I say third Tuesday in June..
And I respectfully disagree with this idea. September has been tried before. The problem with it is that a cadidate coming off a hard-fought primary is often broke (and exhausted) at the end of it. He or she may then be jumping into a general election against an opponent who faced no primary, maybe even a well-rested incumbent with a large war chest. The challenger then has 7-8 weeks to figure out how to talk to a whole different group of people and replenish the coffers.
June is more fair. The legislators whine about it because they say the session makes it difficult to raise money. Too bad.
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4 Responses to So when SHOULD the primary be?
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I favor doing away with primaries and effectively destroying the party system.
No surprise there right?
I’m try to calculate the harm to the citizens of the 5th if all 7 were on the ballot and the winner of the popular vote is the rep from the 5th.
the party system
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When did we devise the system?
I’d say I’m in favor of stronger political parties, but it seems too late for that. Mrs. McM.’s victory another indication that there really is no Republican Party in Ct., for example, and increasingly these entities seem to belong to the biggest-honcho elected-guy; Klinton, Rowland, Bush, Malloy… Not to say that I don’t agree about primaries (or do agree). It appears to me that the parties have been regulated to death in the interest of democracy. If I were to guess, I’d say the demise was begun or accelerated dramatically in 1972.
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McGovern recognized the mixed results of the changes that he made to the Democratic nominating convention, saying, “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Democratic_National_Convention
If we have to have primaries, June would certainly be preferable to August. But I’d much rather have no primaries at all. Let candidates petition their ways on the general-election ballots … however many there are, of whatever party they wish to be in, or from no party at all. The top two vote-getters in the general election, then have a run-off to determine the ultimate winner.
This is not an unusual arrangement; it’s been done in a lot of places. I say we give it a shot. It would certainly undermine the power of parties and their conventions/caucuses, but too bad for them … the parties are part of the problem, and if their power is diluted, so much the better for the public at large.
One of the reasons for the late primaries is Donovan. The Democrats would propose Late October primaries if Donovan lost to Rorabeck over the late-breaking corruption scandal. With only a week separating the primary and election how much trouble could he get into?