GOP Nomination: Race or last man standing?

by David Crockett

OK, it’s time for my quadrennial rant against the contemporary presidential nomination process. No one would think it reasonable to declare a winner in a hundred yard dash after one step, or a marathon race after less than a quarter of a mile. Nor would we want to set the NFL playoffs or NBA championship field after a one-game regular season.

But that’s what we do in presidential nomination politics. On Tuesday, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary. This is the first primary in a long calendar of primaries that stretches into the month of June. True, Romney won the first contest in Iowa last week – but no convention delegates are awarded at the precinct caucus level, so the only firm delegates Romney has won so far are those from his victory in New Hampshire – a grand total of seven.

Yes, you read that right – he’s won seven delegates. He needs 1,144 to secure the Republican nomination. I know math is tough the first week of the new semester, but seven delegates works out to a whopping 0.6 percent of delegates needed for the nomination.
Which means there is 99.4 percent to go.

So, why do I say “game over�? Since the modern nomination system was established in the 1970s, every eventual nominee for both major parties has won at least one of the first two races in Iowa or New Hampshire, except for one – and that was Bill Clinton in 1992, who declared a moral victory by coming in a close second in New Hampshire in the wake of draft-dodging and womanizing stories. Also, no one who has won BOTH of the first two races has ever been denied the nomination of his party. Finally, at the time of this writing Romney is comfortably ahead in the polls in South Carolina, the next primary just over a week from now.
The only thing that can stop Romney now is a YouTube clip of him beating his kids or torturing cats. And if you have access to such a scene, you should email the Gingrich campaign – they’re on the hunt.

So, what can we expect? In all likelihood, South Carolina will end the Huntsman and Perry races. Gingrich and Santorum may limp on, but neither has the money and national organization to compete with Romney, unless all of the current Gingrich-Santorum-Perry-Huntsman supporters coalesce behind one candidate. Ron Paul will do what Ron Paul does best – make a lot of noise in a losing effort.

All of which means that by the time the Florida primary rolls around at the end of this month, we may be finished. Ron Paul will play the nuisance for a few more weeks, but the real choice will be over. Of the 2249 delegates at stake in the GOP nomination race, about 87 will have been chosen – under 4 percent of the total.

This means, of course, that those of us who live in Texas will not have a choice come the April 3 primary. But that’s nothing new. I have been voting in Texas primaries since 1984 – this will be my eighth round – and my vote in the presidential primary has NEVER mattered. Ever. Not once. The race has always effectively been over by the time it got here. Some wiseacre will no doubt suggest that I change parties, since the Obama-Clinton race DID matter in Texas last time – but that was the great exception that proves the rule. In 2008 we witnessed the highly unusual spectacle of two very well-funded titans willing to battle to the death. The rest of the Democratic candidates followed script and exited very early in the calendar.

That’s really the big lie about the process. The current system was designed after the disastrous 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago in order to make the nomination more open, fair, and democratic. But because of all sorts of perverse incentives and unintended consequences, very few people have a say in the process. Candidates spend a year or more raising money and campaigning, only to see their money dry up when they fail to achieve excellence in one early contest. The nomination is secured not when a candidate wins the necessary number of delegates, but when the rest drop out. And that usually happens very quickly.

The result is a two-year election cycle that diminishes the popular legitimacy and constitutional authority of the president, deflects his attention from governing to campaigning far too early in his term, and contributes to a perpetual campaign season in national politics. We often get an overly-long and fatiguing general election campaign that starts as early as March, when most democracies manage to compress their contests into a few weeks.
No one would design such a system from scratch. At the very least, the old-fashioned smoke-filled rooms had the virtue of truth-in-advertising.