One primary, one day …

If there’s one thing that absolutely must be fixed it’s our stupid primary system. It brings choosing nominees for President down to the level of American Idol or the X Factor. In short, it’s a popularity contest where people select based on ignorance and oppose out of prejudice.    

Worse, the current primary structure rewards narrow-focus candidates appealing to micro slices of the electorate who only want a candidate who agrees with them 100%. You can’t be like most of us – with mixed views depending on the issue – and expect to win in the primaries.

If you believe the Constitution guarantees your right to own a gun, you can’t also be in favor of reasonable gun controls. If you support cracking down on illegal immigration, you can’t also be in favor of providing a logical, legal path to citizenship for those already here.  If you are pro-choice, you can’t also want any controls on abortion providers.

The primaries are too either/or, just to appease particular groups.      

It’s at the root of how messed up our entire political process has become.

It causes candidates – and the media – to spend outrageous amounts of time and money wooing voters in places that simply don’t reflect the wants and needs of most Americans.  I mean, how often do ordinary Americans in parts of the country outside Iowa talk about ethanol and wind energy subsidies? Have you ever discussed the farm bill over a beer with your friends?   

The primaries are just a grand opportunity for locals to fleece outsiders, which they do, jacking up the rates for hotel rooms, doubling restaurant prices, gouging for 2-3 times the regular rate for everything. Local media gets a big payday from outsider money, people get temp jobs managing volunteers stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors. Venues get booked.  Flyers and mailers get printed.  Everything – including the pitch – has to be customized for each state primary.

It’s a huge boost to local economies.   But it’s all unnecessary bullshit. 

The money and attention are why states so jealously guard their individual primaries. The money matters most, however. Iowa’s Republican governor recently said he feared that if Hillary loses in the Iowa caucuses – again – yet this time goes on to become President, she’ll strip Iowa of its “first-in-the-nation” contest, which would cost the state millions. 

Please note that his biggest fear if she is elected is losing his state’s place at the trough.

And trough is what it is.  Unless there’s a mass shooting or aliens from outer space land there, what news organization in its right mind would send camera crews and reporters to Iowa in the dead of winter otherwise? 

Similarly, I love New Hampshire, but no one would campaign there – much less spend millions there – if it wasn’t one of the earliest primary states. It nor Iowa are hardly representative of the rest of the nation, racially, ethnically, occupationally, or by almost any other metric.  

But the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primaries are accorded the same reverence as prophets in the Old Testament, when they should be treated with as much seriousness as a fortune cookie. The last Republican Iowa caucus winner was Rick Santorum. The last Democrat Iowa caucus winner was Obama.  So what?  Same nomination odds as a coin flip. 

Despite the media crapola about “real America” reflected in the early primaries, these don’t mean a damn thing especially now. While the media and political wonks bloviate on about possible winners and losers and how this will affect the race, the real winners are the local economies.

Man-on-the-street interviews with possible Iowa caucus attendees may focus on how much they wish this were already over so the barrage of ads, mailers, and flyers would stop. Yet as Tucker Carlson noted this morning on Fox from Des Moines, a lot of Iowans wish the caucuses lasted much longer solely because all the money these bring in. 

This is a costly useless tradition that should end.  It doesn’t yield the best candidates; only those who survived the primaries by pandering to their most extreme followers. Make no mistake – the most polarized are the most likely to vote in primaries. 

The moderate middle of the electorate isn’t represented.   

The solution is simple. One national Presidential primary on one day – sometime in June of the election year; top two vote getters face off in November for a winner-take-all matchup.  

Could those be from the same party?  Sure. Improbable, yes; impossible, no.

To get into the one-day primary, only candidates polling more than 10% nationally by the end of April would qualify; not 10% of their party, but 10% overall among all registered voters. 

I think this would weed out the radicals and party establishment candidates.  That’s who loves the primary system we have now.  And why we keep getting lousy Presidents.