Primary problems

With next year’s Presidential election still a lengthy 21 months away, presidential candidates already seem to be popping out of the ground like zombies in a bad horror film. And what a diverse variety so far! Some of the early Democratic contenders include Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson, all of whom belong to one minority or another. While such diversity is laudable, the Democratic Party must not make the mistake of relying solely on the fact that their candidates are not white males, but that they also have qualities that would make good Presidents.

In order to field a promising candidate for President, the candidate must have firm, obvious, and comprehensive solutions to the pressing issues of the time. Unfortunately, our electoral system is not set up to provide such a candidate. In fact, the chances of such a candidate even getting on the ballot in November is highly unlikely because of the inherent weaknesses in our system of primary elections.

The New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucus are the first of many Presidential primaries that sweep the nation every four years. Yet, despite candidates knowing that many more primaries are to come, most candidates drop out after these first two. Why? Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) has pointed out that neither state is remotely typical of the country as a whole. I have to admit, the fact that these two small states, in effect, get to choose who runs for President year after year still baffles me.

In one of his latest editorials, Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report discussed a better primary system which involved four rounds of primaries, with each round involving larger and larger states. This would mean that the final outcome could not be truly decided and no candidate obviously victorious until the very end, resulting in a someone chosen by the nation, not two states, as the result.

This plan was considered by the Republicans for a while before ultimately being rejected. And as Barone states, who could blame them? With the way recent elections have been decided by the outcomes in individual states, no candidate could afford to alienate New Hampshire or Iowa by removing them from their pedestal as the nation’s Presidential candidate selectors.

With voter turnout at primaries dismally low, much lower than that of real elections, this means that candidate selection is in the hands of even fewer people. The kind of candidate they choose could have dramatic effects on the outcome of the election and policy decisions over the next four years. Even by choosing a weak candidate, they are deciding the outcome of the election in advance by removing any semblance of competition for the opposing party.

It’s about time that the Republicans and Democrats realize that our current primary system has an obvious, glaring defect that has a huge bearing on the outcome of elections, and that it should be transformed to actually represent what it should: the opinion of the entire nation, not two of its states.