The current primary process is correctly criticized for its exclusionary tendencies. New Hampshire and Iowa are certainly not representative of the nation, and caucuses are not very democratic for a variety of reasons.
Despite all of these valid criticisms, there are certainly some positive aspects of our current system that would likely be damaged by a straight up regional primary. Our current system does allow for retail politics, in which candidates get away from their handlers and meet voters one-on-one. If we had a regional primary, retail politics would not be very practical since the primary would become much more like a general election campaign covering millions of voters who must be reached. Our current system also allows candidates with less funding and less name recognition to have a fighting chance. A regional primary where upstart candidates with little name recognition and little funding would be forced to run in 12 or 13 different states at once would make it very difficult for upstart candidates to compete, and it would give an unfair advantage to candidates who can self fund. Would Barrack Obama have won a regional primary in 2008 without getting the boost he got out of Iowa?
So I have a solution, which I believe solves all of these problems. First, I would break the primaries down by Congressional districts rather than by states. Then I would divide each of the 435 Congressional Districts and the District of Columbia into 4 different regions: East, South, Midwest, and West. The regional groupings would be as follows:
East: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
West: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and Guam.
There would be four regional primaries: one on the first Tuesday in March, one on the first Tuesday in April, one on the first Tuesday in May, and one on the first Tuesday in June. The regions would alternate, so that no particular region always gets first in nation status. However, my proposal doesn't end there.
On the third Tuesday in July of the year preceding the election year, three Congressional Districts will be randomly selected from the region scheduled to vote in March the following year. One of these Congressional Districts will be designated as the first in nation primay, and this Congressional District will vote on the third Tuesday in January. The second Congressional District chosen will vote on the first Tuesday in February, and the third Congressional District chosen will vote on the third Tuesday in February. Two weeks later, the remaining Congressional districts in that region will vote. The remaining regions will then vote in succession in the following three months until the primary process is complete.
This set up would avoid the pitfalls of our current system, which allows the same two states with populations that are not very representative of the rest of our nation to have a disproportionate influence. But it also preserves some of the better aspects of our current system such as retail politics and affording upstart candidates with little money and little name recognition an opportunity to compete by pulling off upsets in the early Congressional District primaries and gaining significant name recognition prior to the larger regional primaries.
