The bill now means CA's presidential primary will be on March 3, 2020… could be right behind the first states.
— John Myers (@johnmyers) September 27, 2017
We’re at least 25 years past the point where Iowa’s welfare farmers and New Hampshire’s social parasites had anything useful to say about choosing America’s next president:
… Gov. Jerry Brown gave his stamp of approval Wednesday to a measure jumping California’s primary up to the beginning of March, three months earlier than its contest in 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had already captured the major parties’ nominations.
“The Golden State will no longer be relegated to last place in the presidential nominating process,” Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. “Candidates will not be able to ignore the largest, most diverse state in the nation as they seek our country’s highest office”…
California, home to 11 media markets, is an expensive state to campaign in, potentially giving well-funded candidates an edge.
Democratic leaders said the bill gives California the spotlight it deserves given its record of pushing the national conversation around immigration and other issues.
“With all due respect to our brothers and sisters in Iowa and New Hampshire, California is the beating heart of the national resistance to Trump,” Eric Bauman, chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in a statement. “When it comes to deciding the Democratic nominee, our voices need to be heard early in the process.”
Iowa and New Hampshire will still have their early say.
The measure puts the state’s primary on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March, often known as “Super Tuesday,” when as many as a dozen states hold nominating contests. It will still fall after the earliest caucuses and primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina…
And if I had any doubts, the snotty-faced wails of America’s Worst ‘Progressives’ would salve them:
The importance of IA & NH is that they force candidates to actually meet voters & be vetted. Change the schedule & voters will lose.
— James J. Zogby (@jjz1600) September 28, 2017
Hey Twitter, give @jjz1600 one of test accounts allowing more than 140 characters so he can say what he really means: "White voter states." https://t.co/X4jf5WPznX
— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) September 28, 2017
This is dangerous for democracy. Stacking primaries & moving up state w/expensive media market aids the richest only https://t.co/pAEgl8ovri
— Nomiki Konst ??? (@NomikiKonst) September 28, 2017
Bernie outspent Hillary. https://t.co/shOSJ71aDz
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) September 28, 2017
Corner Stone
Fuck all those hog castrating idiots in Iowa.
Corner Stone
That was a good segment on MSNBC’s LO’D. Joy Reid got righteous and Tim O’Brien picked it up and put it down.
Baud
Somewhat on topic, someone is trying to broker a compromise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-democratic-partys-nomination-process-isnt-democratic-enough/2017/09/25/a56dc232-9f06-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=.3a09a21345ed
I just hope we don’t promote caucuses. They’re so undemocratic.
Elizabelle
I’d pull out of Iowa, if I were Dems. Let it go; caucuses are not representative. WRT it being how Obama got his start: he would have been just fine in many venues.
Zogby is on drugs.
Good on California. And please spotlight: they want to insist that presidential candidates release their tax returns.
No more Trumps. Or Bernies.
Corner Stone
Isn’t Chris Sununu the current Gov of NH?
Michael G
“Change the schedule & voters will lose”
So the current outcome is what winning looks like?
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: That looks to be what Moulistas has been saying all along (and I agree completely). Shame that the author even has to point out that the primary wasn’t rigged.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: I can live with that. I prefer closed primaries, but I loathe caucuses. Don’t care that much about supers. They’ve never really mattered.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Anyone who questions the legitimacy of the primary is instantly discredited in my book. No seat at the table.
Gin & Tonic
@Corner Stone: Yes.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Markos once proposed a mail in system. I thought it intriguing but probably logistically difficult.
? Martin
Let’s be perfectly clear here. We’re not moving the primary forward for this reason. We were a super Tuesday state until we decided we’d rather not pay for the privilege of being an early state (late primaries are cheaper to run). The only reason we moved it forward is so that Kamala Harris can get a jump on the primary field with an early big win. Take it how you want to, this is a move by Democrats to boost their chances. Generally I don’t care for the gaming of the primary calendar.
Have a computer apply the 4-color theorem to the map with a constraint that the 48 contiguous must have 12 of each color. Each color gets a different consecutive Tuesday. Put Alaska and Hawaii in the group with the lowest population. No two adjoining states would have the same primary day, the states would have to be geographically diverse, we’d have this over in a month. Done.
PhoenixRising
Fuck Iowa and the ethanol industry. Fuck also New Hampshire. Fuck all these half assed states with more rocks/cows/cornfields than people. The kind of rubes who live there want to destroy this country if it can’t be run according to their prejudices.
California up front, IL and NY next, then…Texas! Let’s have the counties where humans live close to each other choose our major party candidates.
