Bill to be Introduced to Cancel 2012 Presidential Primary in Kansas

Here's the story from the Lawrence-Journal World:

TOPEKA — Kansas voters won't be able to participate in a presidential primary in 2012 under legislation introduced Thursday by Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Kobach, a Republican, said he would like to have a presidential primary, but the $1.5 million to $2 million cost is too steep during the state's current budget problems. The state faces an estimated $550 million revenue shortfall.

If approved by the Legislature, it would be the fifth straight time Kansas voters have been denied a presidential preference primary. The last one held in Kansas was 1992.

Most of the primaries have been skipped because of budget concerns.

In 2008, the Republican and Democratic parties held presidential caucuses that were well-attended.

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So Mitt Romney Might Skip Iowa

As FHQ tweeted a little while ago, strategically, this would be less than wise. Yet, there it is: Romney's advisers are talking (or floating a trial balloon) about skipping the Republican nomination race's first contest. First, let's look at why this is a bad idea. Then we can look at why it is, as I called it, a trial balloon.

Why skipping Iowa is a bad move

In many ways, a presidential nomination race, particularly one without a clear frontrunner, is about expectations. This point is debated in the political science literature, but this is why the caveat about the presence of a clear frontrunner is an important distinction to make. Regardless of expectations and the comparison to actual results when the inevitably come in at the beginning of primary and caucus season, a clear frontrunner from the invisible primary typically emerges as the nominee. The George W. Bush experience from 2000 is a good example. Candidates, Lamar Alexander and Liddy Dole among them, were dropping out of the race prior to even Iowa and New Hampshire and they were citing Bush's financial advantage. The expectation heading into primary season, then, was that Bush was going to run away with the Republican nomination. He did, but not before John McCain defied those expectations and crushed Bush by 19 points in the New Hampshire primary. McCain also peeled off a few additional victories, but in the end Bush's institutional support within the party was too great.

But 2012 doesn't have a clear frontrunner. If there is a frontrunner, Romney is, at least according to conventional wisdom (something that isn't necessarily trustworthy), the nominal frontrunner. So what would skipping Iowa mean? Is it a sign of weakness from the nascent Romney campaign? Is it a signal that Romney is focusing on New Hampshire? Is it a nod to the fact that Iowa is likely to support a "more conservative" candidate? FHQ is of the opinion that it is none of the above, but I'll hold off on that for a moment. Skipping Iowa is a bad idea precisely because it raises the expectations in New Hampshire. And that's something that polls and straw polls are already doing for the former Massachusetts governor. Romney, in other words, would have nowhere to go but down. That's fine if you're George W. Bush in 2000, but Mitt Romney doesn't have that sort of cushion heading into the home stretch of the invisible primary and into the actual contests next year.

It is a lose-lose situation. Romney loses Iowa by virtue of having skipped it and then is potentially likely to "lose" New Hampshire in the expectations game. That's not the kind of start you want if you are the frontrunner, no matter how nominal.

Why the skipping Iowa story is just that -- a story

As Jonathan Bernstein rightly pointed out in a response to my aforementioned tweet, this story is all about expectations, but about lowering them in Iowa not raising them in New Hampshire. The tendency here is to compare what's going on now to what happened with those candidates who ran in 2008. For Romney (and Huckabee) there had been a lot of activity to this point in 2008 in Iowa. Both were intent on doing well at the Ames Straw Poll in August 2007. Their resource allocations -- visits to the Hawkeye state and expenditures there -- reflected that. So did the eventual results. Romney edged Huckabee in the straw poll in August and the reversed positions in the January caucuses. So they should be doing what John Edwards did before 2008, right? [No, not that. I mean the actual campaigning.] Camping out in Iowa and basically putting all your eggs in that one basket. Well, that didn't work out so well for Edwards. Despite the presence there from 2004 onward, it didn't yield him anything other than second place in Iowa in 2008 (and barely at that. Clinton finished a fraction of percentage point behind the former vice presidential nominee.).

Despite the fact that the dynamics are different between 2008 and 2012, that tendency still remains: What did Romney do in 2008 in Iowa and what is he doing now for 2012? Romney learned a lesson from Iowa in 2008: Don't spend so much. Well, he really doesn't have to. He is a known quantity now and wasn't before 2008. All in all, then, this is an effort to lowball the Iowa effort in 2012. If the expectation is that Romney won't be a presence there, then any visit he makes or money his campaign spends there is seen as a net positive.

