Winner-Take-All Democratic Primaries?

Wow!

Yes, this was an idea that made the rounds at the Democratic Change Commission meeting on Saturday. Commission member Suzi LeVine has an, and I can't stress this enough, awesome inside account of the events of the day. In terms of primary scheduling, she had this to say:

"From the sessions – one big point I took away was that having a single national primary day would not benefit our objectives – but that it’ll be very difficult without incentives to get the states to voluntarily change their dates, spread the map or move to a same day primary. Two ideas raised were: bonus delegates for later states and allow later states to do a winner take all strategy."

Bonus delegates obviously haven't worked. No state has moved back or stayed put as a means of gaining more delegates since Republicans started the practice in 2000. Those moves (or non-moves) have been a function of structural factors; most specifically whether a state traditionally holds its presidential primary concurrently with its primaries for state and local offices. That, very simply, has been a prohibitive factor.

But this winner-take-all idea is an interesting one. For the Democratic Party to even consider this is an acknowledgment of the sense of urgency behind reforming this process in some way, shape or form. The idea of allowing winner-take-all primaries is likely a hollow one though. The whole thing is predicated on there being a close contest coming down the stretch of a presidential nomination race. LeVine rightly points out that we don't know whether 2008 is the "new normal or a complete anomaly," but I strongly suspect it is the latter. And if that is the case and the nomination is wrapped up on Super Tuesday or soon thereafter, then what incentive is that to offer later states what they are going to get anyway: all their delegates going to the one remaining candidate? How is that an incentive?

"Here, move back and we'll make sure that your contest is winner-take-all. That way there will be some interest in your contest ... if there's still a race by that point. Otherwise, the few voters that show up to vote in your primary will vote for the one remaining viable candidate; our nominee."

That doesn't sound like much of an incentive. But let's assume that some nomination race down the road simulates 2008 all over again. In the event that there is another close nomination fight, though, a winner-take-all primary is an attractive incentive for states. That potentially makes a later state or group of later states into kingmakers.

Ah, but there's a catch: the states, in the case of primary states, have to change the primary dates in advance. And how do they know in advance which year's nomintation battle is going to be competitive, so they can begin the legislative process to change the date of the primary. One could argue that states acted in relative short order in 2007 to move their primaries in anticipation of 2008. They did, but that wasn't because the contest seemed like it was going to be close. Hillary Clinton had a sizable lead throughout 2007. States were motivated to move because they didn't want to get left behind in the way they were in 2004 after the Democrats opened their window (period of time in which all non-exempt contests can be held) to allow February contests. To go in March or later seemed like suicide at the time; something for divided state legislatures to quibble over.

So, as interesting as this idea is -- and it is something groundbreaking coming from Democrats -- it is another of those well-intentioned concepts riddled with unintended consequences.

Major hat tip to Matt at DemConWatch for tracking down LeVine's post on this matter.


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DemRulz Liveblog of Democratic Change Commission Meeting

Virginia DNC member Frank Leone is liveblogging the action from the Democratic Change Commission meeting today in Washington. You can follow along at DemRulz and also have a look at the group's agenda (There are some nice graphs in there that I'll pull out and post in a little while.) there as well.

Also, Dan Balz has a story up on Washington Post's page dealing with the 2012 nomination process tinkering that will likely appear in tomorrow's Post (Note the use of the word yesterday in reference to the meeting taking place today.). It is an interesting read. You can check it out here. Importantly, he notes that Elaine Kamarck, in her presentation on superdelegates, indicated that the time was right for their (the superdelegates) elimination.

Now, some graphics on delegate allocation from the meeting's agenda notes (These are from pdfs and that explains the graininess. However, they come to us courtesy of the Democratic National Committee, so let's grant credit where credit is due.)...

1976 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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1980 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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1984 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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1988 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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1992 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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1996 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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2000 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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2004 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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2008 Democratic Delegate Allocation

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So, what do we see here? It isn't that unlike the maps I have in the left sidebar. But instead of being couched in terms of how early the contests are (and those changes over time), these graphs show how a process that had a relatively even distribution of delegates throughout the window period in 1976 shifted to what we witnessed in 2008. Mainly, we see that 60% of the delegates were allocated in the first week of February with no other week breaking the 15% barrier. Of course, those numbers would have been even more lopsided in 2008 if Florida and Michigan had been included in the data. Those states would have pushed the delegates having been allocated by February 6 (the day after Super Tuesday) to over two-thirds and close three-quarters. That, folks, is the impact of frontloading in a nutshell.

For other posts related to the Democratic Change Commission, click here. And here's the progress thus far on the GOP side.


