Global Courant
It’s summer in California, a time when thoughts turn to sandy beaches, balmy nights and, under certain circumstances, the significance of the state’s March 2024 presidential primaries.
It has been more than half a century since California played a decisive role in choosing a Democratic or Republican candidate.
The last time was in 1972, when George McGovern’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey after a protracted fight sent the South Dakota Democrat to a crushing defeat at the hands of President Nixon.
That same year, a 29-year-old upstart named Joe Biden won a surprise victory in Delaware to become the youngest member of the United States Senate. (Biden turned the required age 30 a few days before his swearing in.)
Ron DeSantis wasn’t even born yet.
That’s a long, frustrating time for California to cede the spotlight to the likes of Iowa and New Hampshire — states that have about the same population as Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively.
Obviously, size doesn’t matter. The Iowa-New Hampshire axis has been rooted at the front of the nomination calendar for the past few decades, giving voters tremendous influence over which candidates fall by the wayside and who go on to the many contests elsewhere in the country.
Yet hype and hope remain spring forever, so every four years that comes up in California this time will be different, that the state, showered with attention, will finally exert its weight and assume the role of king that has eluded its many millions of voters for so long.
Don’t count on it.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, President Biden will be the Democratic nominee for 2024, and California will do nothing but ratify its roster on March 5 and pad the number of delegates needed for its term on top of the ticket.
(Right now, the Democratic calendar is a bit of a mess. Party leaders are scrambling to figure out how to implement the president’s plan to push Iowa aside and kick off the South Carolina nomination process, which Biden’s gasping campaign reviving in 2020, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire.)
On the Republican side, California will vote on the same day as a dozen other states, including Texas, North Carolina and Virginia. So once the candidates leave Iowa and New Hampshire – which still hold the leading positions in the GOP contest – they will be spread veneer thin from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts.
If you expect to shake hands with Mike Pence in downtown Alturas or watch Donald Trump flip pancakes in Brawley, as you can catch a presidential candidate in just about any pinpoint town in Iowa or hamlet in New Hampshire, sorry.
However, it is not for lack of trying.
Over the years, the timing of California’s presidential primaries has intermittently surfaced as an issue in Sacramento. (Although not in the most recent session.)
Beginning in 1992, the date bounced around several dates between February and June, as lawmakers sought to elevate the state’s relevance beyond its usual role as an ATM spent elsewhere.
All in vain.
That’s because changing the state’s low presidential campaign status requires a number of feats beyond the power of even the most powerful legislative supermajority.
For starters, California is physically immense.
Placed on a map, the state stretches from Maine to South Carolina. That is a lot of ground for a candidate to cover and takes a lot of time. (Forget all the imaginative talk about breaking up California into smaller chunks. That’s not going to happen.)
So the best and most efficient way to reach the largest number of California voters is through television advertising, which is extremely expensive. An advertising dollar goes much further in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as South Carolina and Nevada, so it’s not hard to figure out a campaign’s bang-to-buck ratio.
The only way to make California more affordable and attractive for a presidential candidate to compete in earnest is to have a legally mandated discount rate on TV advertising. (That’s another nonstarter.)
What also works against California is the frontal nature of the presidential nomination process.
A candidate must win early to gather the momentum needed to catapult into the nationwide campaign that begins once voters have had their say in the opening contests.
John Kasich, a Republican congressman from Ohio at the time, put it succinctly.
“I’d love to campaign in California,” he said during a 1999 stop in Bel-Air. (He was, of course, out of sight of most voters to raise money for his long-awaited bid for the White House.)
“I can’t even think about that until I get out of Iowa and New Hampshire,” Kasich said. “If I Die in New Hampshire. . . there will be no California except holidays.
There was no California.
Kasich didn’t even make it to Iowa or New Hampshire.
If you think California could push itself by pushing its way forward on the calendar, consider what happened in 2008. The state moved its vote to Feb. 5, and nearly two dozen other states converged on the same date, negating California’s impact. and making Iowa and New Hampshire even more important for candidates who want to escape before the national ballot.
The bottom line: California will almost certainly be overshadowed again in 2024 by hotly contested presidential elections in other, much smaller states.
Yet there is some consolation.
Go watch a technicolor ocean sunset. Take a walk among the giant sequoias. Enjoy the granite majesty of the Sierra.
You can’t do all those things in Iowa or New Hampshire.
