Reply #107: If we had simultaenous primaries, [View All]

[leyton]

people would be complaining about how money runs it all because primaries are so expensive. The complaint would be that the process was anti-democratic because whoever the money lined up behind would be the only one who could afford to run a national primary campaign. There'd be a bunch of whining about how Hillary Clinton bought the nomination and how little guys like Dennis Kucinich and Wesley Clark and John Edwards (or their 2008 equivalents) never got a chance because they couldn't afford to run in 50 states at once.

Iowa and New Hampshire do not always pick the candidate. They didn't pick Bill Clinton, and they didn't really even pick George W. Bush. If I recall correctly, Dukakis and Mondale and many of the candidates before them weren't picked by Iowa; they had to work a while to get their delegates. As for 2004, Kerry did get a lot of momentum from Iowa, but he also benefitted very heavily from the condensed scheduling. Had there been more time between Iowa and the rest of the primaries, we might have nominated Edwards or Clark or even Dean. So your "FACT" is really a rather wild claim.