After all it still remains quite possible that social conservative caucus-goers in the state will split their vote if they cannot coalesce behind one candidate. And Mitt Romney, who still has something of a leftover campaign structure in the state, can emerge, if not with a victory, then a solid showing that will help him heading into subsequent contests.

UPDATE: Jonathan Bernstein adds his two cents as well. [I may be quicker than you, JB, but David beat me to it.]

Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling has more but from a polling perspective.

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Primary Bills Move Forward in Virginia & Washington

The state Senate bills to cancel the presidential primary (in Washington -- SB 5119) and to move the Virginia presidential primary from February back to March (SB 1246) have both passed their first tests and have emerged from their respective committees. A majority of both committees voted in favor of the resolutions -- giving a "Do Pass" designation in Washington and by a 14-1 margin in Virginia.

The Washington bill now goes to the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the Virginia bill's destination is unknown at the moment. It may be ready to head to the floor. If the relatively rapid movement of these two bills and committee support are any indication then both are likely to pass in these chambers.

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State Parties in Florida and Ohio Add Their Two Cents on the 2012 Presidential Primary Calendar

State parties always have their say on the date that is ultimately chosen (or maintained) for any given state's presidential primary, but their influence varies depending on the circumstances. On the Democratic side state parties have to submit a delegate selection plan to the DNC for approval. [It should be noted that the DNC checks that each of the states is complying with the entire list of delegate selection rules, not just those concerning timing.] That same type of approval is not required on the Republican side, but that translates into one less formal hurdle in a decision-making calculus that is largely the same across parties. There may be an added step on the Democratic side, but states always opt to operate within the existing framework of rules (...at least initially*).

What do I mean by "existing framework of rules"?

Well, state parties always face a decision on timing their delegate selection events. They can opt to go-it-alone and foot the bill for a primary or caucus (most likely) of their own or they can choose to utilize the state-funded primary system that is already in place. The first option allows the parties the freedom to hold a primary or caucus whenever they desire while the second option cedes the date-setting power to the state government (or some alternate, state government-sanctioned entity). The convenience of the latter option usually trumps the price tag of the former.

Such is the case in both Florida and Ohio, where lately the two state parties' chairs have been in the news over the timing of the presidential primaries in the Sunshine and Buckeye states. There has been no shortage of talk here at FHQ about the position Florida currently occupies on the 2012 primary calendar and the ramifications a move (or no move) would have on the calendar overall. That said, Florida's is a state government under unified Republican control. And that puts the state's Democratic Party in a tough position. They are nearly powerless in terms of influencing the date-setting decision as the minority party in both chambers of the state legislature. In other words, the Republicans in control of the state may decide to keep the Sunshine state's presidential primary in January and take their punishment (a 50% penalty in terms of the number of delegates in the state's 2012 convention delegate) in exchange for a more direct influence over the identity the eventual Republican nominee. That decision, though, affects the Democrats in the state as well. Through no fault of their own, Florida's Democratic primary would be in violation of the Democratic National Committee's delegate selection rules.

That's problematic (at least in the eyes of Florida Democrats). And that is probably why state party chair, Rod Smith, reached out to newly elected state Republican Party chair (full letter below), David Bitner, last week, urging his Republican counterpart to use his position to speak out in favor of a rules-compliant March date for the state's presidential primary (and against the January primary). It was a nice gesture on Smith's part, but he and the Democratic Party of Florida know this one is out of their hands. The Republicans in the state government may opt to move back, but regardless of the decision, it likely won't be affected much by the Florida Democratic Party's desires or the DNC's delegate selection rules. At the end of the day, they will decide to move (or not move) based upon whether they judge the delegate penalty to be steep enough to warrant a shift in the date of the presidential primary.

