Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

I'm really surprised how many takes I've been seeing against staggered primaries lately, *especially* this year. It's extremely expensive to run a national campaign, and most of the candidates simply wouldn't be able to compete in a national primary day

This is especially relevant this year, when we have two candidates who can completely ignore this. The early states give candidates a chance to prove their viability, see a fundraising boost, and move onto a national campaign.

That isn't to say this is the best option, but in the absence of more sweeping changes to the system, simply saying "we should have a national primary day" would result in a race between Bloomberg, Steyer, probably Biden, and maybe Sanders

That's not to say the staggered system couldn't be improved, either. There's really no reason for the delay between the first four states, and it'd be nice to have the first results come from some more demographically representative states like NV and SC

And most of the staggering beyond that is completely pointless. IMO we should have the initial few states on one day, super tuesday, and then the rest of the country on one day, all roughly one month apart with a debate between.

The other thing a national primary day would do is increase the likelihood of a contested convention, which would mean superdelegates end up deciding the nominee. It is much better to see the field winnowed by Super Tuesday than this outcome.

Unless we use ranked choice voting which would solve the contested issue.

https://twitter.com/sgrif/status/1229556918160543745 … Sure, but we need to make ranked choice voting happen first. Removing staggered primaries by itself will only make things worse