It appears that the national Democrats want the Mass Democrats to push back the date for next year’s Massachusetts Presidential primary, currently scheduled for March 5 (Globe story). Why?
…allowing the most Republican states to dominate the early voting would bolster the chances that a more conservative candidate will clinch the GOP nomination.
Democrats believe that the more conservative candidates would be polarizing in the national election and have less of a chance of defeating President Obama than a moderate Republican, such as Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts.
What do you think? My take: Be careful because you never know what unintended consequences will rear up. Remember all of those states wanting to push up their primaries in 2008 so they would be relevant? It ended up that the late primaries were where the real action was.
Don’t try to meddle in the Republican nomination process. You might get what you ask for, and that might end up backfiring big time.
If the national Dems want regional primaries, New England should give them one–on the date of the New Hampshire primary. There’s no reason NH and IA voters should have such disproportionate power over the process.
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p>You’re right about not monkeying with the GOP nomination process. Romney’s a lot weaker than most people give him credit for, and I think he would actually underperform compared to Pawlenty, Daniels, Huckabee, maybe even Palin.
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p>He basically has all the same weaknesses as John Kerry. Except instead of military experience supposedly saving him and ultimately hurting him, it’s going to be business experience. Ted Kennedy figured out how to do that to him in 1994. If the Obama campaign folks can’t, they need to find another line of work.
This is the sort of stuff Democrats should never do as it undercuts our message in multiple ways.
Most Massachusetts voters are unenrolled and want to get their say in the 2012 primaries.
Our current STATE primaries are too late!
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p>Maybe split the difference, and have a single primary in April? Saves money for the cities and towns, would be AMAZING primary turnout for state races, etc.
Multiple primaries are expensive. Either we should go the week after New Hampshire, as the candidates have already saturated the Boston media market to reach Southern NH – or we should have a May primary for all offices.
The same day. Massachusetts has more Dem primary voters than NH and should have a bigger influence on who the nominee is.
… but no way would that happen. NH is so dedicated to being first in the nation, state law is set to force the primary to move forward if anyone else gets too close.
Eventually their law will have ridiculous consequences and they’ll have to cave.
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p>But I wonder: how did the DNC members representing Massachusetts vote on the primary scheme that screws us on delegates if we try to move forward? I’m curious about whether our representatives on the DNC are representing us or representing their buddies on the DNC, and I don’t really know how to get that info.
After all, Massachusetts could pass a law requiring the MA primary to be 7 days before the NH primary… which is required to be before the MA primary.
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p>No, the real problem is the beltway kowtowing. There are lots of interesting proposals, ranging from regional to closest popular vote to random to hybrids.
So we pick the same 2008 date as California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois and a boatload of other states – then wonder why we were ignored. Can we get out of “super” Tuesdays in which we are overshadowed by bigger states?
On the day before 2008 primary, Clinton was in Worcester and McCain and Obama were both in Boston.
In 2008, we voted to apportion delegates instead of having winner-take-all, and would up with visits like Fred Thompson in Chatham. Barnstable County has a reliable heavy primary turnout. Mass still has a decent number of delegates, and being able to split the pie is an attraction.
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p>Me, I’m trying to figure out how to bring Donald Trump in for RTC fundraisers before GOP voters tell him he’s fired…