Local Primaries
Apparently one of the New England states had a local primary election yesterday, whose purpose was to choose a few delegates to go to a presidential nominating convention. The convention itself strikes me as a quaint curiosity, a vestigial bit of ceremony with no real use in the 21st century.
The trill that people can get out of a local primary surprise me. When people thought that the results would be Candidate Y with 36% of the vote ahead of Candidate Z with 34%, and it turns out instead to be X (36%) over Y (34%), is this really huge, huge, HUGE? You might guess what I think from the way I ask the question.
Now, from my attitude you might erroneously start thinking that I am of the opinion that none of it matters. Perhaps I even think that there's no difference between the candidates, or that it doesn't matter who gets elected.
Well, that's utter rubbish. I do believe that it's important who gets elected president. Just as one example, witness the devastation to the ship of state wrought by the results of the previous two presidential elections.
Politics is seemingly necessary and of some importance, and it clearly makes a difference who gets elected as president. However, it is not of all-consuming importance. It is not so important that we should talk for days about one candidate's hair cut nor another candidate's moment of almost producing a single tear in her eye. Of course, we're aware that people often prefer to argue vehemently about things that don't matter much, largely as a way to avoid arguing over things that do matter.
Nor is a primary election important enough that I feel the need for week-long tracking polls, updated every ten minutes. Perhaps I have too much patience, but all last week my reaction was that the results of the primary election would be known on Tuesday night, so why waste so much time and emotion over polls trying to guess who might when when the actual results would make it all moot?
I suppose the best answer must be that it generated so much excitement that when the expected results change by a couple of points one can call it huge, huge, HUGE and pretend that something had actually happened. But, in fact, nothing much really happened. Some sampled statistics had become a too believable allegory for a great metaphorical fight between Y and Z. I suppose it kept the consumers of continuous new headlines pacified and off the streets.
It does, I suppose, feed into the emotions of those poor party voters who are worried that their primaries come too late for them to affect the choice of nominee. This one escapes me, too, since I imagine that people would vote for the candidate that they think is best, and the one who gets the most votes wins. In that case the winning candidate can be seen by everyone when there are not enough remaining votes to count to affect the outcome for the losers.
I keep forgetting, though, that most votes seem bent on trying to guess which candidate is most likely to win so that they can vote for that candidate. Everyone loves a winner! So, perhaps the order of primaries has some effect in the big feedback machine of gather delegates.
Why, then, don't we have a national primary, with all states doing their delegate selecting on the same date? Even better, I find quite appealing using a new system of voting, perhaps the one where we have a big field of candidates and on election day everyone ranks his or her three favorites, with the election going to the weighted top-vote getter. It's like having a run-off and final election all at one time. Saves money, too.
But I didn't start out to identify problems about our two-party system, or party primaries, or obsessive political reporting, or to try to find answers for the problems. Really, I just wanted to complain about primary hype and too much pseudo-news coverage for anyone's good mental health. My hope, of course, was to write about the NH primary in a way that I thought might help me escape accusations that I was just another poor blogger obsessing on the topic.
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on Wednesday, 9 January 2008 at 22.11
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There's always room for a different take in the blogosphere, and this definitely different and interesting.
Now for some contrariness. I don't get all worked up about pre-primary polling, especially regarding Iowa and New Hampshire. What's more, and I suspect like many voters in those states, I think the respective electorates see the pollsters as unwelcome players that inevitably affect the outcome. Thus, there's every chance many a vote is altered to show the pollsters up as wrong.
Re: the N.H. primary. In fact, pollsters had Obama winning by 10 to 14 percent before the fact. So his 3 percent loss to Clinton represents a sizable change in outcome. That's true if pre-primary polls were at all accurate, anyway.
I suspect if you were Obama or his campaign manager, you'd look at the unexpected change in fortune as, if not huge, pretty big and not at all pretty.
A general observation. Primaries are sort of like steps in a very steep stairway. If one or two is missing or unreliable, you can still get up and down. If two or three more go missing,
watch out.