RALEIGH – The presidential primaries are already the subject of extensive analysis – yes, even though the presidential election is still a long way off.
For one thing, there’s this media-created phenomenon called the Wealth Primary. When the Democratic and Republican candidates filed their 1st quarter campaign reports, reporters and commentators treated the results as if they were early vote totals. They marveled that Barack Obama had nearly matched Hillary Clinton in the 1st quarter take. They noted Mitt Romney’s lead position in GOP fundraising, and John McCain’s unspectacular third.
There’s nothing wrong with taking in relevant data and looking for illustrative patterns, but the Wealth Primary meme has gotten ridiculous. All six major candidates – the aforementioned plus John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani – have sizable war chests. All of them have enough resources, cash and otherwise, to sustain their campaigns into the early primaries. As Business Week pointed out in an interesting piece last week, there are also good reasons to be skeptical about the specific dollar amounts reported for the 1st quarter, anyway. Some campaigns rushed to book donations before the March 31st date and shoved expenses past it to make their gross and net numbers look better. There is apparently nothing illegal or even untoward about the practice, but it certainly is incumbent upon analysts to factor it into their political arithmetic.
Speaking of those early primary states, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about whether the prospect of a Super-Duper Tuesday on Feb. 5 will make the election results from Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina more or less important. The “more” argument is that candidates who stumble early will have little time to recover with intervening primaries before the majority of delegates are selected on Feb. 5. The “less” argument, though, is that candidates who expect not to do as well in the First Four will simply spend their time and energy in Super-Duper states and focus media and public attention on the far-larger Feb. 5 stakes.
An interesting wrinkle will be the role of absentee and early voting, reports the Christian Science Monitor. If voters in California, Illinois, Florida, and other delegate-rich prizes have already cast their primary votes by mail or at early-voting sites in the weeks before their election days, they may not be affected by candidate performance in the First Four. The timing may not allow it. That might limit the ability of, say, John Edwards or Mitt Romney to build national momentum off of a strong showing in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Take Florida, for example. Its primary may even precede Super-Duper Tuesday, if legislators have their way on a proposed Jan. 29 date. With nearly half of Floridians casting an early or absentee ballot in 2006, it seems likely that many Democratic and Republican primary voters there will have already make their selections before they find out what happens in some or perhaps all of the First Four.
My view is that the absentee and early-voting factor reduces the significance of the First Four somewhat, but we shouldn’t get carried away here. Those primary outcomes will still be huge news. A large number of voters won’t make up their minds until the last minute, allowing time for a bandwagon to roll. And for those who want to limit their votes to likely winners – which is a widespread voter preference, like it or not – there will be legions of polls in December and early January that will look a lot like election results in local-news snippets and Internet news summaries.
Places like Ames, Derry, Spartanburg – and now Reno – will still matter a lot, and the major candidates will spend time and resources in them.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.