Hat tip to Matt at DemConWatch for the tip on Leone's coverage.


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Is Next in Line a Myth?

...or has FiveThirtyEight's Ed Kilgore taken what he calls an oversimplification and applied a very narrow definition to it as means of mythbusting?

The concept in question -- the myth regarding the GOP selection of presidential nominees based on who is next in line -- certainly is a simplification, but the best theories are parsimonious: simple while being powerfully explanatory or predictive. The best way to disprove any theory is to narrowly define its concepts. All this just seems like a measurement issue to me. If you narrowly define someone's next-in-line status as simply having run before (and done reasonably well), then sure, you'll be able to find instances where that "was trumped" by having been a vice presidential candidate or having name recognition or money or grassroots support.

But this is where I differ with Kilgore. All those other factors are part of this. The theory isn't next-in-line (as I supposed it has sadly been dubbed and poorly described) so much as it is heir apparent; someone who has been there (whether as a vice president, vice presidential candidate or presidential nomination candidate), and has some name recognition, money and grassroots support because of it. And this is how I've approached this concept when I've brought it up in this space in the past; as something more broadly defined.

And I bet you're saying to yourself, "This heir apparent sounds an awful lot like a frontrunner." That's because it is. It's the same thing. And as William Mayer has pointed out time and time again, frontrunners usually win in the post-reform period (the McGovern-Fraser reforms that served as the impetus for the system of presidential nominations our country's two major parties employ). [Yes, there are exceptions to that rule as perhaps you were able to glean from the title to Mayer's article.]

Fine, but what does this have to do with the so-called next-in-line theory? Well, much of this has to do with the choices given voters when the primaries and caucuses begin anew every four years. Kilgore alludes to this in his post, referring to the "psychological assertions about the nature of Republicans as opposed to Democrats." But this next-in-line, or heir apparent or frontrunner or whatever you want to call it theory incorporates (or should) what's happening in the invisible primary period between presidential elections because a lot this has to do with what the party establishment is doing behind the scenes before the first ballot is cast in Iowa. This isn't about voters so much is it is about the rules and/or actions of the parties' elites (see Cohen, et al. -- The Party Decides -- for more on the latter).

The thing that separates Republicans from Democrats in this area is the combination of a more homogeneous base of elites and the winner-take-all rules in the delegate selection events. The Republicans just haven't had as much of a "big tent" issue among the various factions of their party as the Democrats have over the last nearly four decades. Have there been divisions at the elite level around particular candidates vying for any given Republican nomination? Yes, but they have been more muted than on the Democratic side. [Again, there are exceptions. 2008 comes to mind.] But Republican candidates who "have been there" have just been better able to take advantage of their greater number of connections to those elites (and the elites vice versa), their endorsements and the attendant financial windfall. Republican elites simply line up behind those they know, whether that means a consensus behind George W. Bush (that's how the former president fits into this) or a slim plurality for John McCain. There's a relationship there. The candidate knows he or she needs the elite level support to win the nomination and the establishment within the party needs a candidate who can get elected and push the agenda of the party.

So this isn't a question of narrowly defining "next-in-line" so much as it is about how that status works in concert (and overlaps) with other factors (like electability in McCain's case) to make Republican's who are "next-in-line" more likely to emerge as presidential nominees than Democrats in the same situation. That status, though, is the tie that binds the contested nominations of the post-reform era together on the GOP side.

What does that portend for 2012? Both Romney and Huckabee (and even a lagging Palin) have a leg up on others that will contend (or are already quietly contending) for the nomination. All three are logical heirs to the next-in-line label. If, however, the party decides, as it did in 2000, that Romney and Huckabee and Palin are dispensable in the way that Alexander and Forbes and Quayle were, the party is likely to gather around someone who has some institutional strength within the party (Dare I say Haley Barbour? Not without repercussions, I guess.).

As of right now, though, those who are next in line have the best shot at the nomination in 2012.

...unless...


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According to First Read...

*** Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’: Missing those daily superdelegate counts? The speculation about when states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan would hold their primaries/caucuses? Come on, admit it -- you miss it. Well, if you are, you can head over Saturday morning to the first meeting of the DNC’s Democratic Change Commission, which has been tasked with reforming 1) the primary calendar, 2) the number of superdelegates, and 3) the caucus system. Presiding over the meeting will be DNC chair Tim Kaine and commission co-chairs Jim Clyburn and Claire McCaskill, and there isn’t supposed to be any big news. The 37-member commission will listen to a presentation of Democratic Party presidential nominations by Rhodes Cook; a look at the superdelegates by Elaine Kamarck; and an examination of the caucus system by Organizing for America’s Mitch Stewart. This is all in the fact-gathering stage, but ask yourself this: How likely is it that this DNC would dramatically change a system that helped launch the president's campaign? Iowa and South Carolina are VERY safe. As for the superdelegate system, well that’s another story…

As I said earlier in the week, no decisions are going to be made tomorrow, but it is quite another thing to see how much listening the group will be doing tomorrow. That probably isn't the kind of action most people want. My hope? That the DNC posts the presentations as part of their coverage.

