I don’t often diary because I seldom have any topic that I want to rant about at length, at least not without provocation. (Today is actually an exception, but that topic is a guaranteed flamewar, so I’m letting it pass.) But I do often have some simple thing that’s bugging me, so I’m going to start posting the one that bugs me most every Sunday.
Primaries. There are a lot of problems with primaries, but the one that seems to be most topical right now is that states that hold their primaries early in the season have a disproportional influence on the process, while the states that have late primaries may as well not hold them at all. There are two obvious simple solutions to this problem:
- Hold the primaries in all fifty states on the same day.
- Randomize the order of the states.
Both solutions have some equally obvious drawbacks, #1 being that candidates with big war chests at the start of the season would have an even larger advantage than they do already, and #2 being that it doesn’t really solve the problem and might in fact make it worse.
But as Republican voters are always slow to grasp, if the problems are the world were simple, simpletons like them would have solved them already.
So how would you make the primary system fairer, more representative, and harder to game?