Reply #8: Disagree [View All]

[mohc]

Among the downsides:
It would pretty much eliminate the chances of a truly insurgent candidate. One would have to either raise an enormous amount of money to flood the markets with ads or already have a high name recognition. Especially in the case of this year, it would reduce the amount of attention given to the process. We could not simply tell the media we are having a single primary day with a 4 month season leading up to it and expect them to cover it. They would wait until the week before to cover the race, and basically that week would decide who wins. All the time up until then would simply be setting up the starting positions in the race. Although IA and NH might not be the best gauges to use, they do allow for "retail" politics, and I do believe it is good that candidates have to meet the people up close at some point in the election.

The main benefit that a national primary would have is that it reduces regional biases and the momentum built upon them. Instead of making all the primaries on the same day, we should keep the basic structure of the current system but address those two issues. Momentum is a problem because the elections are so close together, and regional bias is a problem because the dates of the primaries are arbitrary. What I believe we should do is spread the primaries out by having only one date a month, say the second Tuesday of the month from January until June (6 dates). And to eliminate regional bias, states should be put into 6 groups of 8 or 9 states each that balance things out, and they can be rotated around from year to year. If IA and NH throw a hissy fit, we could put them alone in Jan and just rotate the 5 other groups.