Your "electoral" processes are backwards and insane.

[theweaselking]

fengi explains why caucuses are pointless, why spending money on them is pointless, and why allowing them to define who continues to stand for election is REALLY pointless.

Short version: The *loser* of the last Chicago mayoral election, which had record low turnouts, got more votes than the *winner* of the record-high turnout Iowa caucuses - and yet somehow based on that, in the whitest of white states and the most hick-filled of hick states, that dropped a half-dozen candidates out of the running?

Comments

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Let me start by saying Fengi is exactly right, and I am not debating him at all. The caucus and primary system is a vestigial backwater system born of the days before telegraph wires and rapid communication, with a dollop of "States Rights" versus Federalism from 1800 thrown in for good measure.

However, most of the candidates being "dropped out of the running" were never in the race in the first place with an eye to actually winning their party nominations. In every election cycle, there are a number of candidates who run because they want to get certain issues out in front of the voters, and force the contending candidates to acknowledge and respond to those issues. This is why it's a big deal when the frontrunners block the fringe candidates from debates -- those fringe candidates force the frontrunners to address things the people might care about but the frontrunners don't have good answers for.

After the first contest or three, most of those candidates drop out of the race, because the frontrunners have the legitimate ability at that point to claim they're nuisances instead of legitimate candidates, so press coverage and the like drops to next to nothing. Several of these candidates had no intention of staying in the race regardless of how they did in Iowa.

One of the interesting elements of the Republican race this time out is Guiliani's strategy. He's focusing on a major delegate state -- Florida -- to the exclusion of the early bellweather contests, and he's trying to follow that up with a major win on Super Tuesday. As a result, he's likely to do the same kind of numbers as the spoiler/issues candidates in the early contests, but it's hard for the frontrunners to claim he's irrelevant given his polling numbers in those states. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that report after report of single digit percentages all through January will simply kill any chance Guiliani would have in those states he's focusing on, making this a futile gesture.

Which doesn't make Fengi wrong in any way -- this is a screwed up system nine ways from Sunday, and it's very very strange that next week I'm going to have a much greater impact on the future of the country than someone from Texas or California, by virtue of my living in Political Launchpad, New Hampshire. However, it's a touch out of place to blame the tiny percentages of farmers and white people for knocking out Joe Biden or Chris Dodd. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd weren't expecting any different.

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that part of the reason the system is screwed up is because it's tacked on. It used to be that you went to the Democratic national convention in the middle of the year, and the delegates who came to the show chose the nominee. The decision to start holding primary votes was seen as a way to get more of the general public in on the action. The reason that New Hampshire has their vote so early in the process is because they held onto the primary system when every other state was abandoning it, and kept it when it came back into fashion. The caucuses are stupid because they started off as a standard get-together of the state's party members to discuss and align - the delegate voting process was hammered on later.

I agree to a small extent with what he's saying, but the main reason I dislike his analogy is because he's comparing a party nomination to a general election. So there are more people in Chicago than in the whole state of Iowa? That wouldn't surprise me. It mostly sounds like he's whining that candidates with otherwise sound policy (Dodd) can't win elections, which has nothing to do with the process and more to do with the media and the machine it runs by. I mean, John Edwards, supreme policy dork that he is, still managed a third of the delegates. Allowing Iowa to go first with a convoluted process of voting is not the best way to nominate a candidate, but this sounds more like sour grapes than real analysis of the issue.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Yep. Our entire election process, from the choice of candidates to the actual positions, is fraught with vestigial weirdness and accidental policy, all perpetuated not to choose the best leaders for the offices, but to keep the parties dominant.

We need serious reform, true, but need to address the little things, like how to make electronic hackable balloting seriously disappear forever.