Baud
@? Martin: Hard to get states to move that quickly. And that doesn’t solve the big money problem, if you consider that a legitimate concern.
PhoenixRising
The primary schedule is the only way rural America is over-represented in our politics that we don’t need a new Constitution to cure. Therefore it’s the right way right now.
Ksmiami
Because rt now America is being run by a tyrannical minority full of dumb ppl. Time to tip the scales the other way- sorry pig fuckers
Mike J
CA media costs 1000x what IA media costs. If you like candidates like Obama or Sanders, having a big state first is bad, bad, news.
Jeffro
@Baud:
They’re kind of the Electoral College of the primaries, in a way: they just ratify whatever has already been voted/decided upon, without regard to anything else. Would be nice to get rid of both.
Baud
@Mike J: March isn’t going first.
? Martin
@Mike J: $40M was spent just in Iowa in 2008. Just because Iowa is cheap doesn’t mean they don’t spend there. Instead, they get 5-10 robocalls and a comparable number of mailers every day. It’s at least an order of magnitude more spending than necessary and passed the diminishing returns point ages ago. A more expensive state isn’t going to change a damn thing.
Fair Economist
@Mike J:
We are way past the point where a candidate can get started by winning Iowa on a shoestring. Both Obama and Sanders were bringing in huge sums before Iowa.
Edit: CA is so big and expensive money doesn’t go far. This is really going to benefit those who can start a grassroots movement, which I think is largely a good thing.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
This hurts California because it will get buried under the larger Super Tuesday narrative.
In 2008 Obama lost Cali by 8 pts but because he won the majority of states and delegates on Super Tuesday he was able to douse any media narrative Hillary could have achieved had she won the state as a stand alone.
Also too, cuz of proportional representation in the distribution of delgates, you can lose a big state like Cali by 8 pts without it damaging the overall delegate counts.
PhoenixRising
@Mike J: Cost of TV has never mattered less.
Once we pry the levers of enforcement out of the hands of people who benefited from Russian & domestic investments in social channels, we’ll find out exactly how worthless Tad Devine’s spending was.
What we can be sure of is that different kinds of experts will partner with lesser known politicians if media strategy dudes can’t get really, really rich at the expense of small donors. And why is that bad?
Feebog
As a Californian, I like this. And if it benefits KH, nothing wrong with that.
Baud
Plus, California will be the most liberal of the early states. Isn’t that the group we would like our candidates to focus on?
efgoldman
@? Martin:
But then we wouldn’t have 8563976495495456 committees and sub-committees so we can argue over which campaign assigned the most important membership.
Democrats learned everything we need to know from Saturday Talmud study.
Amaranthine RBG
Ugh – probably confers an advantage on California vomits like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom.
We are well and truly fucked.
Citizen Alan
@Amaranthine RBG:
And another dogshit person gets pie’d.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: liberal? Yeah right. Hillary won here in 2016.
//
Corner Stone
@Amaranthine RBG: I don’t normally go this way, but – if you’re agin it, then it makes some sense to me to find out if I should be fore it.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, Hillary was the most liberal candidate.
FlipYrWhig
Someone once had an idea that I rather liked: move Delaware way up in the primary calendar. Small state but near major media and unlike IA and NH has actual black people in it.
We could also have an early Hawaii primary. It IS the fucking WINTER when the whole thing gets started.
FlipYrWhig
@Baud: ONE THINGS FOR SURE WE NEED MORE INPUT FROM ME
dmsilev
@? Martin: I think a month is too fast. My preferred approach would be similar to yours except with more blocks (say 8 instead of 4) with two per month. I would aim for having as close to the same number of people (and hence delegates, roughly) in each block. And yes, that’d mean California gets one block by itself. That would give us four months, somewhat shorter than the ~6 we had last year, but at a much smoother pace.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: I used the sarcasm marks and everything.
ETA let’s not forget that California also has that new bill saying you have to release tax returns to be on a primary ballot.
efgoldman
@Fair Economist:
Whichever states run their primaries whenever, they need to be restricted to actual DEMOCRATIC candidates.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: sry
Chyron HR
@? Martin:
If you consider Democrats to be the opposition party, you don’t actually have any business participating in the Democratic primary in the first place.
Corner Stone
@dmsilev:
You have to remember that Martin is essentially a technocrat.
BBA
@? Martin: Why not just hold the primaries nationwide on one day, like general elections?
smintheus
The NH hate is bizarre. WTF is “social parasites” supposed to mean?
