Just When You Thought It Was Over…

And now for the 1996 elections. Yes, believe it or not, the race for the presidency is about to push itself in your face, if not tomorrow at least a lot earlier than it ever has before. In a little over a year you are going to be amazed to see presidential candidates vying for space with Santa Claus in the tinseled aisles of shopping centers.

It’s not just that prospective candidates for president already are putting their campaign or-ganizations together. We’re used to that. What is brand new is a radically revised presidential primary schedule resulting from a political arms race that has been conducted among the states in recent years. To achieve more influence on candidate selection than somebody else, one state after another has moved its primary forward in the
election season calendar. In 1996 we are going to suffer the cumulative consequences: an earlier primary season and a painfully elongated final election drive.

Whereas, not long ago, the first presidential primary campaign was held in New Hampshire in March and then used to lead in a simple, elegant progression to April in Wisconsin, May in Oregon and June in California, we now have approaching us a mad bunching of primaries and caucuses in two late winter months. New Hampshire’s primary, for example, will move forward to February. Giant California and New York are moving to March, where they will join such a large cluster of states that roughly 80 percent of delegate decisions will have been made before the spring thaw in Wisconsin.

The public’s participation in this political orgy probably will be intense but brief, seriously beginning after New Year’s hangover and ending about April Fool’s Day. By that time we should know the identity of both parties’ nominees.

The chance for voters to get to know candidates and ponder their claims will be gone. Decisions will be pressured, and buyers’ remorse is inevitable. Most primaries now lock in at least first-ballot choices of delegates, so if it turns out that the anointed winners were too hastily selected, or that they don’t wear well, or that formerly unnoticed skeletons start wobbling out of the closet, there will be no remedies.

Once the likely nominees are known, the public will have to bear up under what effectively will become a six-month-long final election campaign. Yet the three-month marathons that follow the late summer conventions, and with which we are familiar, already are a torture unparalleled in the civilized world.

There is no knowing, furthermore, how much this elongated process will cost the candidates, the parties and the taxpayers. In what promises to be a short, wild spending spree in February and March, it is hard to see how any candidate without a big lead or a personal fortune behind him can hope to explain his case. And meanwhile, in Congress, there will be little to keep the legislative process, which now usually stiffens into unredeemed partisanship by August, from becoming paralyzed as early as April.

This strange scenario into which the republic is tumbling is so counter to what any sane person—politician or voter-might consciously de sign that it would be funny if we all didn’t have to live with it. The added incentive to gridlock and the further demoralization of the electorate that it will encourage are hardly the medicine our system needs. The new campaign calendar is sure to lead to still more attacks on representative democracy and upon everybody in politics.

Several solutions are available, though all of them at first seem improbable. Just as no one seems to have seen this new election order developing, it is unlikely that the electorate will demand change until after it has experienced the strain and boredom ahead.

One partial answer, in any case, would be to leave the new schedule alone, despite its flaws, but change the date when the president takes office, setting it also forward-say, to July—and holding the final election in the balmy days of May. That still would leave us with a primary season that was too early, but at least it would spare us from a final campaign that was too long. (It also would give us an inauguration in good weather for a change.) The election date, last set in 1877, could be changed by law, while the change of inauguration date, last moved in 1933, would require a constitutional amendment.

Congress, alternatively, might call upon the states to move all their primaries back two months, and try to encourage this recommendation by prohibiting presidential candidates from receiving federal matching funds until at least March of the election year.

Yet again, the two major political parties might decide to cooperate in meeting this problem, since they are both going to be hurt by it. Early next year they would tell the states’ legislatures that they would refuse to seat any national delegates selected before, say, late March of 1996, and urge the states to set their primaries back accordingly. This again would tend to push the process into something like its old channels.

The parties also could decide to designate in advance of the primaries a third share of each state’s delegates from the parties’ elected officials and state party officers. The Democrats already embrace this principle, though only to a modest degree. If the states refused to accept this prior designation, the parties could add national delegates from among local and state party and elected officials. Designation of such delegates in advance of primaries would ensure that each party’s continuing leadership would be represented at national conventions. It also would provide potential flexibility in choosing nominees at the conventions; and it would restore interest, if not suspense, since the elected officials and party officials who were delegates could retain their neutrality long enough to adjust to late-breaking events. This actually would be a service to primary voters, who now are going to be rushed into early— and perhaps premature decisions. They would have someone to represent the judgment that they might have made if they had been allowed time to reflect.

As is, the presidential election process of 1996 is likely to produce an electorate that will make the angry voters of 1994 seem, in comparison, like purring political pets.