UPDATE: Oh, and C-SPAN's TV schedule is full in the morning tomorrow (when the meeting is going on), but C-SPAN2 still has some holes to fill. The former does have some spots in the afternoon to run a rebroadcast if they get some cameras out there.


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Here's an interesting topic for discussion on a Friday: What's the likelihood that any of the 22 Republican governors ever reaches the White House? Ken Rudin handicaps the odds over at NPR's Political Junkie. Let me add my take. Now that Mark Sanford has voluntarily/involuntarily withdrawn his name from 2012 consideration (and who's to say a future comeback isn't possible?), the line between those who realitically have a shot and those who don't can currently be drawn just after Rick Perry. And if that is the case, what can we make of the ordering of those top 8?

The common thread among this group (with maybe the exception of Rick Perry) is that all have been mentioned in one way, shape or form in connection with the race for the 2012 Republican nomination for president. [Of course, there is at least one person out there who sees Sanford's loss as Perry's gain in regard to 2012.] The order of that top eight, then, would be dependent upon who throws their hat in the ring in 2012 and by their subsequent performances in the primaries and caucuses to follow. Pawlenty, Palin, Jindal, Crist and Perry can't all be rising stars in terms of the presidency. Each affects the other if they all enter the race. How each finishes, then, essentially handicaps any future race for the nomination. And that affects the likelihood that those on the bottom half of the order reprise their nomination run.

Let's illustrate this with some examples. Both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee helped themselves for future runs by doing "well" in the 2008 nomination race. No one, for instance, is talking about Fred or Tommy Thompson or Sam Brownback running again in the future. [You could make the argument that Brownback is running for governor in Kansas as a means of positioning himself for another run at the presidency down the road. I'll grant you that. However, would he cut a second term as the Sunflower state's chief executive in 2016 to run or would he wait out a prospective second term and run in 2020 when he'll be 67? At least his 2008 run will be a distant memory by then.] In 2008 John Edwards was helped in a way similar to that of Romney and Huckabee because of his performance in the 2004 Democratic primaries and resultant VP nomination. Meanwhile, Bob Graham essentially wrote his own obituary for national office when his candidacy didn't take off.

The lesson is that, well, "this town ain't big enough for the [lot] of us." If all of those eight enter (and they won't) there will be winners and losers in terms of future presidential prospects.

Of course, the odds of making it to the White House on anything other than a tour stop are pretty long anyway.


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For the first time this year since Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response to President Obama's speech before a joint session of Congress, Sarah Palin searches have been surpassed by another (now former) prospective Republican presidential candidate. Last night FHQ asked aloud whether Mark Sanford's searches, once they were incorporated into Google Trends, would settle in between where John Ensign searches were a week ago following the Nevada senator's announcement and where Palin searches have been post-Letterman or surpass Palin. They seem to have passed Palin and then some. In fact, the first of the two Palin spikes in June is the highest the Alaska governor has been all year and that is around the same height Jindal reached in the pre-/post-response period.


The Sanford data has not been fully implemented in the main Google Trends search, but is working with our tracker for whatever reason. The F in the screenshot above denotes where Sanford admitted to the affair and we can also see the first of the two Palin spikes in June there as well and that it rivals the Jindal jump in February.

Needless to say, Sanford searches over the last few days have outpaced both Palin and Jindal by far in 2009. And that says something about what we see in these trends and what that tells us about the candidate emergence tracker in general. First, none of these search spikes are for "good" reasons. The tracker's intent is to pick up an organic movement toward a particular candidate -- to see a candidate emerge. And it is not a good thing for the Republican Party overall or the tracker generally that all the movement thus far is being triggered by scandal-related or other negatively-identified moments.

But I'll have more on that tomorrow when I look at the state of the 2012 race for the GOP nomination.


