The potential moving of California’s 2008 presidential primary election from June to February has sparked a fair amount of discussion across the CA blogging community, so I figured I’d throw my two cents in as well:
The Status Quo Doesn’t Help Us:
1. California’s voice really doesn’t matter in presidential politics, despite our massive electoral weight, because our primary comes too late in the cycle to be worth bothering campaigning for. So our votes don’t matter, and we see neither hide nor hair of candidates except at big-money fundraisers in SF or LA (and even then, that access only comes when you’ve got the thousands to ante up).
2. Because of this, California ends up being DC’s ATM, and little more. They’re happy to take our money, but could care less about our issues, our concerns, our needs at the state level, our take on the American dream. Just the money, thanks. And please don’t embarass us by reminding the rest of the country you exist, please. You might scare “swing voters.”
3. As a result of being ignored politically, our own primary election turnouts tend to be pretty low, since the big-name race is over by the time we vote. This low turnout in turn allows the loonies from Howard Jarvis and the christian right to get terrible initiatives snuck past a rather liberal electorate, when our guard is down and attention elsewhere.
4. The low turnout also tends to leave the state party infrastructure in decay, with GOTV only really at play in districts with especially contested races, or concentrated in Democratic strongholds like LA county and SF/Alameda Counties, or Republican ones like Orange County. Obviously this is a bigger problem than just presidential primaries, but the extra attention, excitement and funding couldn’t hurt.
5. The lack of a competitive presidential primary also frees Democrats from having to bother to campaign in Inland California, ceding the whole region to the Republicans, and reifying a coastal-inland divide that is far more complex in reality than the political CW would have you believe.
6. Finally, since California’s political perspectives never enter into presidential campaigns, the candidates that ultimately emerge in either party’s oracular spectacles in Iowa and New Hampshire never have to justify themselves politically to Californian voters, or take our perspectives seriously. This neglect doesn’t just hurt California, but also the country as a whole (of which we are, after all, a significant fraction).
Were the Feb. primary to actually come to California, it could potentially:
1. Lead to a record-high turnout, which could benefit Democrats depending on which state initiatives get on the ballot.
2. Invigorate the state party with the efforts of god knows how many Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns trying to GOTV.
3. Result in Democratic candidates actually campaigning (hell, just setting foot in) the Central Valley, and making a case for voting Democratic to our long-neglected region. Jerry McNerney got real traction in ’04 when he started campaigning in earnest in the San Joaquin valley by paying serious attention to ag, water and job issues, and offering a Democratic alternative to the failed Republican status quo; the Democratic party would do well to follow in his footsteps up and down the valley.
4. As TV ad prices go through the roof (one major drawback), some candidates might even try to go the old Dean grassroots route, getting California out of this rut where our entire political discussion happens one-way and on television, in the form of cheesy attack ads. Hey, could happen ( i’ve got my utopian side, i’ll admit).
5. Keep the races in both parties alive, as California’s diverse electorate gets wooed by multiple canddiates with different approaches. The longer the primary goes on nationally, and the more parts of the country get to have a say, the more democratic and politically inclusive the process becomes..
6. Finally, presidential candidates would actually have to come here and speak to the America that is California, instead of just ignoring us or taking us for granted while jabbering on about “the Heartland,” as if the rest of us are chopped liver, or un-American, or both. The California experience(s) deserves a place in our nation’s political conversation, and our diverse electorate deserves a say in the direction our government goes, before the general election. Not just the handful of wealthy donors who fund both parties in the current setup, but all of us, from farmers in Bakersfield to farmworkers in Imperial Valley, from liberal suburbanites in Silicon Valley to libertarians in the foothills, from dockworkers in the Bay Area and Long Beach to loggers in Redding, and the thriving communities of immigrants in every community up and down the state.
Will there be problems with it? Yes, especially in how the process of campaigning in the many expensive California media markets will have on an already out-of-control orgy of campaign fundraising. In the end, though, I think we’ll come out ahead, and the national presidential primary process will be the better for it. New Hampshire and Iowa should not decide the nation’s candidates, and Californians ought to have a say, for a change.
One way to cut down the sticker shock and voter fatigue of fitting another special election into the schedule might be to just move the whole primary to February, instead of just the presidential one.