Even more bizarre, the idea that it’s a win for democracy to move a hideously expensive media-market race like California earlier. Or for that matter, the idea that California moved its primary earlier out of concern for anything other than promoting KH.
Another Scott
@dmsilev: I like something like that, too.
I’m not a fan of someone “coming out of nowhere” and winning the big prize. The Presidency is too important. Obama had to prove himself over a very long time. It’s expensive, and inefficient, but it does show how a person would behave when things go wrong, in the face of unfair but newsworthy (using today’s definition of “newsworthy”) attacks, who s/he associates with, etc.
I used to see some value in the “retail politics/inexpensive media markets” arguments. But those have been demolished by the smart people in this thread. But even if you still believe they hold, there’s nothing to prevent that kind of retail politicking in California. It might just take longer, and more than one cycle but the cost argument doesn’t hold any more. If it does take more than one election cycle for a candidate to catch fire, that’s fine, IMO. We’re too diverse a country these days to have to pander almost exclusively to a couple of 95+% white, rural, states and have them serve as gatekeepers on who our President will be.
Any system can be gamed, and the Presidency is so important that people will try to game it. We just have to be smart about making changes rather than accept that any change will make things worse.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who doesn’t yet have a specific opinion about Kamala or Kirsten, but who does like the symbolism of a strong Democratic woman being #46.)
efgoldman
@smintheus:
96% white. Not typical of either Dems nationwide or the nationwide electorate.
Major Major Major Major
@smintheus:
Yeah, screw the country’s most populous state and the grower of half its food! What did they ever do for democracy or America.
smintheus
@efgoldman: That’s no reason to hate on NH Democrats, who generally are pretty serious about sussing out the candidates carefully. Anyway, how are they “social parasites”?! That’s beyond any rationality.
I defy you to name a single state that is typical of the nationwide electorate.
smintheus
@Major Major Major Major: You mean besides giving us Nixon and Reagan?
Major Major Major Major
@smintheus: straying a little off topic from whether letting the most populous state have an opportunity to assert itself at a time that will count is or is not good for democracy.
Amaranthine RBG
@Corner Stone:
Funny you should say that. There was some dingus this pm posting about pie-ing me.
Then later he asked “Was Julia Louis Dreyfus on Seinfeld or something? I tried to watch an episode once but found it revulsive.”
? Martin
@BBA: That’d be my preference. The staging over time means that every state is gamed in the overall strategy. The objection to Iowa and NH is that they clear out half the field before the first black person gets to vote. Running everyone simultaneously doesn’t really allow some geography to dictate what some other geography gets to vote on.
smintheus
@Major Major Major Major: Speaking of straying off topic, how in the world did you construe what I said, and what you yourself quoted, as either
or
?
Corner Stone
@Amaranthine RBG: I am not sure what that has to do with me, exactly. But I am open to figuring out a way to break the ridiculous lock of small, all white, states having so much sway in a Democratic primary process. Most solid candidates have a pretty good bank account before the voting starts, and even if they do not there are several opportunites to get in front of voters. I have yet to understand what makes Iowa voters “knowledgeable” or more genuine than any other state. They seem like a bunch of prima donnas demanding their due.
Major Major Major Major
@smintheus: you said “Even more bizarre, the idea that it’s a win for democracy to move a hideously expensive media-market race like California earlier. Or for that matter, the idea that California moved its primary earlier out of concern for anything other than promoting KH.” I was providing an example of why it would be “a win for democracy”.
? Martin
@Major Major Major Major: ⅓ of the nations abortion clinics, ⅓ of the nation’s immigrants. Hell, LA county has more immigrants than Iowa has people. The clear leader in environmental action, clean energy and gun control. Leader in voting rights and health care in general (strongest Obamacare market by far). We’re considering banning the sale of gasoline vehicles. What would we know about liberalism. Oh, yeah, only Hawaii gave Clinton a bigger % win in 2016 than California, which makes CA at D+30.1 more liberal than MA at D+27.2.
J R in WV
Haven’t read the thread comments, but do I recall correctly that CA is now requiring the release of the tax returns for ballot access? Going earlier AND requiring released tax returns is all a very good thing for the west coast liberals to do for the rest of us.
Thanx!!
Gretchen
@J R in WV: That would have prevented Trump, and possibly Sanders. He didn’t want to release his tax returns and never got any pushback for it.
socraticsilence
My only real objection is that it could basically destroy insurgent candidates; forget Bernie- I feel like this probably would have kept Obama from winning in 2008 and Clinton in 1992.
You may or may not agree that’s a good thing and I agree that NH amd Iowa shouldn’t always be first but California might be too big to go third.
