald Trump. Indeed, that's basically what happened in last year's GOP primaries in Nevada and Delaware; a candidate who couldn't hold up to serious scrutiny peaked at the right time and wound up winning a one-shot primary.
ReplyDeleteThe above are either non-arguments or arguments against mass electoral democracy itself.
A national primary for a presidential nomination is not the same thing as opinion polls well ahead of any meaningful vote, or a brace of primaries in Nevada and Delaware. In other words, high-stakes events focus the collective mind.
Suppose, however, a political party went insane enough to nominate Donald Trump or Herman Cain. It would receive a drubbing so drubulous that it, or its successors, would either take things a lot more seriously the next time around - or not be taken seriously itself.
No offense to George Stanley McGovern - a much more sensible and credible national figure in '72 than Cain or Trump have ever been or will be - but, for better or worse, the Dems after '72 sought to avoid every controllable aspect of their McGovern unpleasantness, and even the Rs added lessons to their own post-Goldwater re-assessments.
I'm not arguing in favor of our current system, nor against it - I'm arguing that the issue doesn't matter very much. By the time we get around to making significant adjustments in our political system, they are more likely to be reflections or validations of more fundamental changes that have taken place elsewhere.
Is there any reason this logic doesn't extend to the general election? If the Constitution didn't forbid it would a sequential general help us get more "even" results?
ReplyDeleteThis is also an argument for holding the actual election sequentially in each state.
ReplyDeleteBut where the argument really fails is that it doesn't define the problem. Why is it a bad thing if a party is "stuck" with a Gingrich, and who is it bad for? I think the real issue is that the current process favours (in Edelman's terms) insiders and a national primary would favour outsiders. Professor Bernstein is strongly pro-insider. End of.
I have to agree with Anonymous here. Some sort of tacit pro-insider, pro-establishment, pro-moderate normative stance is the only basis for Jonathan's preference here. Or else, Jonathan, you've already pre-emptively decided that the GOP's essence is Mitt Romney-ism, not Gingrich-ism or Perry-ism. That really doesn't seem clear to me; we don't know what are bubbles yet.
ReplyDeleteAnd, for example, you scoff that the 2010 GOP primaries in Nevada and Delaware were instances in which the GOP didn't get the candidates that it wanted. Yes, those candidates didn't win in the end, but it actually seemed pretty clear that they clearly reflected and represented where those state parties and their supporters wanted the state parties to go.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I feel like your normative commitments or your objective criteria for what constitutes a preferable process need to be more explicitly laid out.
Or perhaps another thought or way of putting this is that I'm sensing that your model of properly functioning party nomination processes has trouble accounting for how a party's ideological committments and worldview can legitimately radicalize and transform.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to address this stuff soon, in either a comment or a post. Short version: no bias here towards moderates, but a bias in favor of party actors (which includes activists) choosing. I don't think insider/outsider and establishment/not are useful distinctions, usually.
ReplyDelete@Jonathan
ReplyDeleteGreat. Thanks. I know your rough positions on the problematic insider/outsider and establishment conceptualizations from posts/articles in the past year or so. That's partly why I was confused (or maybe confusing myself) in trying to understand this post's reasoning. Your brief reply here may already go some way toward better defining the issue. You have a preference in favor of privileging party actors, but that also leaves us with sorting out which groups of party actors should have the most influence -- and whether it's 'legitimate' (may not be the right word) for that to change drastically. Maybe really significant groups of party activists and party media/publicists, with significant groups of ordinary followers, are in the midst of recasting the party-actor structure of the GOP?
The big problem with sequential primaries is Iowa and New Hampshire getting to go first. I actually tend to agree with Jonathan that in reality, party insiders tend to have control over the process anyway. But nonetheless, the result of Iowa and NH going first is way too much parochialism towards their politics among our presidential candidates. (For instance, humongous subsidies for corn which are bad on all sorts of levels.)
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't mind sequential primaries if we rotated who got to go first. But with Iowa and NH going first, I would prefer a national primary. Yes, that would make bubble candidates more possible, but at least the rest of the country wouldn't have to subsidize a bunch of Iowa corporate farm interests on the dole.
PF,
ReplyDeleteYes, that's how I think about it. What I think is that stable rules and practices allow party actors to sort out for themselves who gets the most influence. Rotating the first states risks upending that -- that's what I mean by transaction costs, the costs to all types of party actors to learn the incentives and rewards in a different system.
Granted, some of that happens in the current system, given that things leap about so much. And of course changes beyond the rules & procedures destabilize things, too, such as technological changes. Also, new party actors can themselves change things.
I think it's extremely important that the system be open, and that parties be permeable, to new people. Can't stress that enough. OTOH, that doesn't mean that new people should necessarily win!
But, yeah, I'm mostly concerned with finding ways for party actors -- again, including new ones -- to coordinate and compete over nominations than I am in the role of just-plain-voters. Again, for nominations.
Dilan,
ReplyDeleteMeh. All sorts of states get advantages in some part of the system. That Iowa, NH, and SC get advantages in nomination politics just doesn't seem like a big deal to me, just as it doesn't seem like a big deal that OH/FL and others currently get advantages from the Electoral College, and that small states get an advantage in the Senate.
Meh. All sorts of states get advantages in some part of the system. That Iowa, NH, and SC get advantages in nomination politics just doesn't seem like a big deal to me, just as it doesn't seem like a big deal that OH/FL and others currently get advantages from the Electoral College, and that small states get an advantage in the Senate.
ReplyDeleteActually, I think all those things are big deals. We can't do anything about the Senate, but the small-state bias in the Electoral College is awful and basically results in New York and California having to both subsidize and subordinate their political opinions to small state conservatives.
The great advantage of a big non-sequential national process is that small groups of people don't get their interests catered to. No more Cuba policy dictated by Miami refugees, no more Iowa ethanol subsidies, no more gigantic transfer payments from big states to Southern backwaters.
And that really is a huge advantage. Indeed, just about every other country with a Presidential (non-parliamentary) system does it that way.
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ReplyDelete