Super Tuesday: How It Started And Why by John Gizzi

All right -- it’s over now. The biggest one day primary event in U.S. history, one in which more than twenty states either held presidential primaries or commenced the selection process of national convention delegates at party caucuses, has ended. The Democratic battle royal between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues, and John McCain moved a big step closer to the Republican nomination.

For many Republican Party leaders, at least, February 5, 2008 is a day of infamy. Those I spoke to made it clear, regardless of the outcome of the November elections, there was going to be a movement to scrap future “mega primaries.” Indeed, “Super Duper Tuesday,” as pundits dubbed February 5th, could well be the last straw in a process of more primaries and less party conclaves conventions to choose national convention delegates -- a process that was launched, in fact, by Democrats, with Republicans following along.

Kris Kobach, Republican chairman of Kansas, appeared to be speaking for many of his colleagues when he told me: “This Super Tuesday demonstrated just how disastrous it can be when the candidates try to cover the entire country at once. They barely contact each other, like ships passing in the night, each rushing off to the states that offer the most strategic value to that particular candidate.”

As is the case with many other state party leaders, Kobach argues for conventions and some form of election-year timetable. There is much to be said for a staged process, where all of the candidates are in the same state at the same time. It allows us to see them directly competing for the same votes, and it allows the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates to emerge over time.” (Kansas Republicans scrapped their primary in favor of a caucus/convention system in 1996).

Hence the move for a timetable among RNC members for 2012 and beyond. “I think there will be a greater desire for some kind of "normalized" timetable,” said Michigan State Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, “There has also been more discussions of moving away from "open" or "semi-open" primaries and having activists/Republicans nominate their candidate. Conventions and caucases could become more popular.”

Anuzis has taken the lead in a promoting a plan in which states would participate in a lottery for dates on which to hold their delegate selection. They would be divided into regions and held in a timely way, with regions and their accompanying states going successively in a period of months. Front-loading would be out of the question. In December, Anuzis met in Washington with RNC Rules Committee Chairman David Norcross to discuss the plan.

There are other variants of plan Anuzis is pushing. “A regional construct,” is the way Connecticut GOP Chairman Chris Healy characterized the desired alternative to the present system by his colleagues, “and any variant is fine with me.”

If one wants to find out how Republicans got to the point of front-loading, primaries over conventions, and Super Tuesday, the answer is easy -- the Democrats.

In their 1967 book “The Republican Establishment,” authors Stephen Hess and David Broder pointed out that the following year, the bulk of Republican delegates were chosen by conventions and caucuses rather than primaries. In fact, their appendix lists fifteen states that would hold primaries in 1968 -- beginning with New Hampshire on March 12 and ending with Illinois on June 11th. A similar operation and calendar was used by Democrats.

But in 1968, in large part to satisfy anti-war dissidents who felt cheated that Hubert Humphrey was going to be nominated without having entered a single primary, the Democratic National Convention narrowly passed a resolution calling for a commission to study the nomination procedure and recommend changes. The commission would be headed by George McGovern -- whose rules changes permitted him to become the Democratic nominee four years later -- and tremendously expanded the number of primaries rather than state caucuses or conventions.

Republicans by and large had no problems with their system but were, in effect, dragged into the primaries en masse system by state legislatures controlled by Democrats and eager to curry favor with the national party. Republican rules were amended in 2000 to permit any state party that wished to decouple from the state-mandated primary and go back to a convention or caucus to choose presidential delegates. Although few state parties have actually done this, this “escape clause” could well be used, as Anuzis suggests, should one of the “regional construct” plans for choosing delegates in 2012 be adopted by the GOP and legislatures not go along by changing the primary date.

As for “Super Tuesday” itself, this again is a Democratic concept that Republicans simply trailed along on. In his much-read “Political Junkie” on-line column, Ken Rudin spells out the history of the mega-primary: “The idea first came into existence in 1988, four years after the Democratic debacle in which nominee Walter Mondale lost 49 out of 50 states. Mondale's landslide loss was attributed by some to his inability to stand up to liberal interest groups. That led some centrists in the party to come up with the idea of a "Super Tuesday": Primaries would be held mostly in the South. It was designed, theoretically, to result in a more conservative nominee, such as Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) or maybe even Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). It didn't happen.

“On March 8, 1988, primaries were held in 16 states, 11 of which were in the South. Gore managed to win only four of them: Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and his home state of Tennessee. Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts and hardly a conservative, carried the two largest states, Florida and Texas. But Jesse Jackson, perhaps the polar opposite of the conservatives who devised "Super Tuesday," was the big winner, taking five states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia.

“With Super Tuesday more or less a bust, there was less interest in duplicating the tactic in 1992. That year's mega-primary day came on March 10, when just eight primaries took place. Seven were held on March 12, 1996. The big day in 2000 came on March 7, with 11 primaries. And in 2004 (March 2), there were nine primaries.

This year, “Super Tuesday” again resurfaced and, once again, it was a case of state legislatures and other elected officials taking political parties along with them, courtesy of tax dollars that pay for primaries on the day the state says.

“Politicians want to be the king makers,” explained Connecticut’s Healy, “So they rolled back these primaries thinking their endorsements early would translate into delgates for their favorite candidate. In Connecticut, it was the Democratic Secretary of the State and the Democrats in the Legislature that moved it back from mid-March. This could propel many state parties to move to a convention format thereby focusing the attention on a selected few rather than the rank and file voter.”

All told, Republican party leaders agree, the system that chooses a de facto nominee more than six months before a convention and makes the convention a coronation has to go. What steps they will take to do this next year and beyond may well be a defining moment in the Republican Party.

Left out of that discussion was the Republican jiggering of the rules this year in favor of liberal Republicans by making the northeastern states winner take all and the southern states proportional.

The move away from open primaries is definitely a good thing. Why would they have done that to begin with? This isn’t something we want dems and independents deciding for us.

I have mixed feelings about the super Tuesday. The candidates criss-crossing the country doesn’t bother me, what bothers me is how the media; with all of it’s polls, can tell us who the winner should be ahead of time.

If we had all of the primaries the same day, this takes away the media’s chance to talk about all of the “momentum” a candidate has.

I wish we could do something about all of these polls too. Why couldn’t there be a ban on polls 60 days prior to a primary?

We’ve done it with political advertisements already. (Thanks McStain!)

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