In Ohio, the issue is not one of rules violations. Instead, it concerns a new rift between the state party chair where there was once an apparent agreement. Earlier in the month, FHQ posted a link to a story about the new Ohio secretary of state's warning that a prolonged redistricting process in Ohio could delay the state's 2012 primaries. Those contests are slated for the first Tuesday in March currently, but they could be moved back to May when the state holds primary elections in other, non-presidential years. Prior to this warning, however, there had been some discussion and agreement about when the primary should be held among the two state party chairs. Both Democratic chair, Chris Redfern, and Republican chair, Kevin DeWine, had discussed a May primary as the best option. Now, however, DeWine is in favor of keeping the Buckeye state's primary in March because of the impact the state's voters could have on the nomination process and because of what that might do for drumming up support in the state (with an eye toward the general election). Like Florida, Ohio is now under unified Republican control. And even though DeWine might speak for the state party, he may not necessarily speak for Republican state legislators or Governor John Kasich.

State parties and their chairs have some platform for discussing these matters, but in primary states like Florida and Ohio, their influence is limited to the extent to which their wishes and desires overlap with those of the various decision makers within the state government.

*The delegate selection plans and any amendments to them are usually due to the party around Labor Day of the year preceding the presidential election. In the 2008 cycle there was a fair amount of positioning and repositioning after that point. That is expected to some extent from the exempt states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina), but 2008 saw several non-exempt states move after this point (Michigan and Massachusetts among them).

--

January 21, 2011

Chairman David Bitner
Republican Party of Florida
420 E. Jefferson Street
Tallahassee, FL 32301

Dear Chairman Bitner,

Congratulations on your election as Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.

On behalf of the Florida Democratic Party, I write today asking for your support to change the date of Florida’s 2012 presidential preference primary. This move is critically important to ensure full representation of our state at our respective national conventions since Florida law currently sets the date of the presidential primary as the last Tuesday in January, which is out of compliance with the rules of both parties.

As you may know, for the first time ever the Republican National Committee has adopted the same timing rules as the Democratic National Committee, which came about through bi-partisan cooperation between the two parties.

It is my sincere hope that we, in the same spirit of cooperation, can work together on selecting a date that complies with the rules set by both national parties. While changing the date of the primary would require action by the Republican Legislature and Governor, I am confident that we can make this happen.

I look forward to working with you on this issue.

Sincerely,

Rod Smith
Chairman, Florida Democratic Party

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One More February to March Primary Bill in Oklahoma

In addition to the Oklahoma bills detailed earlier today, there is a more all-encompassing election law bill (HB 2138) that shifts the date of the Sooner state's primaries for state and local offices from July to June, changes filing deadline and also alters the presidential primary date, moving the election from the first Tuesday in February (where the state's presidential primary has been since the 2004 cycle) to the first Tuesday in March. From 1988-2000 Oklahoma held its presidential primary on the second Tuesday in March. The Democratic Party in the state used the same date for its 1984 caucuses.

The bill is sponsored by Republican Rep. Kris Steele and is the third bill that has been introduced including a provision to move the presidential primary back to March.

Hat tip to Richard Winger at Ballot Access News for the news.

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Pair of Pre-filed Bills Propose Moving Oklahoma Presidential Primary Back to March

The Oklahoma legislature does not convene until next month, but there are already several bills that have been pre-filed which would affect the date on which the Sooner state holds its presidential primary in 2012. Republican lawmakers in both the state House (Gary Banz) and Senate (David Holt) have pre-filed bills in their respective chambers to be introduced on the opening day of the session to move the state's presidential primary from the first Tuesday in February to the first Tuesday in March. The bills (HB 1614 and SB 808) also cede control over setting the date of the presidential primary to the State Board of Elections in the event that one or more states bordering Oklahoma have moved the dates of their presidential primaries in an effort to set up a regional primary.

Oklahoma is the first unified Republican-controlled state government to have a bill(s) pre-filed or introduced that would pull a primary currently in violation of national party rules back in to compliance (on the issue of timing). This is significant because, as we've speculated around here, Republican-controlled governments would be more likely to consider staying put if early and in violation of the rules and just taking the party penalties instead of moving back. It is still early to tell if there is anything to that hypothesis.

A third bill (HB 1057) would shift the financial burden of funding the presidential primary from the state to the state parties. Control of the date setting of the contest would also change hands from the state government to the state parties as well. There is no definite change proposed, then, but the parties could opt to move the date if they so chose.

[I apologize in advance for all the RTF links for these bills. There is no good way of linking to the status of bills in the Oklahoma legislature and this is the only way of accessing the bill text.]

