Next week’s first-in-the-nation presidential contest has so much influence on who our next leader will be that Democratic candidate Andrew Yang likes to say a single Iowan is worth 1,000 Californians.
“I did the math,” he quipped at a youth event last fall, according to the Des Moines Register.
That should cut New Yorkers’ egos down to size, given that they won’t get to vote this year until April 28th, six weeks after California’s primary – and nearly three moon cycles after Iowa.
Who remembers 2004, when John Kerry had won 19 out of 21 contests by the time New York Democrats had a chance to show up at an overcrowded polling place?
Or 2012, when Mitt Romney’s only notable competition in the GOP race, Rick Santorum, had dropped out two weeks before New York Republicans could feed their ballots through a balky voting machine?
In 2020, 70% of the Democratic delegates will have been committed by the time the New York primary rolls around, according to a Gothamist analysis of the election schedule. New Jersey Democrats will be potentially even less relevant: they won’t get to chime in until June 2nd, the last day any of the 50 states will be holding a primary. Only the U.S. Virgin Islands is voting later (June 6th)
Lisa Parshall, a political science professor at Daemen College in western New York, argues the nation’s primary system in some ways disenfranchises voters in later states.
“Either they have a more limited range of options among candidates still remaining on the ballot,” she said. “Or, in the worst-case scenario, their vote doesn't matter at all because the nomination has already been determined.”
This unfairness is not by design, Parshall explains, but a result of a series of accidents, conflicting interests, and claims to primacy. The U.S. Constitution is mum on primaries, and for much of the nation’s history, they mattered little compared to the elaborate ritual of horse-trading that took place at the quadrennial party conventions. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago nearly tore the party apart, both parties began offering their rank-and-file members a greater say in choosing nominees.
Listen to Matthew Schuerman's story on WNYC:
Each state’s legislature gets to decide when to hold its presidential primary – and some, like New Jersey, keep it simple (and inexpensive) by holding it the same day as preliminary contests for congressional and state offices. Others, like New York, gamble with the elaborate system of incentives offered by the national party committees.
This year, by holding its primary after April 1st, New York gets to send 10% more base delegates to the Democratic National Convention . And it gets an extra 15% because it’s holding it on the same date as two contiguous states – Pennsylvania and Connecticut. (Delaware, Maryland, and Rhode Island are holding their contests the same day, making it the “Acela Primary.”)
Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the state Democratic committee, says he recommended the April 28th date last year to Governor Andrew Cuomo and leaders of the state legislature—all of whom are fellow Democrats.
“My rationale was based on the fact that we had such a large group of candidates, there was a good chance that not one would get the momentum to become the obvious nominee early on,” Jacobs said.
The incentives will bump up New York’s contingent to the July convention to 319 delegates, the second largest after California’s. If – though it has never happened before in the past 50 years – no candidate arrives in Milwaukee with a majority of delegates, that heft could come in handy.
“The chances are this could be quite a battle,” Jacobs said. “Everybody, everywhere is going to want to be talking to the New York delegation.”
That sort of clout is undoubtedly important to the state’s politicos on the convention floor, many of whom are anxious about losing more congressional seats with the next census. But it also confers some advantage to the average New York Democrat.
Since the party apportions many of its delegates according to the popular vote, a New York vote for Bernie Sanders will count somewhat more if it’s cast on April 28th than if it were to be cast on March 3rd, Super Tuesday.
Most Americans, either ignorant of the finer points of delegate-counting or simply faithful to the principal of universal suffrage, favor holding all primaries on the same day, a so-called “national primary,” according to numerous polls, including one from the Monmouth University Polling Institute earlier this month.
Maverick Democrats have attempted to change the system, but have largely failed to overhaul it for both political and philosophical reasons.
In the late 1970s, for instance, the party set up a commission to re-evaluate whether Iowa and New Hampshire should always go first. (New Hampshire had been holding the nation’s earliest primary long before 1968, well before it was important to do so.) But, the commission gave a lot of power to the sitting president, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, who had won Iowa and New Hampshire in 1976.
Ultimately, according to Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Primary Politics: Everything You Need To About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates, “the White House bowed to pressure from its friends in Iowa and New Hampshire.”
In general, Kamarck said in an interview with Gothamist, both Republican and Democratic leaders like the current process, even if the public does not.
“The long season allows for different voters in different states, different parties to have a closer look at the candidates,” she said. “It has happened that as the season wears on, some candidates gain favor and others lose favor. And the parties think there is something important to that.”
Kamarck, who is herself a member of the Democratic National Committee, agrees with New York party chief Jacobs: In this year’s contest, New York may really matter.