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It has been a couple of weeks, and things still don't really look any different in the race for New Jersey governor. Jon Corzine still trails Chris Christie by nearly ten points in FHQ's graduated weighted average of the race even after a new Strategic Vision poll was released last night. And while that isn't necessarily a death knell for the incumbent Democrat, the fact that all three post-primary polls have had Christie above the 50% mark does not bode well for Corzine. Of course, conventional wisdom continues to tell us that Democrats and some independents will come home to roost in time for the November election. Time will tell. [Recall that the state silhouette above gets bluer/redder depending upon how the average fluctuates. With no decided change since the original version, the color stays as red as it was two weeks ago.]

In the meantime, here is a graphic that ties together the first two iterations of the averaging on this race's polling. As was the case in the Virginia version, this one will look better once we have more polls come out. You have to start somewhere though. Unlike the Virginia example, undecideds in New Jersey are actually following the pattern we'd expect: decreasing as the election draws closer. But we have more polls in the New Jersey race than for Virginia's.



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DNC to Provide Coverage of Democratic Change Commission Meeting on Saturday

From the Democratic Party's web site:

Introducing the Democratic Change Commission

The Democratic Change Commission will be having their first meeting, open to the public, on Saturday June 27th in Washington, DC. We will provide highlights of the meeting here on the blog.

Following the Democratic Presidential primaries and caucuses of the 2008 presidential nominating campaign the Democratic National Convention Rules Committee, at the request of then Senator Obama, drafted a resolution calling for a commission to review and recommend changes to the 2012 nominating process. That was adopted on August 25, 2008 by the full Democratic National Convention and thus created the Democratic Change Commission.

The first part of the resolution outlines the structure and purpose of the Commission. According to the resolution, the DNC Chair has to appoint 35 members, who must represent the diversity in our Party, to sit on the Change Earlier this year Chairman Kaine announced the 37 Commission members, including two co-chairs. These members are grassroots activists, local and federal elected officials, labor leaders and a wide range of other backgrounds. Here is a full list of the commission members and their biographical information. We will be introducing several members from the Commission throughout our coverage of the Commission's work. We welcome questions you would like to ask them and we will try to present several of the top ones during upcoming interviews.

The resolution's next sections outline the areas the commission will be charged with improving. The first area the Commission must review is the nominating calendar, the scheduling and sequence of presidential nominating events (primaries and caucuses). The Commission is charged with making recommendations to significantly reduce the number of unpledged delegates (also know as super delegates). Finally the Commission must consider ways to improve caucuses to increase the ability of Democratic voters to participate.

During the 2008 nominating process the Democratic Party was able to bring its ideas and messages for improving government to every state in the country. We were able to reach new voters and engage many long time voters. This success was critical to our victory this past November. We learned a lot from the nominating process and believe through improvements we will be able to continue to reach new Americans and build on our success.

We look forward to providing you access and coverage of the work of the Commission. If you have questions please share them in the comments.

Good to know. Plus, with the meeting being open to the public, I can't imagine a scenario where C-SPAN doesn't cover it in some way. As of now though, the network's Saturday schedule isn't really up yet.


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No, the Mark Sanford numbers aren't actually factored into the archived Google Trends data on the FHQ Candidate Emergence Tracker yet, but the numbers from John Ensign's affair announcement may give us some indication of where Sanford may end up.
Who is represented by that orange line? That's Sarah Palin. Well, Sarah Palin and David Letterman. That particular bump dwarfs the Ensign announcement bump in purple. Both those incidents and where Mark Sanford searches end up underline one important point about the tracker: That the influence of news coverage has to be accounted for in some way.

As we've pointed out several times since we began working with this data, there is a certain recursiveness to this relationship. Candidates drive the media and the media drives candidates. What we have to be on the lookout for in this data is the extent to which news story triggers a bump and then decays over time. Does the trend decay to the point that the earlier equilibrium of searches for that candidate resumes or do we see the emergence of a new equilibrium with a higher/lower search volume. If the track is upward, especially three years away from the next election, we may be seeing the organic, grassroots emergence we originally hypothesized about.

The somewhat unrelated question for now, given that the South Carolina governor is likely out of the 2012 White House sweepstakes, is whether Mark Sanford surpasses Palin/Letterman or settles in between that level and Ensign's announcement last week. I'll update as soon as that becomes apparent on the tracker.