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"States weigh later dates for 2012 presidential primaries"

Josh Goodman at Stateline.org has a nice synopsis of where things are in the effort to shift the 2012 presidential primary calendar back. [see full article below]

One note that I'd add, in addition to Mayer's fabulous quotation*, is that states have moved back in the past, but never before has that movement been mandated by a change in both parties' rules. The parties allowed February contests and watched states move up and take advantage of that in period of 1996-2008. But now the national parties are requiring states to move back. That is what is new about this cycle. And the big question that remains is if the states are actually going to play along.

*"The surges forward are a lot more substantial than the retreats." Too true.

--

States weigh later dates for 2012 presidential primaries

by Josh Goodman, Stateline staff writer

Ahead of the last presidential election in 2008, Arkansas lawmakers had an idea. Why not move up the date of the state’s presidential primary from May to early February? Arkansas was tired of being an afterthought on the campaign trail, not weighing in on Democratic and Republican candidates until other states had already decided the races. This time, Arkansas was going to have influence.

There turned out to be just one problem: Everyone else had the same idea.

Arkansas voted with more than 20 states on Super Tuesday, including California and New York. With so much competition for the candidates’ attention, Arkansas wound up feeling left out again. John McCain and Barack Obama didn’t even campaign in the state, conceding it to Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton.

“It didn’t do anything,” Arkansas state Representative Jon Woods says of the date change, which actually resulted in the state holding two primary elections — one for president and another for other offices. “All it did was cost our state money.” A couple of years ago, Woods sponsored a bill to return the primary to its old date — the third Tuesday in May — for 2012. Both houses of the legislature approved it unanimously. Arkansas’ experiment with an early primary is over.

In jumping toward the front of the presidential calendar in 2008, Arkansas was doing what states have been doing for decades now: holding their contests as early as possible. States want to gain power over the process, but more importantly, they want candidates to visit them and visit often. It’s a chance to make an impression with, and perhaps win promises from, the future occupant of the White House.

In moving backward for 2012, however, Arkansas may have been setting a new trend. That’s because several factors — from strained state budgets to new Republican National Committee rules — are converging to prod states to schedule presidential primaries later in the year.

For now, the calendar remains uncertain. What’s clear, though, is that state legislators are prepared to give the conventional wisdom that earlier primaries are better its most serious challenge in years.

The push to frontload

The modern presidential nominating process, in which candidates must compete in primaries throughout the country to have a chance to win, dates to 1972. After that, it only took a few election cycles for states to realize that the ones voting first had the biggest say in the nomination. By 1988, the push to “frontload” had begun in earnest.

Almost immediately, political scientists began complaining that the primary schedule was becoming perilously compressed. If too many states vote too early, they argued, only the best-funded candidates can compete. Candidates can effectively wrap up nominations in a matter of weeks, before the press and the public have time to scrutinize them. Then, states with primaries and caucuses later in the spring don’t matter. “A lot of states are not just less influential, but have no effective voice in the process,” says William Mayer, a Northeastern University political scientist who co-authored a book on frontloading.

Both the national Democratic and Republican parties have tried to impose some order on the process. But the parties don’t set the dates of primaries. State legislators do — because it’s the states who actually administer the elections, along with local governments.

Legislators’ foremost concern has been maximizing the influence of their own states. Even those who agree with the political scientists about the problems with a frontloaded calendar don’t want their own state to be the one left behind.

The results are dramatic. In 1976, on the Democratic side, the Iowa caucuses were in January and the New Hampshire primary was in February. Four more states voted in March and three more in April, with the other 20 primary states scattered later into the spring.

In 2008, six states voted in January. They included Florida and Michigan, which moved up their primaries in violation of Democratic Party rules. By the end of February, voters in nearly three dozen states had already cast their ballots in primaries or caucuses on both the Democratic and Republican side.

Moving back

Given that history, it’s striking that so many states now are talking about moving their 2012 contests in the opposite direction. Besides Arkansas, Illinois already has moved its primary from February back to its traditional date in March. Montana Republicans have canceled their February caucus and instead plan to use the state’s June primary to pick their delegates. Florida is talking about moving its vote from January to April. Bills introduced by key committee chairs in California and Virginia also would push their states back.

