Who Will Choose This Year?
Primaries or Conventions
Voters were not able to choose Howard Dean as president in 2004, nor could they vote for Bill Bradley in 2000 or Colin Powell in 1996. Yet each was considered at this point a year ahead of those elections to be the front-runner for his party's nomination.
Their failure to emerge as their party's candidate was due to a reality overlooked every four years at this time. The reality is, to put a decent turn on a crude phrase, "stuff happens."
Because of the time span until the conventions and election, a likely blase voter population could make 2008 the best year ever for an inde- pendent candidate to mount a campaign for the White House.
There could be a major twist in this reality for the 2008 election, be- cause the determining primaries are being crammed at the beginning of the election year. In the past, we often did not learn the party's nominee until May or June. This year's two candidates are likely to be determined four months earlier.
The expanded period between the primary that determines a party's nominee and the convention at which the selection is made official opens another fascinating scenario.
A candidate who dropped out of the race after the early primaries could keep his or her hat in the ring until the convention. Because the added months offer far more possibilities for something to go wrong with the would-be nominee's candidacy, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, the two best-qualified in the Democratic race, or Chris Dodd, a close third, or someone else could still run a quasi campaign within his own party to position himself as the best replacement for the primaries' nominee.
Those replacement candidates could do that by keeping in touch with and wooing the delegates from states where delegates are not absolute- ly committed to their primary's choice. That should not require much of a war chest either.
"Stuff happens" candidates also could resume campaigning after the primaries, spreading their message as far as funds will let them, to build some popular support to influence changeable delegates.
Technically, the votes cast in the primaries only determine which candidate has the most delegates at the party's convention, usually held in July for the out party, August for the party in the White House.
But there is another element rarely considered because it never had to be. The Democratic and Republican parties at the state level deter- mine how delegates will be apportioned to the candidates of their party. Some give the winner all of the votes, others a ratio reflecting the primary vote, and still others reserve some delegate positions to be filled not by voters, but by party bosses.
So which journalist, analyst or other election campaign hanger-on is going to be the first to examine the rules in each state to see what hap- pens if "stuff happens" to the primaries winner between the vote in the clinching state and the convention, likely a six-month span this year in- stead of two or three?
What happens if something comes up about the yet-to-be-nominated candidate that makes him or her unelectable, but the candidate refuses to quit before the convention?
And what happens if an also-ran or two decide not to accept the pri- mary choice and know they have six months to try to persuade the con- vention delegates to choose one of them instead? How possible is that?
