Dangerous Ideas

I’m glad to hear that Hillary Clinton and John McCain won in Hew Hampshire. I hope the rest of the early primary states continue a trend of mixed results so that those of us voting later feel like we’re actually participating in the election (of course, states voting after Super Duper Tuesday might not be so lucky).

Absentee ballots are going out this week in California. Given that more than 40 percent of the voters for the last California election voted by mail, it’s possible that a huge number of Californians will vote before the results of the other early primaries are known. Which means that some voters in California might actually vote without using earlier primary results as a criteria.

For a while, it looked like once again a small number of voters would have a hugely disproportionate effect on the presidential race. Headlines kept reading like Clinton was almost out of the running and that Barack Obama was the new front-runner. I find this so disturbing. As John Edwards said today after his 3rd place finish, even after NH has voted, less than one half of one percent of the country’s voters have had a shot at this. Why should so few people determine who’s the front-runner and who isn’t? And they really can because in addition to the media, polls showed a marked difference before and after the Iowa caucuses. Fortunately, the polls did not accurately predict the actual votes.

I completely understand that the idea with staggered votes is to give smaller states a chance to have presidential candidates visit them, but is what we have now really better than a national primary? It’s always the same two states that vote first. And Iowa and New Hampshire are not exactly representative of the rest of the country (for one thing, both states have relatively few people of color voting).