Saving money is a key consideration. For some states, moving up the presidential primary meant paying for the cost of an additional statewide election. They went on to hold their regular primaries to choose candidates for Congress, the state legislature and local offices later.

Paul Fong, who chairs the California Assembly’s Elections and Redistricting Committee, says his bill to consolidate the presidential primary back into the state’s regular June primary would save as much as $80 million. In Washington State, the Democratic governor and Republican secretary of state both want to save money by cancelling their state’s February presidential primary entirely. That move would leave the selection of delegates to party-funded caucuses.

Redistricting, the states’ once-a-decade job of redrawing political boundaries, also could pose a problem for early primaries in some states if legal challenges or political stalemates delay the process. In Ohio, the presidential primary is currently scheduled for March 2012. At the same time, voters will choose candidates for lower offices whose boundaries are set to change. Secretary of State Jon Husted has wondered whether his state will complete legislative and congressional redistricting in time to hold its primary.

In Illinois, not wanting to rush was a factor in the state’s decision to move its primary back. Under the earlier schedule, the filing deadline fell in early November of the preceding year. That forced candidates for even the most minor offices to decide exceptionally early whether they wanted to run. It also forced campaigns into the dead of winter.

The unifying theme across all these states is that legislators are questioning whether voting early was worth the trouble. It’s not just a small state like Arkansas that felt ignored in the super-packed primary schedule of 2008. Some Californians felt that way, too. “It didn’t do anything by moving it up,” Fong says.

Watching Florida

The great irony of 2008, of course, was that the primary battle between Clinton and Obama dragged on well past the clump of January and February primaries. The most front-loaded presidential calendar in American history coincided with the most prolonged battle for a party’s nomination in decades.

While few political observers expect another drawn-out primary battle like that one anytime soon, the national parties are nudging states to vote later into the season. Both the Republicans and Democrats have rules that forbid states other than Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada from voting before March. The Republicans — who are likely to be more relevant this cycle since most observers presume Obama will be the Democratic nominee — plan to penalize states that go too early by stripping them of half their delegates.

Still, it’s not clear how many states will be rushing to push their primaries back. For now, Florida is still scheduled to vote on January 31, 2012.

If Florida legislators don’t change their date, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada likely would bump ahead of them in January. After that, other states could take that as license to flout the Republican National Committee and stick it out in February. “Everything hinges on whether Florida decides to move back,” says Josh Putnam, a political scientist who tracks the calendar at blog called Frontloading HQ. “It only takes one state to unravel the whole process.”

Even if the schedule does become substantially less compressed for 2012, that might not mean much for 2016, 2020 and beyond. After 1988’s front-loaded calendar, some states also moved primaries back in 1992. But the long-term trend remained unaltered. “The surges forward,” Mayer says, “are a lot more substantial than the retreats.”

Still, for some states the calendar calculus appears to have changed in a lasting way. That’s true in Arkansas, where no one sounds particularly interested in a future race to the front. “Making us a player or contender,” Woods says, “just isn’t in the cards.”

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Frontloading in Idaho. ...sort of

There is one late add to our list of frontloading/primary movement for the week that just concluded. A bill (HB 14) was introduced in the Idaho House by Secretary of State Tim Hurst to make some "technical corrections" to an election law passed during the legislature's previous session in 2009. Among those corrections was a provision that would move the state's primary -- including presidential primary -- from the fourth Tuesday in May to the third Tuesday in May.

Technically, this could be considered frontloading because of the shift forward on the calendar, but it misses the other key element to the frontloading phenomenon that has occurred in the post-McGovern-Fraser reform era. There is a move ahead on the calendar, but there is no addition to the compression at the beginning of the process. The intent here also is not to carve out a particularly advantageous position on the calendar. Idaho would go from sharing a date with Arkansas, Kentucky and Washington to sharing a date with Nebraska and Oregon. And if history is any guide, both of those dates will likely fall after the point at which the two parties' nominees have been decided. [Yes, there are exceptions to this recent history.]

Thanks to Richard Winger at Ballot Access News for passing this news along to FHQ.

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2012 Presidential Primary Movement: The Week in Review (Jan. 17-23)

Compared to the previous week, this last week was slow on the presidential primary movement front. That said, what do we now know?

