A One-Day National Primary
On his blog The Stalwart, Joseph Weisenthal proposes a one-day national primary:
…as everyone knows, one of the big problems with politics is the tendency to address localized problems at the expense of large, diffuse populations. This is the primaries in a nutshell. You start off in Iowa promising corn subsidies, even though they’re not a good deal for everyone else. Then you go to Nevada and promise restrictions on internet gambling and then you go to Michigan and promise to “bring the jobs back” and then onto Florida where you promise greater money spent on disaster relief.
All these sound good to the voters they effect and by the time they get to the next state, they’re no longer talking about these things. So maybe we should just have a one-day national primary. It’s doubtful candidates would start making promises that benefit just one state at the expense of the other 49…
Also interesting would be a “devil-may-care” Bulworth-type politician who intentionally or maybe just through laziness pulls out the wrong promises for the wrong states, promising corn subsidies in Florida, a ban on internet gambling in Iowa, jobs in Nevada and disaster relief in Michigan.
Probably that would backfire, but if a presidential candidate were consistently off-base in every single state, he might help Floridians realize that actually, they do like the idea of subsidized corn. And Iowans might finally think, “hey, what havoc will internet gambling wreak on brick and mortar casinos? Is nothing sacred?” At the same time, this flagrant disregard for establishment thinking could paint this candidate as a refreshing radical, just what the country needs “after what we’ve been through.”
Of course he’d end up assassinated before he could institute stricter subway security in Texas.
4 years ago