California Plan

For people who check facts

The U.S. presidential primary season has been successively shortened since the advent of "Super Tuesday" in 1988. Some people claim that the current primary system is unfair, because it places undue emphasis on the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, which they claim are not representative of the nation as a whole. The "front-loaded" schedule also requires candidates to campaign in many states simultaneously, giving an enormous advantage to the candidates who raise the most money. Proposed by aerospace engineer and political scientist Thomas Gangale in 2003, the California Plan would return the presidential primary season to a more relaxed schedule. Fewer primaries in smaller states would allow grassroots campaigns to score early successes and pick up steam. The plan is currently being reviewed by the rules committees of both the Democratic and Republican parties.

In the California Plan, the primary/caucus season would be divided into ten rounds, and each round would be two weeks apart. For the first round, any combination of states or territories totaling eight districts would be randomly selected. For the second round, the "eligibility number" would increment to 16. For each successive round, the eligibility number would generally increment by eight, until the final round would consist of states or territories totaling 80 districts. Every two weeks, the delegate prize would get larger and larger, until nearly one-fifth of the delegate total would be at stake in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Because California is so much more populous than the other states, this baseline design would allow the Golden State, which has 53 districts, to vote no earlier than the seventh interval, in which the eligibility number is 56 (8 x 7). In the best case, California would not be able to hold its presidential primary until more than 45% of the nation had already voted, and on average it would have to wait for 59% of the country to vote ahead of it.

The modified schedule "re-shuffles" rounds 4 through 10 into a new sequence: 7, 4, 8, 5, 9, 6, 10. This allows the four most populous states--California, Texas, New York, and Florida--to vote as early as the fourth round. Since only eleven percent of the American electorate votes in the first three intervals, these large states can figure early enough in the delegate selection process to have as meaningful an input as any state.

The California Plan is designed to begin with contests in small-population states, where candidates do not need tens of millions of dollars in order to compete. A wide field of presidential hopefuls will be competitive in the early going. A "minor candidate's" surprise successes in the early rounds, based more on the merit of the message than on massive amounts of money, will tend to attract money from larger numbers of small contributors for the campaign to spend in later rounds of primaries.

However, as the campaign proceeds, the aggregate value of contested states becomes successively larger, requiring the expenditure of larger amounts of money in order to campaign effectively. A gradual weeding-out process occurs, as less-successful candidates drop out of the race. The goal is for the process to produce a clear winner in the end, but only after all voices have had a chance to be heard.

Within the proposed system's static structure of escalating stakes, the scheduling of presidential primary elections in specific states is random and dynamic from one quadrennial cycle to the next. Thus Iowa and New Hampshire are not always first. Any state or combination of states amounting to a total of eight congressional districts could be in the first round of primaries and caucuses. This could include such ethnically diverse jurisdictions as American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, and Maryland. These jurisdictions have large proportions of people of color, and 17 of the 38 "first round eligible" jurisdictions have poverty rates above the national average. Opening the first contests to this field of jurisdictions would empower demographic groups the current system marginalizes, for Iowa and New Hampshire are mostly white, rural, and middle-class.

Table of contents

1 Types of primaries
2 List of primaries
3 Related articles
4 External Links

Types of primaries

List of primaries

External Links

Presidential Primary Reform