• The only new bill to move (or cancel) a presidential primary this past week was a House companion bill to the Washington Senate bill that was proposed a week ago. At a public hearing for the Senate bill, state Republican Party chair, Luke Esser, spoke against the plan, one endorsed by Democratic governor, Christine Gregoire, and Republican secretary of state, Sam Reed.
• The real news was the roller coaster in Arizona. First, there was talk of the Arizona Republican Party possibly opting to "move" their primary to February. Of course, it is already scheduled for the fourth Tuesday in February. Then it was revealed that the resolution the party was to vote on at their meeting this weekend would only ask Governor Jan Brewer to use her proclamation power to move the primary. And then, to top it all off, what was originally reported to have been a possible unanimous vote in favor of the resolution (Resolution #12) turned into the measure failing to pass at all on Saturday. The state still has a February primary, so either the legislature will have to act or Brewer will have to use her privilege to shift the presidential primary to a later date.As has been mentioned in this space several times, there are currently 18 states with presidential primaries scheduled for February 2012. That would put those 18 states in violation of both parties' delegate selection rules for 2012.
• As has been mentioned in this space several times, there are currently 18 states with presidential primaries scheduled for February 2012. That would put those 18 states in violation of both parties' delegate selection rules for 2012.
• Of those 18 primary states, 13 of them (California, Connecticut, Missouri, New York, Arizona, Georgia, Delaware, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey and Virginia) have convened their 2011 state legislative sessions.
• Of those 13 states, 3 (California, New Jersey and Virginia) have bills that have been introduced and are active within the state legislature to move their contests' dates. Both California and New Jersey have bills that would eliminate an early and separate presidential primaries and position those events with the other primaries for state and local offices. That would mean June presidential primaries for both states if those bills pass and are signed into law.
• One additional early state from the 2008 cycle, Washington, has proposed temporarily (for the 2012 cycle) canceling the state's presidential primary. That primary is currently scheduled for the fourth Tuesday in May according to the law. However, that same law allows the secretary of state to propose a different date and the state parties can propose their own alternative. If either or both propose(s) a different date a bipartisan committee (made up of party members and state government officials), by a two-thirds vote, has to approve the change.
• Utah (one of the aforementioned 18 states) convenes its legislative session this week. Oklahoma (February), Alabama (March), Florida (March) and Louisiana (April) get down to work later in the year.
• For this next week, then, the 14 early states in conflict with the national parties' rules will be the ones to watch. That includes the 13 mentioned above and Utah.
  

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Romney Takes New Hampshire GOP Straw Poll

Former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, won Saturday's straw poll of New Hampshire Republicans by a more than three to one margin over his next closest competitor, Texas representative, Ron Paul. In a crowded field of candidates, Romney emerged with 35% of the vote (273 total votes cast of the 493 members in attendance -- 55% turnout) and won despite Tea Party-aligned state party chair candidate, Jack Kimball, winning that race. In other words, even with some Tea Party atmosphere to the proceedings, Romney -- not necessarily a favorite of the movement that grew from the grassroots up following President Obama's victory in the 2008 election -- won and did so by a margin that largely reflects what polls of the early primary state have shown.

Mitt Romney: 35%

Ron Paul: 11%

Tim Pawlenty: 8%

Sarah Palin: 7%

Michelle Bachmann: 5%

Jim DeMint: 5%

Herman Cain: 4%

Chris Christie: 3%

Rick Santorum: 3%

Mitch Daniels: 3%

Newt Gingrich: 3%

Mike Huckabee: 3%

Mike Pence: 3%

Rudy Giuliani: 2%

Judd Gregg: 2%

Gary Johnson: 2%

Other: 2%

Donald Trump: 1%

Haley Barbour: 1%

Jon Huntsman: ~1% 0*

John Thune: ~1% 0*

There isn't much to read into this other than the Romney-Tea Party angle discussed above. The fact that 220 members opted to sit on the sidelines is noteworthy, but may only indicate that it is still a little too early.

*I just got a nice email from James Pindell, the political director from WMUR, the station which held the straw poll vote. Jon Huntsman and John Thune not only got less than 1% of the straw poll vote, they each got 0 votes. That correction has been made in the results above.

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