In the 2020 Democratic primaries, California and Texas voters will be asked to cast their votes on Super Tuesday, the earliest date allowed by Democratic Party rules still bent on preserving the first-in-the-nation status of Iowa and New Hampshire. The move to March 3 will immediately transform the most populated state in the nation from also-ran to a key early battleground, but even that undersells the change: California is now a majority-by-mail state, and will actually begin mailing out those primary ballots the day of the Iowa caucuses.
That means that within a few days of the Iowa caucuses, Californians will already begin turning in their own votes for the Democratic presidential nominee. And that means campaigning is about to look considerably different.
The explosion of early voting and reshuffling of the primary calendar in 2020 could transform the Democratic presidential nominating contest, potentially diminishing the power of the traditional, tiny and homogeneous early states in favor of much larger and more diverse battlegrounds.
Iowa and New Hampshire's early placement has given the states an outsized role in influencing first perceptions of the race; glad-handing your way to a first-place Iowa caucus finish is taken as a signal of frontrunner status, even if the concerns of Iowa voters are considerably distant from those of voters in larger states, or coastal states, or urban centers, or take-your-pick. Iowa and New Hampshire are among the whitest states in the nation—again, a poor measure of the wider Democratic Party.
But it’s Iowa’s insistence on running a caucus, rather than a true primary, that is the most grating. Rather than testing the ability of a candidate to appeal to and motivate the largest collection of voters in a state, a caucus instead tests candidate's abilities to turn out far smaller subsets of die-hard believers. It allows candidates with poor fundraising and smaller staffs to compete, say adherents. Why, precisely, we should want to elevate candidates with poor fundraising, a smaller staff, or a more limited appeal remains, as always, subject to debate.
A more sensible system might rotate the primary calendar or assign per-state primary dates by lottery; until then, we're stuck with the current absurdity, in which each state, large and small, jockeys for relevance in presidential primaries at the expense of every other state's voters. So by moving California and Texas to the vote-by-mail front, what does that mean?
NBC cites political scientist Josh Putnam, who predicts it will mean a new disparity between the "have and the have nots." Candidates will need robust, expensive, and well-strategized national efforts from the get-go; as large states scramble for their share of Super Tuesday attention, candidates must scramble to appeal to voters in California and Texas, even as they make the usual Iowa county fair circuits.
I'm not sure that is the case. Certainly, candidates will now be all but required to pay requisite attention to California and Texas voters. That is the whole point. Vote-by-mail in both states means that many voters will be making their decisions within days of the Iowa caucuses, which in turn means candidates will be expected to show their faces in both states immediately after the caucuses close, if not before.
But both proportional allocation of delegates and each state’s considerably different agendas mean that the most likely outcome of Super Tuesday voters is likely to be a wash. It is possible, if a home-state favorite like Texas's Beto O'Rourke or California's Kamala Harris runs, that they will dominate those large states, but it is by no means a death knell for anyone else. And it is equally possible that a candidate with a tiny staff but widespread name recognition and appeal will nick enough delegates from enough disparate states to land themselves in serious contention.
That outcome, in which no one candidate runs away with the thing as of the first Super Tuesday primaries but, instead, a handful of candidates each come away with credible showings that further boost their credentials, fundraising, and name recognition seems the best possible one. It's what we should be hoping for, yes? A debate that lasts longer than the first couple of states to wedge themselves onto the calendar?