Moving California’s primary to March would give us a voice
The United States fell from “full” to “flawed” democracy in an Economist Intelligence Unit index this year. That should surprise no one in California.
While a democracy’s most populous region would by definition be expected to figure prominently in its governance, the Golden State was largely excluded from a meaningful role in the contest for the country’s highest office. Not only did the Electoral College effectively disregard the votes of millions of Californians in the general election, but the state’s last-in-the-nation primary also allowed the November contenders to be determined by others.
Legislation to move the state’s presidential primary from June to March would begin to restore California’s rightful relevance, giving the state a greater chance of affecting the nominations. It won’t, however, solve the broader problems of the presidential primaries, which have spread across the calendar as states compete in an arms race that has made the contests longer and costlier but no more democratic.
The bill introduced last week — backed by California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and state Sen. Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County), both Democrats — would move the 2020 primary to the third Tuesday in March, the week after the scheduled date of the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary. Unlike the legislation that temporarily rescheduled California’s presidential primary in 2008, the new proposal would change the date indefinitely. It would also apply to voting for all offices, avoiding the cost and confusion of holding two primary elections in a single year.
Padilla noted in an interview that the early 2008 primary saw the state’s highest turnout for such an election in more than a quarter century. He said California deserves to be heard not only as the nation’s most populous state but also its most diverse. “It would force all the candidates for president to not just pay attention to California voters, but also to pay attention to California issues,” he said. “My priority is to make California more relevant.”
Like New Hampshire law, which allows officials to change the primary date to preserve the state’s position at the beginning of the schedule, the California bill would empower the governor to move the election to follow the Granite State’s. That state’s primary and others, along with the even earlier Iowa caucuses, have tended to move deeper into the winter months over the years. In two of the past three presidential elections,
the voting started soon into the new year.
The increasing duration and therefore expense of the presidential campaign would only be exacerbated by California or any other state jockeying for position. Nor does the Padilla-Lara proposal challenge the inexplicably sacrosanct privileges accorded to relatively tiny and nonrepresentative states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
Last year’s Republican primaries raised the additional problem of candidates with relatively narrow but avid followings — like Donald Trump — vanquishing crowded fields of candidates with potentially broader appeal who split the rest of the vote. Innovative reforms such as independent redistricting and a top-two primary for state and congressional races have been deployed to address such democratic deficiencies in California and a few other places, but they don’t cure the fundamental problem with presidential primaries: A handful of states hold disproportionate influence on the outcome.
Reformers have proposed a number of more logical, efficient and equitable plans for national primary elections. One prominent proposal — sometimes known as the California Plan — would progress from smaller to larger states but employ a rotation to ensure that all get a turn in the most influential positions. The trouble is that the political parties, the only centralized players in the nominating process, have been unwilling or unable to impose such reorganization, even when they were more powerful than they are today.
While the parties’ right to choose their nominees as they see fit is constitutionally protected, they rely on the states to run the primaries at no small expense. California shouldn’t hesitate to use its resulting leverage to push for elections that reflect the will of its people.