It makes sense for the Florida and Michigan delegations to be sanctioned by the DNC, as has now happened. If the Democratic Party is going to win elections, you can't have states capriciously violating agreed-on rules. But an equally critical reason to dock the states delegations is that for a relatively unknown challenger like Obama, taking on someone as massively visible as Clinton, in-person campaigning is essential, and he had no chance to do it there. Obama's campaigning has played a critical role in every contested race in his once-underdog fight, both those he won, and those where he closed the gap, though lost.
In Wisconsin, for instance, Clinton led Obama by a 10 to 20-point margin throughout last fall, and continued to lead through December. By mid-February, Obama took a narrow lead, but only after he began seriously campaigning did he open up his eventual 17-point margin. The same was true in Virginia. Obama started in late October was down by 24 points down, opened up a 15 to-18 point margin after he won Iowa and South Carolina and held his own on SuperTuesday, then ended up winning by 28 points after he visited enough key cities to get his message blanketing the media. Major states that Obama lost had a similar pattern. Clinton was ahead by nearly 30 points in Ohio in October, and by 21 a month before the primary. Obama closed the gap to 10 percent, and the gap would have been narrower still without the interventions of Rush Limbaugh and Clinton's spurious NAFTAgate charges. The same process occurred in Pennsylvania. A month before the vote Clinton had a 19-percent lead. She ended up with 9 percent. Part of this was the strength of Obama's get-out-the-vote efforts, efforts he had no chance to exercise in Florida. But voters also got the chance to see him on their local media and in their local communities, and this made a major difference, even with the emergence of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. The more they got to know Obama, the more they liked him.
I'm not saying that Obama would have necessarily beaten Clinton in Florida (though I think he would have in Michigan). But her mid-January leads were no greater than those she held at a similar point before the Pennsylvania and Ohio primaries. With a chance to give people a sense of what he'd done and what he'd stood for, plus an election people knew would count, there's every reason to think Obama would have cut Clinton's 17-percent margin in half, if not more. With Obama demographically far more competitive in Michigan, and the state's current polls showing him running as well or better than Clinton against McCain, I think he'd likely have won there.
Not having the chance to fully campaign also hurt Obama in key states with fully legitimate elections. For instance, he had time to make just three stops in California between the Iowa victory that marked him as an unarguable contender and the SuperTuesday primary, and only one stop in New York. With greater exposure, he likely would have closed both gaps. That's especially true given that California's early voting rules meant that as many as half the California ballots may have been cast before Super Tuesday--which means that many people voted before the Ted Kennedy endorsement, before the campaign stops Obama was able to make, and before his massive Los Angeles Oprah rally three days before the election. A new Field poll now finds Obama leading Clinton by 13 points among California Democrats, a 23-point shift of buyer's remorse from Clinton's original ten point victory.
But while I believe SuperTuesday was created in part to help insider front-runners against outsider challengers (it also originally emphasized southern states, to promote a more conservative politics), the elections held on that day still represented the will of Democratic voters at that current moment. For elections held with no direct exposure to the major candidates, where many voters stayed home because they knew the results would be meaningless, and where in Michigan, Obama was not even on the ballot, you cannot say the same.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, and Soul of a Citizen. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles
Need I go on?
- The Democrats (for better or worse) allowed themselves to be taken hostage on a Republican bill that provided for paper trails in electionss (how could the Dems refuse?) and which also moved the election date.
- BOTH candidates were on the ballot tho neither candidate "technically" campaigned there -- Clinton did make a private fund-raising event and Obama aired an ad in a "different" market which was certain to be seen in Florida.
Here's what we know about Michigan:
- The Michigan Democratic Party applied to move their election to a time closer to Iowa and New Hampshire's because New Hampshire always gets to go first and presumably that's unfair because Michigan comes first in the alphabet (ask any 2nd grader).
- Clinton left her name on the ballot even though she said in New Hampshire that the votes didn't count. The other candidates removed their names and the Michigan Democratic Party didn't see a problem with that.
Here's what we know about all primaries and caucuses in retrospect:
If we knew then what we know now, everything would be so much different.
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Hillary Clinton has more democrats voting for her than Obama, yet with the non-uniform rules from state to state, we have allowed the republican party to influence the results and therefore the nomination.
If Obama can not unite the democratic party and in fact he and his supporters have divided it more, how can he unite the entire country?
