An afterthought?

by John Wynne, Politics NC, February 23, 2016.

An afterthought. That’s what the presidential primaries in North Carolina look like right now.

Sure, things could change. Perhaps Marco Rubio gets some momentum going into Super Tuesday and wins a handful of states. That would certainly make North Carolina important. But barring significant events, it looks like both Trump and Clinton will romp in their respective primaries. North Carolina will merely affirm the decisions of other states.

It wasn’t always going to be this way. Originally, the legislature set a date of just three days after the South Carolina primary. But the national Republican Party refused to cooperate and the date was changed to March 15th. Had the initial plan held up, we would have been swarmed with candidate visits – and our vote yesterday would have received national attention and perhaps influenced the direction of the race.

Mainly, the problem is timing. March 15th is not exactly early in the process. It’s after Super Tuesday, the date that tends to decide nominating contests if they haven’t been decided already. As far as states go, North Carolina is in the middle of the pack. And in our crazy nominating system, if you’re not early, you’re irrelevant.

An additional problem is the fact that North Carolina is not a winner-take-all state. Being a populous state, we have a bunch of delegates. But proportional rules lessen our impact. If legislators had to do it all over, they would probably make us winner-take-all, which was the original plan.

But the main thing is getting our state to go out as early as possible. To some extent, that’s limited by the decrees of the parties themselves. We need to fix our primary process. Otherwise, we’re always going to be in the shadow of our neighbor to the south.

Once again it looks like along with the vast majority of states in the union, North Carolina is going to be an afterthought. That’s unfortunate for the millions of people who wish they could influence the nomination process but are denied a voice by our archaic and arbitrary presidential nomination system.

http://www.politicsnc.com/an-afterthought/