South Carolina GOP Primary Moved up to January 19

In an attempt to increase the power of its voters in the presidential primary elections, state after state in America has opted for earlier and earlier polling days. Naturally, the states that have traditionally voted early feel squeezed. Yesterday, the South Carolina Republican Party announced that it was moving its primary date to January 19, 2008, a year and a day before the next president is inaugurated. The move is an attempt to prevent Florida’s new date of January 29 from making the Sunshine State the first southern test of the candidates.

Interestingly, both the new South Carolina and Florida dates violate national party rules. The National GOP says February 5 is the earliest they can be held. Sanctions include reducing the number of delegates to the nominating convention that states in violation can send. This is particularly significant if enforced because the whole point is to maximize state leverage in the nominating process. Losing delegates is an effective counter-measure.

As Lenin observed, “everything is connected to everything else,” and so, this re-ordering of the calendar in South Carolina has knock-on effects for other states. Iowa Governor Chet Culver has said that his “bottom line” is his state’s caucuses come first of all. Iowa Republican Party chairman Ray Hoffman agreed, “If they [South Carolina] move, we will move. We’ll have to see what happens.” Since New Hampshire has blocked off the week of January 8-12, and has yet to set the exact date, Iowans will have to either caucus during the holidays (which would limit turn-out), or hold their event in early December.

This also has a major effect on the campaigns. Their timelines have just shortened, and they now need to campaign to win in South Carolina earlier, and perhaps be prepared to caucus in Iowa in December rather than late January or February, as tradition has had it. That means less money and less time to build an effective organization. And that will take money raised earlier away from spending in bigger states like California, which used to vote in June and now will do so in February.

This is clearly no way to choose candidates. Far better to require a single national primary, or regional primaries with rotating dates over the years. A further improvement would be to permit only party members to vote, not just a “declared” Democrat or Republican. Make a would-be primary voter pay a $10 party membership fee (which could bring in as much as $500,000,000 to the parties, effectively splitting the difference between the current fund-raising nonsense and publicly funded campaigns). After all, only union members vote on strikes and contracts, only school kids vote in student government elections, so why should non-party members help a party choose its standard bearer? Anti-democratic – maybe, if one believes people outside a polity should have a voice in that polity. In which case, perhaps there should be primaries in China, Zimbabwe, Iraq-Nam and France to help choose the next American president.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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