Change we can live without.
Instead Sen Obama has played nice, yet the Clintonians are treating the primaries like a NFL rivalry and are willing to dismiss the vitality of this nation by rooting for the other team (McSame). I would be embarrassed to file behind such supporters who are entirely drunken on entitlement
That way, the lesser known candidates would actually have a chance of competing and people in smaller states would actually have a voice. Also, barring a landslide, the nomination would still be up in the air until the very end, rather than being decided at the beginning of February, only one month in to the race. What a novel concept - allowing voters to make an informed decision.
Of course, campaigning in Alaska in January would really suck, but you do what you gotta do.
I think it works fine like it is, but it takes candidates willing to respect the process and states willing to play by the rules
This year, the DNC had a plan to make sure that we didn't run another Kerry. He became the front-runner early into the primaries. Without competition, he wasn't properly tested or vetted. And because of that, we LOST.
So the DNC crafted a nominating schedule. It took them a YEAR to do it. The plan was this:
Make the first four states small ones. Four states that had a decent mix of demographics. Let them get up close with the candidates. Make sure that no candidate has the opportunity to become a front-runner without being tested and vetted.
Then mix in medium/larger states. Drag out the competition so that more (if not all) states have a say this election. Make it a REAL competition, not a cake-walk. Whichever Dem that makes it will have been weighed and measured.
It was a good strategy. Just compare this year to the past ones. More states counted this year than EVER. And both candidates? Have been beaten mercilessly by the media and the public. Both candidates are more ready than Kerry EVER was. The DNC DID THEIR JOB.
Now if only MI/FL had've been team players. But they wanted fame. Screw the bigger picture, they wanted to have an "impact".
Ironically, had they stayed in line, they would've had a more significant impact than those four "early states" combined.
Good job, MI/FL! *applause*
and if rules are more important that votes then the committee has to explain two things:
1) what rule gave the committee the right to take 4 delegates from Hillary Clinton (delegates that had been duly elected to represent her) and give them to Obama.
2) what rule allowed the committee to give the 'uncommitted' delegates to Obama.
answer: NONE.
the rules (Rule 11) provided that the sanction for violating the schedule was that the Committee could take 1/2 their votes (Rule 20).
instead of applying the rule to take 1/2 votes, the committee last august decided to impose the extraordinary sanction of taking all their votes and created the mess that resulted.
american citizens voted. no committee can take those votes from them. we know the outcome of those contests. both primaries were certified according to law by the secretaries of state of the state of FL and MI.
I certainly doio not KNOW the outcomes of those elections ( in michigan 41% of people who KNEW that the primary was not supposed to count, still went out to vote AGAINST Hillary, 238,000, and 38,000 more wrote in votes that were not counted), as I know that in order to have a fair election, candidates have to be able to campaign, and people need to know that their votes are supposed to count. Maybe hillary can still win florida for Gore in 2000 though I don't remember her making any fuss, or being around when the congresswoman (tubbs?) needed just ONE SENATOR to sign a challenge to the Ohio/general election results in 2004. I guess she didn't care so much about the votes then, when her job was safe, and the result left her future unblocked.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a definite start date for national primary campaigning that would run for a couple of months, include debates and rallies and town hall meetings all over the country, culminating in a national primary?
Let them make their case to us but cease making some of us more equal than others due to our geographic location.
I prefer a system where the candidate has to actually meet and talk to people, not get ad execs to make good ads.
And then, in the Federal Election, it should be popular vote only and the Electoral College should be completely abolished.
Thus, no one state or region would have signifiantly more clout or visibility (read Iowa and New hampshire).
Doesn't anyone believe decisions have consequences anymore??
Barack Obama has been a household word since 2004. And he DID campaign in Florida.
There are tons of people on this board who didn't know who he was. Obviously, people in California didn't know who he was.
A household word? On what planet? Obviously you're trying to suggest that he didn't deserve the opportunity to campaign, or that the florida elections were somehow fair. Nice try, but you're really reaching here.
A household word? Maybe where you're from.
As for the Florida bit - he didn't campaign. Ads ran on a national television station.
That's far different from being Hillary Clinton, Wife Of President Bill Clinton.
She had all the cards stacked for her at the beginning. Florida wasn't a fair election. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to suggest that it was.