Primary Election season has a scheduling problem... Let's fix it.

 The 2024 New Hampshire Primary provides a great opportunity to address another idea for fixing American Politics – the electoral calendar.  In case you missed the news, President Biden was not on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary and only won thanks to a massive, independent, write-in campaign.  The basics facts of the matter point to a couple of little kids whining about not getting their way.

Here’s the brief summary of the Democratic in-fighting over the electoral schedule.  New Hampshire has a state law that declares they have to be the first primary on the calendar.  The national DNC made changes to the calendar with the first primary being South Carolina and New Hampshire was moved to share the primary data with Nevada (effectively second).  New Hampshire got their pride hurt and stuck to their guns by scheduling their primary first anyways and the DNC has basically ignored the state and declared the primary “meaningless.”  To be fair, the DNC isn’t wrong.  New Hampshire’s delegates make up less than 1% of the total delegates that will meet later this year at the Democratic National Convention.  And that’s assuming the DNC doesn’t penalize New Hampshire for bucking the party.

This is the quintessential “making a mountain out of a molehill.”  New Hampshire feels overlooked and being first is their only way to be relevant (so they think).  So they’ll cling to that even if it incurs penalties from the party and makes their delegation even more irrelevant than they already are.  The DNC’s move to start in South Carolina, a state with a much more diverse population, makes a lot of sense if you want to claim to be the party that best represents people of color.  One could also claim that the DNC is behaving the same way as New Hampshire and argue that we all know NH isn’t all that important so just let them have their day in the spotlight and move on.  Overall, it’s two sides being rather petty and we all know it.

The other issue is that more states have started to realize the importance of not being last (Indiana not among them) and they are starting to clamor for earlier primaries so that they have more impact on the presidential nominees.  They aren’t wrong.  By the time Indiana gets around to voting on May 7^th, there won’t be anything left to decide in practical terms.  Even in a year like 2016, where no incumbent is running, the nominee is practically wrapped up before we Hoosiers go to the polls.  Other states know this and don’t want their voters left behind.

So how do we solve this?  Legislate a fundamental change to the primary calendar and establish a single Primary Election Day with the same respect as the General Election in November.  Now I know people are going to argue that there isn’t enough time to campaign in all 50 states at once, that the staggered primaries allow candidates to focus on smaller groups of states.  I don’t think that argument holds much water.  Conventions are held in late summer and then it’s only a few short months until the general election.  Setting a national primary election in May should give candidates plenty of time to campaign in each state and use surrogates to help shore up support as primary election day draws near.

The nation could easily hold Primary Election Day on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in May (let’s keep the same arcane scheduling logic because, why not).  Every state would get an equal opportunity to voice their opinion on the nominee.  Parties could then schedule their conventions for late July or early August as usual.  Frankly, this is much more democratic.  Too often, we see multiple candidates drop out after failing to win in just a handful of primaries.  Practically all of Trump’s opponents have dropped out and only two states has voted so far.  We would still see some winnowing of the candidates before May as support/polling/fundraising help clarify the picture, but we’d likely get to May with 3-4 candidates still running.  Combine a single primary with ranked choice voting and we would definitely get a much better sense of who the entire country feels should be the nominee for each party.