Some eye regional primary plan with caution

Despite a resolution passing out of the Colorado House 36-29 in support of a presidential regional primary plan that had bi-partisan support, some Colorado politickers are still resisting the idea as bad for Colorado and bad for politics in general.

“One of the prime arguments made for the plan is to slow everything down,” says one Democratic activist, “but my sense of it is not that things are going too rapidly under our current system, but too slowly. We are a year into this election. I think there is campaign fatigue setting in. I hate to see what it’s like by November.”

The regional plan endorsed by the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) “would divide the country into geographical regions (East, South, Midwest and West) and spread out the primaries and caucuses over a time period of four months [for each region], beginning in March of each cycle,” says the NASS. “The voting order of the regions would then rotate every four years.”

Iowa and New Hampshire would keep their traditional roles of kicking off the voting “but only as a warm-up to give lesser-known, under-funded candidates the chance to establish themselves as genuine competitors in the larger, regional competitions that follow,” says NASS.

While the Colorado House resolution in support of the plan included an amendment that gives Colorado the right to choose delegates either by primary or by caucus, some see the regional plan as a way of getting rid of the caucus system eventually.

“I’d be suspicious of it,” says one Colorado Republican. “I think the tendency would be for politicians to try to play to the biggest votes, like California, and it would make the caucuses kind of old-fashioned.”

Others come to the opposite conclusion: “I think you’d see places like Montana, Nevada Colorado and Wyoming more tightly embrace caucuses,” because taken together they’d provide a counter-weight to a delegate-rich state like California. A candidate with less money to spend would be able to compete in those smaller western states.

One problem with that theory is that Colorado does not select national delegates by caucus. So far, Colorado has only held a non-binding presidential preference poll. For Republicans, delegates to the national convention are selected by the delegates to the state assembly who are then “morally bound” to support the winner of the presidential primary held in August. The Democrats select delegates at the state assembly based on 52 pages rules. You can read them right here.

In either case, a change in the primary or caucuses dates to accommodate a super regional primary would add little in Colorado, especially for the GOP.

“All you have to do is look at the McCain campaign to see what’s wrong with the system in Colorado,” said one GOP consultant in DC. “They ignored Colorado, because it was just a preference poll. There was nothing for anyone to win there. And they instead put their money into winning Florida.”

So, in other words, if you want fix the presidential nomination process, you got fix the state first.