Anne Laurie
@smintheus:
Not if you live next door to NH. The largest industry in NH, officially, is tourism; that’s probably outweighed by the dependence of its citizens on the jobs, schools, hospitals & other resources of Massachusetts. Not that they realize they’re parasites… they think it’s just “smart business” to get their salaries, education, health care, etc. from ‘Taxachusetts’ while relying on property taxes and the toll roads to support what little in-state infrastructure doesn’t offend their libertarian propensities.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Like they aren’t spending the money now?
I like Martin’s idea. We run this out for months and what does it get us, a beauty pageant with very few beauties in it. We all are supposed to be electing a leader, instead we get regurgitated bullshit for months. I think a lot of people don’t care because the way it works now, doesn’t. Other countries have a month or two, it’s insane the way we waste time and huge amounts of money, not because of the cost but because of the time the broken process takes.
WaterGirl
@Corner Stone: Iowa did give us Barack Obama in 2008.
Corner Stone
@WaterGirl: No it didn’t.
Eljai
@socraticsilence: In 2008, California held its primary in February and Hillary won, but it wasn’t enough to stop Obama from getting the required delegates 2-3 months later. I can’t remember how many states had already held their primaries by the time California voted that year.
Anne Laurie
@WaterGirl:
Winning Iowa certainly proved that Barack Obama was a once-in-a-generation politician. But I think he could’ve proved that just as well by winning a whole bunch of larger, more diverse, far more representative state primaries — Iowa needed him more than he needed Iowa.
Ruckus
@socraticsilence:
So you like land and whites only getting a head start on the country?
We are all important there really should be either one day or over a short time. The primaries could all take place in a month with rotating primaries in each national election to insure that no one state has a jump on anyone else or a lottery draw for position. The idea that a state with almost 15% of the population of the country goes last or almost last is as bullshit as NH or IA go first.
joel hanes
@Corner Stone:
Why, thank you. (expatriate Iowan, and moving back sometime soon)
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
Iowa did give us Barack Obama in 2008.
Iowa gave you 31 years of Tom Harkin in the Senate, and before that, 10 years of Tom Harkin in the House.
He was a liberal’s liberal, and widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s top
defense politicspolicy wonks.WaterGirl
@Corner Stone: I believe Barack himself said that if they haven’t won Iowa that probably would’ve been the end . That’s what led me to make the statement that I did. Do you disagree with this statement or with the conclusion I drew ?
? Martin
@J R in WV: That bill hasn’t been signed yet. Jerry Brown isn’t exactly a rubber-stamp Democrat and it can be hard to predict what he will and won’t sign.
? Martin
The difference between this and Iowa in 2008 is that everyone expects Harris is running in 2020. CA will turn out huge for her and we’ll carry that across the country. She won’t need to spend a dime in this state, and all of her volunteers will be canvassing every other state but this one. I myself may make the trip to Iowa…
gorram
@Mike J: Media saturation is real, however, and no where is it more tangibly cross-platform and cross-narrative than California. Beyond local factors, there’s also a reason social media was so powerful in 2016 – because very, very limited portions of even primary voters a) regularly watch “normal” media anymore b) are uncritical of what they see there.
Besides, a massive chunk of the state’s population is concentrated in LA and the Bay Area. A small, concentrated ground game would be vastly more effective than a media blitz. Emphasizing a state with those sorts of conditions would likely actually work against a media-based campaign, especially since so much of the population is concentrated in high-cost media markets. In-person work would be vastly more effectively, whether you have a shoestring budget or are just saving up for another primary.
Haroldo
@Anne Laurie: What she said. A few times over.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, by all means, won’t anyone think of the white rural voters whose votes are what,. only 10 or is it twenty times worth more than an urban voters?
smintheus
@Anne Laurie: I used to live in NH and know it quite well. Know MA quite well too, and your caricature of both is not credible, particularly this:
Are you describing the fact that a lot of massholes decided to move to Nashua as the fault of NH? They’re not exactly wanted or welcome. A lot of massholes have also moved to RI, and when they’re not moving in permanently they’re flooding RI’s beaches; they’re not welcome there either, but again their existence is not RI’s fault.
smintheus
@Major Major Major Major: You didn’t justify either of your responses to my comment. It’s not a “win” just because one particular state moves up the ladder. The nature of extended primaries is that some states are going to come before other states, duh.
The Lodger
@FlipYrWhig: Delaware doesn’t have its own TV markets though. 95 percent of the TV budget would be viewed in PA, MD and NJ.