There has been a good deal of activity on the presidential primary front lately and the West has been right in the thick of it.
The most recent development is a recommendation to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from its "Commission on Presidential Nomination and Timing."
That commission held its final meeting Dec. 10, and its recommendations now go to the DNC?s rules committee.
The most controversial recommendation would allow one or two states to hold caucuses between Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus and New Hampshire's early-bird primary. This possibility has New Hampshire all in a froth, but more on that later. A few mechanics are in order first, just to understand the game.
First, even though most of the action is currently on the Democratic side, this is not fundamentally a partisan matter, and there will be plenty of Republican action in due time.
Second, the role of the national parties is limited, because they can't make law setting primary dates or tell state parties when they can hold caucuses.
What the national parties can do, though, is to control how many delegates any state can send to the national convention. (That's why the DNC action now moves to the rules committee.) The national party rules can either penalize a state for holding a primary or caucus at the "wrong" time or reward it for picking a "good" time. The DNC commission's recommendations do both.
The proposed rules change would allow one or two state parties to hold presidential nominating caucuses between Iowa and New Hampshire without suffering a delegate penalty, as they would under the current rules. This is what has New Hampshire in such an uproar. (I was even asked to participate in a call-in show on New Hampshire Public Radio, where I did my best to soothe the fears of the "Live Free or Die" folks.)
The reason so many Democrats have wanted to dilute Iowa and New Hampshire's influence in the nomination process is because neither of those states reflects the diversity of America (and especially not the ethnic diversity of the Democratic Party). The DNC commission wants that diversity reflected earlier in the hope that it will help their party choose a candidate with the broadest possible national appeal.
If this rules change is adopted, then one Southern state and probably one Western state would be permitted to hold January caucuses without losing delegates. Nevada seems to be the frontrunner for the western slot, although Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado may be in the running.
Mike Stratton, the Colorado Democrat who helped engineer Ken Salazar's election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, has served on the DNC Commission, where he has taken the lead in advocating the region's cause.
Speaking of the possibility of an early Western caucus, Stratton claimed, "We had, for the West, a great success here."
A very early caucus in one Western state might indeed help to focus national attention on Western issues. But in those terms, the greater promise lies in the ongoing effort to coordinate several Rocky Mountain primaries or caucuses on or near the same day.
Those efforts were very much in evidence a week before the DNC commission's meeting, when the entire DNC met in Phoenix Dec. 1-3. There, Stratton, along with Democrats for the West, mounted a major effort to rally support for a coordinated western primary or caucus. They distributed hundreds of lapel stickers and circulated petitions that Democrats for the West later posted on their web site.
This effort, like the bipartisan Western Governors Association resolution adopted in 2004, aims at bringing together as many of the eight Rocky Mountain states as possible. This would be an early set of primaries or caucuses (the current target date is Feb. 5, 2008), but it would follow New Hampshire and it would (barely) fall within the "window" where the DNC's rules do not impose penalties.
But there's a catch here, and it's one that could put Western solidarity to the test. A little-noticed feature of the DNC commission's recommendations would prohibit (or punish) any group of more than five states holding primaries or caucuses in the same week. This is an understandable effort to even out the primary season, but Westerners should think twice about supporting this rules change, since regional solidarity is key to making a Western primary effective.
Unless there is a critical mass of Western states involved, the effort of coordination would hardly be worth the trouble. And the worst scenario would be one where the least populous Western states are pushed to the sidelines by the bigger ones because of something like a five-state-per-week cap.
Maintaining a reasonable amount of regional solidarity over the next few months will be a major challenge. That was already obvious in Phoenix, where the chair of the state Democratic Party supported a regional caucus or primary, while his Republican counterpart worried that Arizona's influence might be diluted by sharing a primary date with other Western states.
Neither party has a monopoly on such concerns; Montana Democrats helped kill an early primary bill in the last session of the Montana legislature. Their concerns, like those of Arizona's Republican chair, were perfectly legitimate either from a partisan, a single-state or a financial perspective.
The question is whether the broader interests of the region will manage to trump narrower but real concerns. So far, the West is continuing on the path toward a regional primary, in spite of all the tempting detours. The last two weeks took us farther along that path.
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