A Better Plan For The Primaries
Roy Maynard
Texas Republican National Committeeman Bill Crocker is looking out for me — and for you, too, if you found the primary season this year to be interminable and exhausting.
The Austin attorney is a member of the RNC’s Rules Committee, and is putting forward a plan to revamp the Republican primary process. The primaries began, you’ll recall, with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. They lasted until March for the Republicans (and even longer for the Democrats).
By the time the primaries ended, I’d missed more sleep than an over-caffeinated late-night news anchor.
I spoke with Crocker last week as he was polishing his proposal for the Republican National Convention next month.
“The major problem we had this year was that Super Tuesday (Feb. 5) turned into Super Duper Tuesday, with 20-odd states holding primaries on the first day available,” Crocker said. “And our best estimate is there will be 30-odd next time, all who want to be on the first day.”
And that would be a disaster for the party, Crocker said.
“We’ll come very close to having a national primary day, if we’re not careful,” he explained. “That would be inordinately expensive. And it would ensure that an Abraham Lincoln couldn’t get the nomination, because he would start with low funding and low name recognition.”
But the old system was little better, in terms of Texas’ influence, he adds.
“Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina all exert an inordinate amount of influence on the primary,” Crocker says. “Texas doesn’t have a lot in common with Iowa or New Hampshire, in my opinion, so that’s not good for us.”
And because those states have a disproportionate effect on politics, they have a disproportionate effect on policies.
“If they raised cotton in Iowa, I believe we’d be trying to make motor fuel out of cottonseed oil, instead of corn,” Crocker says.
But he has a solution, the “Texas Plan.”
“First, we’ll back the system up so we don’t start until March,” he says. “And we’ll divide states into four groups as internally balanced as possible.”
“First, we’ll back the system up so we don’t start until March,” he says. “And we’ll divide states into four groups as internally balanced as possible.”
By “balanced,” he means approximately the same number of electoral votes, the same number of delegates, and approximately the same number of Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning states. The groups would also be balanced geographically, as much as possible, so that no region dominates a primary
“And we would want some contiguous states, where possible, so bus tours could begin in one state and continue to the next,” Crocker says. “Smaller sates would find that advantageous.”
Those states would hold their primaries as a group — one in March, one in April, one in May and one in June.
The order would be determined by a lottery in 2012; and in following presidential election years, the groups would rotate in that same order.
“We’re not telling anyone when they have to have their primary, we’re just setting a date limit they can’t go before,” Crocker explains. “If they want to do a non-binding caucus or a straw poll, they can do that whenever they want, so long as it is not binding on the delegates.”
The first group would include the District of Columbia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massach-usetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The next group would include Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, The U.S. Virgin Islands and Washington.
A third group would include Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin.
And a fourth group would include American Samoa, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, the Northern Mariana Islands, Pennsylvania and Utah.
There are other plans being presented, but Crocker’s plan bears watching. The Republican National Conve-ntion lasts from Sept. 1 through Sept. 4.
Early Returns is the political observations column of staff writer Roy Maynard, who can be reached at 903-596-6291 or at roymaynardtmt@gmail.com.
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