Its the end of August 2007 and we are smack dab in the middle of the Presidential election season… for an election that is well over a year away. Further, the Primary system is accelerating into a state of meltdown as the political elites of each state have finally come to the conclusion that it is their duty to maximize the impact of the people that elected them, the citizens of their own state.  Why finally? Because all of this was written and inevitable when the election laws were changed in the various States back in the 1960’s-1970’s in an attempt to ‘clean up politics’ by taking the nomination process for elected politicians out of the ’smoky back rooms’ and giving the choice directly to the voting public. It was the beginning of the misguided and disastrous campaign reform efforts that have now resulted in massive free speech intrusions by Federal bureaucrats which plainly don’t work and never can if we retain the least bit of our Free Speech Rights. There are many unintended and damaging consequences of these attempts at reform, we’ll focus here on the one poking up at the moment.  Betsy Newmark identified the precise symptom that lead to this point, The demise of party power:

National conventions have degenerated into four-day celebrations for each party and an opportunity to get some prime time TV coverage. The one thing they haven’t been is the method for choosing a candidate. Since the rise of the primary system in the 1960s, the conventions have lost their traditional role. And now, even the pretense that conventions choose the nominee is being cast aside. As states ignore the Democratic Party’s rules about when they should hold their convention and schedule primaries earlier and earlier, the DNC has retaliated by saying they’ll take away Florida’s convention votes. Now, Michigan is also planning to leapfrog the DNC’s schedule and will probably face the same penalty.

The primary system originally worked and was crafted in the schedule it was because the national political parties had the power to make it work.  Some history and civics is necessary here.

Legally speaking there is no such thing as a ‘national party’ with any sort of power over anything.  The ‘DNC’ and ‘RNC’ are voluntary associations of elected officials in the House of Representatives to help each other get re-elected and to help elect more like minded people to that particular chamber.  There’s another set for the Senate that does the same thing for each party’s officials in the Senate.  That’s it, finito.  There is no such thing, anywhere, as any sort of organization that actually exists as a central parent organization that can tell the State parties what to do.

Political parties came about from our right of freedom of ‘association and assembly’ as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.  As technically fully sovereign political entities, each State makes its own election laws and enforces them.  All politics truly is local.  In each State like minded people get together and register a political affiliation by the local laws of that State in order to coordinate and do the things that political party’s do.  Technically speaking political party’s don’t have to submit to the will of ANYONE other than themselves in terms of arranging meetings or activities, not their local State and most certainly not the Federal Government, because of our right of Assembly and Association.  Of course if a political party wants to have its nomination procedure whenever it dang well pleases without consideration for the State government’s desires in running elections then it would have to pay for its own activities…. which is just way too expensive so they just don’t.  But they could.  There’s lots of things they could do, and that’s where we arrive at the current developing mess.  Nobody, absolutely NOBODY, can tell a State political party when to vote, or nominate, whenever or however they wish to do so.  They can schedule their elections whenever they please to choose.

And now we are seeing that.  Back in the days when the State party’s officials selected people to run for office and go to nominating conventions the national cooperative conglomerations that are what people think of as the National party’s had a lot of power.  The parties raised the money, picked the candidates, and ran the campaigns.  Politics was (and still is at higher levels) the business of personal relationships.  It was a club of people who knew each other or at least of each other.  Nobody wanted to get kicked out of the club, a career ending event.  The national party, as such, had influence because of the vast sums of cash floating around among the players on the national political stage.  State politicians did some serious politicking and maneuvering in the negotiations setting the election schedule but abided by the result of the final agreement because if they didn’t their word wasn’t worth anything and nobody would deal with them anymore.  Everyone in the club would know.

In many ways politics is still like this.  Politics is a team sport and loyalty is the most prized virtue in it.  Very few politicians want to be seen among their colleagues as not being a team player.  So even though the primary political forces that crafted the political compromises which created the National Primary schedule vanished 30-40 years ago the system limped along because nobody wanted to upset the cart too much.  There wasn’t a clear payoff to politicians for doing so, while at the same time there was a clear personal political cost to be paid by politicians advocating ‘reckless’ changes.  Reckless because those in the know are aware that there is no longer any way to effectively coordinate and set agreements for the timing of the national primary system.  Each State’s political parties are too selfish and have too little centralizing counterbalancing pressure because of campaign finance reforms to create the conditions for compromise.  So if the system broke everyone knew there wasn’t any real way to fix it in the current system.  Which is why they just let it ride as the system got more and more out of alignment with changing demographics and political realities.  And while parties aren’t the bosses of candidates any more it is the rare politician who doesn’t want the help of his fellow party members to get and stay elected.  So a combination of fear and uncertainty kept the system more or less the same through 40 years of neglect and stasis.

That is until the voters in various states woke up and started pressuring their State politicians to do something about the growing imbalances in the progressively dysfunctional nomination system.  After decades of experiencing their votes effectively having zero influence on the nomination process the problems with the system became common knowledge and voters demanded that something be done about it.  Loudly.  Repeatedly.  It became a campaign issue.  People got upset.  These forces changed the political equation for politicians.  The strong desires of their voters are much more important than vague worries about the abstract system of elections or pressure from their political party.  So now they are doing what their voters want, not what the political elite wants, as was the intention of the campaign and elections reforms all those years ago.

That is what is happening now.  It was a long time coming, but given the change in interests created by the reforms it was only a matter of time.  There’s no legal way to stop them from outside the States making the changes.  The Federal government has no right to regulate voluntary political party gatherings and activities, and any attempts to do so will go straight to the Supreme Court and almost certainly get immediately struck down given recent rulings by the Court on such matters.  The results of moving so far forward in the election cycle are likely to reward the states that do it, by giving more impact to the choice of the voters of that State on the nomination process, and thus the politicians in those States that made the change will be rewarded by their voters.  Threats by the national organizing committees are not likely to have much impact for the reasons stated in Betsy’s excellent post on the issue that was quoted above.  So there’s no reason to think they will change voluntarily.

There’s no sign that this trend of moving primaries forward will stop or slow down now, and to the contrary now that change has begun the moves are happing with increasing speed and aggressiveness.  There is simply no incentive for any one State to allow itself to be late in the process and thus in practical terms have no voice in choosing the nominees of each party.

The current system is broken, well and truly broken, and it will remain so until there is wide recognition of the fact.  It took 40 years for public recognition of the changed reality to get this far.  We can only hope recognition of the problems and a will to do something about it is a bit faster.