Does South Carolina have too much, too little, or an ok amount of influence on who gets nominated?

[The Mikado]

Is this about the Republican Primaries or the Democratic Primaries?

SC rarely misses on either side. They got the GOP winner wrong in 2012 and that's the only time in the modern primary era. They got the Dem side wrong in 1976, 1984, and 2004. SC has a much better record of picking the winner than either IA or NH on either side. That's a pretty impressive track record and shows why people should take the SC primary deadly seriously on both sides.

[The Mikado]

?

The options are flawed.

There is no need to have indicated, in parentheses, whether a respondent identifies as “R,” “D,” or “I.”

Answer to your question:

The Democrats, who rigged their 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential primaries, and other races in between those years, and will likely continue to rig their at least their future presidential primaries, value South Carolina greatly. It serves their desire to get a rightwing candidate to win there with the goal that that candidate will also go on to win the nomination.

In general elections, South Carolina is aligned to the Republicans. It would take carriage of 31 or 32 states, at a minimum, for a winning Democrat to carry South Carolina. (They haven’t carried beyond 28 states since 1996.) The Democrats schedule the state near the front of the primaries schedule to help their abilities to control precisely who ends up with the nomination.

Why are you only talking about Democratic Primaries when both parties have an early South Carolina primary?

This question is about SC's influence on the primaries of both parties.

And your contention is insane, by the way. SC's early status is not something the parties imposed on it, at least it isn't any time recently as SC has been early for decades in both parties and states like keeping calendars consistent with the two parties as it saves them the burden of paying for two different primaries. There are always a few states that are different between the two but you'll never see a ton of states decide differently on dates between R and D primaries, and the SC primary is a pretty key one to the Republican Party.

SC was already early on both sides way before 2008 when the whole "first four" thing started and Nevada was added to early. SC was one of the main early states as far back as the 1996 GOP primaries and has been ever since. This idea that the Democrats in 2016 or 2020 suddenly decided to push SC forward for nefarious reasons has no basis in reality, especially because the RNC is equally responsible for keeping SC in the early window and, in fact, pushed it into early status in the first place! (W's win over McCain in 2000 in SC basically secured him a lead he never relinquished and was a pretty dramatic moment that solidified SC's early state rep...Gore/Bradley was basically over by then)

[The Mikado]

I think Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina have far too much influence. Unless every state votes on the same day we are disenfranchising voters in states that vote too late because the race might be over. Millions of Democrats (who we expect to vote in the general) have no say in the primaries wtf

Get rid of caucuses. Every state votes on the same day with ranked choice voting. Pretty simple of you ask me

If you get rid of the calendar system, then yeah, this is a good idea. Everyone voting on the same day is a pretty good strategy.

I do take issue with the one round RCV idea, though. For something like this where you might have a LOT of candidates, a runoff is way more practical, because you could go from having a ton of candidates to only two for the second round. With a one round system, you might never even get to see the top two candidates on a stage alone together making the choice clear.

My ideal system is a two round primary. First round is first Tuesday in March, if top candidate breaks 50% they're the nominee. If not, top two runoff third Tuesday in May. This creates two and a half months for a dedicated runoff between two candidates. So at most, by late March, you'd be down to a mere four major party candidates (two Rs and two Ds) and at least, just a straight up two nominees. This is way easier for people to focus on.

If you really want to keep an RCV element in, you could make the first round (if no one hits 50) keep the old 15% cutoff, but nationally, and just have the second round be RCV between all the surviving candidates who broke 15%. That way, you'd still likely have at most 3 (maybe 4 on a really wild year) people advancing to round 2. 3-4 candidates is still way easier to process than dozens. Under this system, maybe (given polling/Super Tuesday etc), maybe you get Biden/Sanders/Warren/Bloomberg all advancing to round 2, eliminating the rest of the field. That's a pretty tight pack and the debates wouldn't be a wild cattle call.