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The Group That Might Change It All? A Closer Look at the Democratic Change Commission's Membership

Earlier today in a post about the Democratic Change Commission's first meeting -- set to take place this weekend -- I set myself the goal of finding out how many superdelegates from 2008 were among the group's members. The logic there is that if the group is made up entirely of former superdelegates, then the likelihood of that portion of the nomination equation being changed drops significantly. But there are three points on the commission's to-do list. Let's look at them again and then examine how the members' backgrounds may influence the commission's ultimate recommendation to the DNC:

1. The window of time in which presidential nomination contests are held
   
2. The impact of superdelegates
3. The caucus system

So, if superdelegates comprise a majority of the group, that [hypothetically] negatively affects the chances of that issue being meaningfully reformed. And that logic holds for the other two issues as well. If caucus states are overrepresented on the commission relative to primary states, that affects action on the system of caucusing. Also, if earlier states are represented in higher proportion on the commission, they may be more likely to protect the status quo.

Before we turn to the numbers, let's revisit my back-of-the-napkin analysis from when the commission was named in March.

The Membership

My first inclination is to look not at who specifically these 37 commission members are, but to focus on where they are from and what that says about the group collectively. Let's look at it by the numbers:

• 37 members (2 co-chairs and 35 members)
• Representing 26 states (plus DC, Puerto Rico and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe)
• 7 members are from 7 red states
• 24 members from 19 blue states (and four more from DC)
  
• Of the 15 states within ten points in the presidential election, 13 are represented on the commission (only Indiana and North Dakota are excluded)
• All of the January 2008 Democratic contest states are represented (Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina and Florida)
  

Now, what does any of that have to do with the changes this commission may bring about? Well, it has a "take care of your own" feel to it. The membership hails from the Obama coalition of states and of those outside that coalition, most are states that were within ten points last November. These states won't necessarily have privileged positions on the 2012 calendar but they will be represented on the commission. Part of the Obama success story was primary season organizational efforts that paid dividends in the general election. The flip side here is that the membership isn't a reflection of future goals (in terms of states to target), but represent states where those organizational efforts were the strongest/most vital.

First, let's augment this with a look at the caucus states representatives on the Democratic Change Commission (DCC). Of course, we should probably start this by noting that proportionally there are far fewer caucus states than primary states. About a quarter of the states (12) held Democratic caucuses in 2008. On the DCC, six of the members are from caucus states and that amounts to just under a sixth of the total membership.

Prognosis: The likelihood of some change to the caucus system -- uniforming the process across caucus states, for example -- actually has few obstacles.

How about superdelegates? How many former supers are on the DCC? From the 2008 cycle, 12 former superdelegates are among the members of the commission and that is roughly a third of the membership. However, just because there are a fair number of superdelegates on the commission doesn't necessarily mean that they'll stand in the way of some change to the superdelegate formula.

Prognosis: Perhaps less likely than a change to the caucuses, but the chances for change are not bad on the whole.

And primary/caucus timing? It'll never happen. Frontloading is here to stay. I'm kidding, but when you look at the numbers there may be a significant obstacle here. This, after all, is the most difficult plank on this three-pronged platform to change. How can we quantify this, though. For our purposes, I'll look at DCC members from states that held contests prior to March. [Yes, I know. That's over half the country.] And there are 28 members from pre-March states out of the 37 person group. That's quite a few. But the obstacle theory doesn't necessarily hold here. If all or most states are already early, as they were in 2008, those early states are more likely to be amenable to just moving everything back a month if no one is better or worse off for the move. Texas and Ohio and the other handful of March states get something of a boost (Well, that's debateable given the likely March logjam. But it isn't a given that at 2012 or 2016 race would play out and last as long as the race in 2008.) and all those February states just shift back a month. Basically, things would, on the Democratic side, revert to their pre-2004 levels.

However, we could also see members complain about the difficulty of pushing such a shift through unreceptive (read: Republican-controlled) legislatures. In other words, state legislators wanting their constituents -- the Republican ones at least -- to have an influence over the 2012 Republican nomination would basically thumb their noses at the Democratic rules if they asked for there to be such a February to March shift. In fact, such legislators may even see that as an opportunity to keep their state in a less crowded, more advantageous position on the calendar.

One final thing we can look at here is how pre-2008 February states are represented on the committee. By this logic, new early state's in 2008 may be more willing to go back to the way things were with the 2004 calendar. This seems less likely now that I'm typing this out, but I've got the numbers and I'll go ahead and share them. Instead of 28 members from pre-March states, there are only 16 (a little less than half) that were from pre-March states in 2004.

Prognosis: There are a lot of early states represented on this commission and that may or may not bode well for some reform on this particular aspect of the group's plan. However, this group was handpicked (possibly making the above numbers moot), so if they desire to make a change -- like the February to March shift -- then they are likely to be able to push it through. But they'll have to tackle the issue of the problems that could create with the RNC. There have been some contacts kept between the parties on this, but without bipartisan action, it is unlikely that we'll see any sweeping reform to the system.


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