South Dakota's Really Smart Primary Date

Well, we considered doing what California did, which is to say, the dumb thing: moving our party primaries to early in the year.  But we didn't, and as a result you can't spit in the prairie wind without hitting someone from the Clinton Campaign.  Professor Schaff notes below that President Clinton will be spending a lot of time here this week.  By contrast the Californians, having gone late and uncelebrated for so long, moved their primary to February just in time for the first election when June became the hottest temporal real estate.  Great going!

I think we are now in the position to see what a good scheduling strategy would look like, from the point of view of a state that would like to sell a lot of hotel space and pork sandwiches to journalist and campaign personnel.  It would look like getting a hit in baseball: the trick is not to hit it here or there, but to "hit it where they ain't."  This year the best time to have a primary turned out to be last, because nearly everyone else tried to go first.  That might not be the way it is next time.  There's no point in trying to game the Republican schedule (assuming there is still a Republican Party next time).  The GOP system is well-designed to produce a nominee in an efficient manner.  The Democratic primary system is designed to avoid that. 

So long as the parties do not manage to come up with a rational, national schedule, such as SDP has long advocated, our state should wait as long as it can for the other states to schedule their primaries.  Then pick a spot on the calendar where nothing much is going on for a few weeks.  Looking at this year's schedule, and without the benefit of knowing that the Democratic contest would go on as long as it did, I would have had us share May 3rd with Guam.  If the contest were still going at that date, I think we would have gotten more than our usual share of attention.  Whoever wins Penn. would be trying to turn that into momentum, and the loser would be Hell bent to stop that momentum. 

If a lot of states tried the same strategy, it might be that a rational schedule would emerge spontaneously, as each state tried to find its place in the sun.  That's what us Darwinists call a "self-organizing system."  It's a lot to hope for, but if it should happen, I am taking credit.