Multiple times since 2008 there have been attempts to back New Hampshire down so a larger more diverse state could be put early in the schedule. That failed down to a number of problems with convincing New Hampshire. Including GOP control of the state, and GOP support for the Democratic Secretary of State who’s the one guy who practically controls all this. You can’t primary the guy, or withdraw support. Because New Hampshire’s Secretary of State is elected by their legislature rather than appointed or picked by voters.
That culminated in SC and Nevada being moved to 3rd and 4th. Basically a compromise acceptable to New Hampshire and Iowa to get large diverse states as early in the schedule as possible.
New Hampshire is the stumbling block here. Because their law dictates that they be the first primary nationally, and the Secretary of State sets the date to ensure that happens. And weirdly New Hampshire holds a lot of power over the scheduling and format of Iowa’s caucus, as their law avoids conflict with NH by definitely not being a caucus and scheduling carefully in reaction to NH’s announced date.
2018 Democrats took control of the NH legislature. And there was an attempt by Democrats, apparently supported DNC to replace Bill Gardner the secretary of State (who is a Democrat) in response to his involvement with the Trump voter fraud pony show.
That failed largely thanks to lock step support for Gardner from the GOP. The combined GOP minority, and a subset of state Democrats fixated on the first in the nation thing was enough for Garner to keep his office by a single vote. He is the single largest stumbling block to altering the schedule without a big ole slap fight between State Governments.
This time in 2016 people were enraged that delegate levels in the DNC contests favored popular vote winners too heavily. That narrow winners, esspeciallt in almost tied contests, were given a disproportionate number of delegates. Disadvantaging less established candidates. So under DNC pressure most states have switched to a more proportional allotment of delegates. Leading to out current Buttigieg/Sanders situation. And there are no winner take all contests in the Democratic process this year (admittedly I don’t remember when there last were).
Fact of the matter is that within the bounds of what they can do. Without triggering a big ole legal fight or getting the GOP and a majority of states on board. They’re pretty active about it.
There’s myriad ways you could force the issue. But I for one don’t think a messy series of lawsuits in the midst of an election would work out all that well.
That doesn’t make it OK that there’s lots of money involved. Regardless of where the money comes from you’re still looking at a massive for profit industry revolving around our elections.
That a few highly visible politicians can run billion dollar presidential campaigns with a focus on small donors doesn’t mean that vast costs for mounting any sort of campaign up and down the ballot doesn’t have a negative impact.
It also doesn’t mean that our politicians don’t spend vastly more time fundraising and campaigning than they do actually governing. Hell getting politicians back on the campaign trail is a major factor in scheduling government actions. Particularly Senate votes, and became a factor in the impeachment trial. We had a Democratic congressman here on Long Island retire cause he couldn’t stand to cold call for contributions anymore (he writes science fiction now).
How does that avoid it? The weight there is just fixed by a slightly different schedule. Unless the final block is large enough to overcome all preceding blocks it’s still largely set before most people vote. If you do it that way then the early votes are the pointless ones. That’s largely a question of trying to push the media attention elsewhere in the schedule.
Why not cut that factor out.
Votes as a proportion of total eligible voters we sit near the bottom. And while states with automatic registration, early voting and the like see improvements after putting them in place. It’s still not great.
More important is where turnout lags most. The young, the non-white. With votes not mattering and things be pre-decided or already set in stone by the time they get to vote being among the most commonly cited reasons for not voting or not registering.
Even looking at New Hampshire where the first primary is commonly fingered as providing best in the nation turnout. That only happens in the presidential primaries. Turn out lags pretty bad in off years, and it’s considerably lower for the general.
I don’t see any real reasons for any state to go first or to break it up. All of the cited reasons are after the fact justifications. The real reason we do it this way is tradition. It’s just always been spread out, the main reason it was spread out in the first place is the same deliberate compromise intended to over represent small and rural states (particularly slave states, and eventually white voters) as the electoral college and the whole congressional district thing.
Things went pretty good in Ireland the other day. I suspect they’re heading to another round of voting but there was a surprising upset in favor of left wing parties. Little weird that the major one is Sinn Fein, but had they run more people they’d be in control of the government there.
Besides our long, weird, money loving process is uniquely responsible for Donald Trump.
