It still about 6 months before 14 or so politicians set up their homes away from home in New Hampshire and Iowa in the hope that time spent in those two states will catapult them into being the next President of the United States of America.
And the rumblings of how unfair it is for two small, mostly white, protestant states to have such an unfair advantage in choosing the candidates, have already begun. It feels like the other 48 states are ignored for a year, then after the New Hampshire primaries are over, they are lucky if the candidate shows up in their state for a few days before their primaries.
From my point of view there are simple solutions to this problem and I don't understand why it is so hard to implement. I'll offer my solution below the fold and would love to be enlightened as to why this is such a hard problem to solve.
Easy: Regional Primaries.
I propose arranging the states in 10 groups of 5 geographically close, if not contiguous states. And then having a primary for each group about 3 weeks apart. This would take 30 weeks for all the primaries to complete, which is about the end of July. If the parties insist on having achronistic conventions which don't decide anything, there is the full month of August availble and then presidential campaining can start in earnest after Labor Day.
New Hampshire and Iowa, will reflexively object to no garauntee of being first every election cycle. But I have three suggestions on how to entice them into this system:
1. Have the order of the states be in rotation every election cycle, so that a different region always starts the election cycle. This garauntees that NH and IA will be in the first group of states at least once every 10 cycles.
2. Have IA and NH regions be in the first two starting groups, so they will not suddenly be the last group voting.
3. Give those two states special dispensation to start their primary and caucus early. No more than 12 hours before the rest of their group, so they can occaisionally say they are first in the nation, even though it is a group of states voting.( Did I forget to mention 24 hour polls. That helps with the 12 hour suggestion above, but probably is for a slightly different diary on election day problems )
From my perspective, this system has the best chance of allowing divergent views to surface and maybe a real race between candidates without restricting the choice to the money candidate ( whomever has raised the most money ) or/and the establishment candidate ( whomever is the most liked in Washington D.C. ).
Isn't this simple!!! I think it is an elegant solution.
My Question is why is this so hard to implement????
Here are my suggestions for the state groupings:
a) ME, NH, VT, MA, RI
b) IA, MN, ND, MO, WI
c) NY, CT, NJ, PA, DE
d) NC, SC, VA, WV, MD
e) FL, GA, AL, MS, TN
f) OH, MI, IN, IL, KY
g) NM, TX, LA, OK, AR
h) WY, CO, KS, NE, SD
i) AK, WA, OR, ID, MT
j) CA, NV, UT, AZ, HI