Democrats Getting Closer to Dumping 1st of the Election Season Iowa Caucuses

[SteveRogers]

Let's just get rid of all caucuses in one fell swoop, and improve the whole nominating process while we're at it. Here's an idea that I've talked about several times before, and because of some criticism I received for my original idea, I decided to revise it a little bit. We need a constitutional amendment adopted to create a schedule for when states can hold presidential primaries.

Considering the Constitution has nothing regarding political parties and therefore even further the idea of political party primaries in it, how are you going to do that? Here's everything your amendment is going to do:

First, you need to establish what political parties are. That's going to have a basket of unintended consequences and many Supreme Court cases.

Second, you need to establish what political party primaries are. That's likewise going to have a basket of unintended consequences and a few Supreme Court cases.

Third, you have to dictate to the parties (which are private organizations) some kind of "thou shalt nominate this individual if receiving _____ in the primaries", which means you need to come up with the winner mechanism or how votes are counted, which probably means unallocated delegates due to dropouts or an RFK 1968 scenario are going to be dictated how they'll vote similar to how Electors in the Electoral College are now instead of "our guy lost, we're going to back the winner". This is an unintended consequence.

Fourth, you need to come up with a schedule agreed on by mostly all that is going to be in place for decades unless further amendments come.

Fifth, you've just established the political calendar for every political party in the country, not just the Democrats and Republicans, and dictated to all of them that they must use primaries when third parties largely don't due to state law in most cases not giving them access to one and also because they're highly susceptible to entryism in primaries for non-party members, which is why forcing parties to have open primaries de facto violates their 1st Amendment right of association. But if you state all political parties must use primaries on a defined calendar, you've forced every state elections board in the country to give every political group a primary. This is something neither Democrats nor Republicans want or desire. You've also effectively killed the raison d'etre for the New York fusionist parties as they would be required to nominate the winners of their primaries for office instead of co-nominating the Democrats and Republicans they choose to do so (an unintended consequence of my 2nd point).

Sixth, in light of my 5th point, you've just established political legitimacy for all third parties that follow this calendar and process, meaning they should have input to the election system and would be discriminatory if they didn't. This is something neither Democrats nor Republicans want or desire and would be an unintended consequence.

Seventh, are you requiring elections for federal office primaries to follow this calendar or just the election for president?

Eighth, if you apply this primary law to all federal office primaries from point 7, do these primary laws now also apply to special elections?

In short, you're well-meaning but your proposal is incredibly flawed out of the starting gate even before you get to the details.

Doesn’t literally every state already have laws covering all of this for elections to state offices?