CAMPAIGN 2000

'Big Bang' Approach To Primary Season

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Staff, March 28, 1999

It will all be decided in one short month.

That's the growing consensus about the 2000 presidential primary campaign. It will start next Feb. 7 in Iowa, and in all likelihood end on March 7, when at least 11 states, including California, New York, and all of New England save New Hampshire, go to the polls. The schedule isn't final, but it seems probable that as many as 41 percent of the total delegates will be chosen that day alone.

And if the process doesn't end then, it almost surely will on the following Tuesday, when another six states, including Texas and Florida vote. That is, if Florida doesn't move up to March 7. One way or another, the four most populous states in the country -- California, Texas, New York, and Florida -- will have held their primaries by March 14.

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin calls it the Big Bang method of presidential nominating: Everything, all at once. And it means an end to the campaigns we've come to know since the nomination selection was wrested from insider caucuses and planted in primaries.

The rules, of course, are never neutral. The new system, which has come about haphazardly as states have pushed their primaries up in search of greater influence in choosing the nominees, will dramatically change the process.

Consider this:

In 1972, antiwar Senator George McGovern couldn't claim the Democratic Party nomination until he beat former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey in California on June 6. In 1976, challengers pursued Jimmy Carter until he wrapped up the Democratic nomination by winning the Ohio primary on June 8.

That same year, Ronald Reagan chased President Ford almost all the way to the Republican convention. Similarly, in 1984, Senator Gary Hart battled former vice president Walter F. Mondale to the June primaries and beyond before Mondale's pull with super-delegates let him claim the party's mantle.

Or this. In 1968, only 8 percent of the Democratic delegates chosen by primary had been allocated by week five of the primary process. By 1996, 59 percent of comparable delegates had been picked by that point. On the Republican side in 1968, only 7 percent of delegates were chosen after five weeks; by 1996, the figure was 65 percent. (These statistics are drawn from the upcoming book "In Pursuit of the White House 2000: How We Choose Our Presidential Nominees" by William Mayer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University.

Collapsing what was once four to five months of voting into one inevitably tilts the process toward the well-known and the well-financed. Indeed, many think the campaign no longer allows for a lesser-known, underfunded candidate who can make his or her case in the retail politics of Iowa, improve his showing in New Hampshire, and catapult from there into national contention.

"The current process obviously helps those candidates who have better name ID, are better financed, and are better organized across the country," said Ron Kaufman, White House political director in the Bush administration. "The truth is, it is almost like a national primary."

And it's not just the little-knowns -- Fred Harris in 1976, say, or Reuben Askew in 1984, or Pierre du Pont in 1988 -- who will be squeezed out. A McGovern, a Carter, or even a Bill Clinton might not emerge from such a system today.

Just last month when he decided not to run for president, US Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a smart, substantial, experienced third-term Democrat who would have been counted as a serious contender in slower years, cited the syncopated primary system as one of his reasons. A process that demands $15 million as minimum table stakes was just too much, too fast, Kerry said.

Galvin says there's another price to the Big Bang approach to primaries: new thinking.

"The leading candidates aren't inclined to say anything controversial or innovative," he believes. "They are just not inclined to take risks."

Fans of the European style of short campaigns may argue that a truncated campaign is a plus. Still, there's something particularly American about a staggered system of primaries that tests a prospective leader week by week, trying a candidate's skills in the crucible of campaign combat.

"I think it is a very good test," said Michael S. Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. "It's kind of a gradual test of who you are and what you're made of, and it gives a less well-known candidate an opportunity to demonstrate what he has got."

Is there a way to modify the system so that states that want early influence can have it, but that keeps the nomination process staggered enough to permit lesser-known candidates to emerge and be tested?

One of the most interesting proposals so far comes from the National Association of Secretaries of State, the nation's top election officials. At their February meeting, the secretaries called for a system of rotating primaries, with the hope that it will be in place for 2004.

It would work this way. As small states that can nurture an underdog candidacy, Iowa and New Hampshire would preserve their season-starting spots.

After that, the country would be broken into regions: West, South, Midwest, and Northeast. Regional primaries would be held the first Tuesday of each month, from March to June, with the region that went first moving to end of the line the next time. About a quarter of the delegates would be selected each Tuesday, which would mean that, in a contested field, no candidate could secure the nomination for at least three months.

Galvin, chairman of the association's Committee on Presidential Primaries, thinks such a system would give candidates time to campaign, to prove themselves, perhaps even to recover from a stumble, and all in a matrix that preserves time, money, and sanity. Dukakis agrees.

"To be able to stay in one region a couple of weeks and campaign intensively makes a lot of sense," Dukakis says. "I think there are all sorts of arguments for it, and I don't know what the argument against it is."

There are some. Mayer believes the regions are still too large. "You still may be facing a situation where it is difficult for a less-established candidate to compete in the system," he said.

Unnatural advantage is another argument against regionalizing. That's why Steven Grossman, recently retired Democratic National Committee chairman, is skeptical of Galvin's proposal, even though Grossman favors a longer primary season.

"The favorite son from a particular region may not be the best candidate, but it will inevitably propel him forward," says Grossman, who says the governor of California would become the instant front-runner in years when the West held its primaries first.

There's something to that concern, certainly, although Grossman may be overstating the problems. Any well-performing California governor probably deserves to be considered a serious candidate in his or her own right. As for other favorite sons, voters have a knack for separating the serious from the symbolic (witness US Senator Bob Smith's single-digit showing in home-state New Hampshire polls). And any smaller-state candidate who could dominate an entire region would hardly fit the favorite-son category.

For his part, Galvin concedes there might be some regional advantage.

But the current system has long had such advantages: a shared border is the reason so many Massachusetts Democrats have a toehold in the New Hampshire primary. When it comes to proposals for improving the nominating process, it's best not to make the perfect the enemy of the good (as Voltaire might have put it), particularly since, in politics, perfect is not realistic.

The proposal Galvin and his fellow election officials favor is realistic, in no small part because it builds on the geographic blocks of the current system, which has seen New England, the South, and the intermountain West all establish regional primary days.

"It is far from a perfect system," Galvin concedes. "I don't think it is as good as what we had, when the system was truly spread out. But it is far better than what we have now."