I have to say that it really pisses me off that New Hampshire, or Iowa, or even a handful of states get to select the party presidential candidates for the nation as a whole every cycle. I don't care about the GOP candidates, they are all the same, so I will simply focus on the Democrats who are merely 90% the same as the GOP. Follow me, please, below the fold for a suggestion of the simple solution.
Honestly, why should Iowa or New Hampshire get to choose for California, Nevada, Indiana, etc, who they have to vote for or against come the following November? It is patently and self-evidently absurd to think that the literal handful of early primary states, the SAME ONES EVERY TIME, know better than the rest of the nation who is the best candidate to serve the nation as a whole. Yet every 4 years we nonetheless go through this, with a literal handful of states out east (midwest at best) determine for the rest of us who we will see on the following November ballot. For a slight bit of variation on this ridiculous (and harmful) theme, THIS time around we have the same handful of states jockeying to see who can be the earliest primary state of them all, giving the winner a major role in determining the name that will be seen on the upcoming ballot. The contenders ignore the rest of the nation, for the most part, and simply focus on the first few states because once there have been no more than 3 primaries, the "winner" is selected and the rest of us get squat as far as input in who the best candidate is.
This has got to stop. The way Primaries for President are handled by the parties is unfair, plain wrong, ultimately harmful, and in need of fixing. I couldn't actually care less whether the GOP fixes their system but the Dems can and should do so and while the netroots is totally ignored when it comes to legislation and votes (really, we ARE ignored...look no further than vote after vote after vote for Alito, for Iraq supplementals, for FISA nonsense, for the MCA, for immunity for Telcos for spying on Americans - it's coming - and the Iran war amendment recently passed. WE ARE IGNORED) perhaps we can change the way primaries are run. Basically, I call for a scraping of the current primary system entirely and replacing it with a nation-wide primary. NO single state, no 2 or 3 states get to pick the Democratic presidential candidate for the rest of the nation any longer. The only objectively correct and fair way to do this is to give ALL people in ALL states a chance at selecting who the Democratic contender is. In this way, you are far more likely to get a candidate that actually does have the ability to win nationwide. Candidates would actually need to speak to the nation as a whole, north, south, east, and west. I demand a nationwide Democratic primary held on the same day across the nation. The winner of the most votes, overall, wins the right to have their name on the ballot that November.
The next best way to do it would be to randomize the order of which states get the first primaries so that it isn't always the same list of usual suspects. This is still inferior by a large stretch to a nationwide primary because you once again have candidates merely kissing up to the specific concerns and needs of those people in a few states. Thus, nationwide and on the same day is THE best answer. It should happen about late in the summer so that candidates have time to visit as many states as possible to get their nationwide appeals out there. To protect against all candidates merely going to California and Texas due to populations, however, we could setup a scheme whereby all states have an equal number of state votes available (no electoral college nonsense with a few states carrying the lion's share of available votes). The states votes would then be alloted proportionally to each candidate based on their percent vote in that state during the nationwide primary.
What do you think? Why should we keep going with allowing New Hampshire, Illinois, etc, get to pick the nation's candidate? What other way could we use? What's wrong with a nationwide primary? Is what's "wrong" with it really a fatal problem or merely a problem for some pundits or party machinery? (In which WHO CARES!?)