As states play 'Me First,' primaries fall into chaos

CONCORD, N.H. -- Don't be fooled by the mild manner and balding pate: William Gardner just might be the most powerful person in American politics at the moment.

For three decades, the little-known New Hampshire secretary of State has had the sole authority to set the date of the Granite State's first-in-the-nation presidential primary — an early-in-the-year contest that has been the single most decisive event in determining who gets nominated.

Now moves by Florida and other states to get the attention traditionally lavished on New Hampshire and Iowa, which holds the opening caucuses, has created a train wreck of an election calendar and a high-stakes political showdown. It also has increased the odds that the 2008 nominations for president could be decided before Valentine's Day.

A Democratic National Committee panel voted Saturday to strip Florida of its convention delegates unless it moves back its primary from Jan. 29, but there are no signs the state will comply. If nothing gives, Democratic presidential candidates will face an unusual dilemma: commit to spending valuable time and money to compete in a beauty-pageant election that won't build their delegate count, or essentially ignore the nation's fourth-most-populous state — the one that decided the 2000 election.

Meanwhile, Iowa's caucuses, required by state law to move earlier and maintain the state's primacy in the nominating process, will be competing with New Year's Eve for attention. In any case, the crush of more than 20 states now scheduled to vote on Feb. 5 means the nominees in both parties could be apparent by the next morning.

There are other unintended consequences of the compressed 2008 schedule: The odds of a long shot winning a nomination — as Democrat Jimmy Carter did in 1976 — have gotten longer. And public financing of presidential elections, a post-Watergate reform, is effectively dead because nominees won't be able to wait until the end of summer to get federal funds and begin spending money.

Through it all, Iowa and New Hampshire are likely to be more important than ever. The momentum that victories in those states can provide will be enhanced by the rush of contests that follow.

That suits Gardner fine. He argues that New Hampshire, which has held the nation's first primary since 1920, has a distinctive political culture makes it uniquely qualified to winnow the field of would-be presidents. "There's a reason the Kentucky Derby is in Kentucky," he says in an interview in his cluttered corner office on the second floor of the state Capitol. "Is it not fair that New York Harbor always has the Statue of Liberty?"

While he's serenely confident New Hampshire will hold the first primary — state law mandates it — Gardner hasn't decided precisely when that will be. As Labor Day looms, the traditional starting point of a political season, campaigns are scheduling candidates' travel, buying TV ads, deploying field workers and devising get-out-the-vote drives based on their best guesses of when the first contests will be.

"You want to know what the track is that you have to run the race on," says David Plouffe, campaign manager for Democratic contender Barack Obama, calling the uncertainty "frustrating."

Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign, calls the jumbled primaries schedule a "huge" problem for strategists, especially since the rhythms and gaps in the calendar help determine what impact a contest has.

"From the perspective of the top-tier candidates," she says, "you're dealing with a situation where the bases are probably loaded but you don't know whether you need to hit it out of the park."

The tumble of dominoes

Brazile, an influential voice on the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee, was among those calling for the party to take a hard line against Florida. The committee voted to strip the state of its 210 delegates, the toughest penalty available, and gave Florida 30 days to set a later date for its primary.

But state party Chairman Karen Thurman says she expects the primary to go forward as scheduled.

Florida's decision to move its primary, which violated Democratic Party rules that allow only four small states to vote before Feb. 5, was like a domino falling.

South Carolina Republicans then leapfrogged the GOP primary to Jan. 19 from Jan. 29 to preserve the state's "first in the South" status. That means the New Hampshire primary would have to be set on Jan. 12 or earlier to ensure it falls a week before any other primary. Which means Iowa (where a state law requires the caucuses be held at least eight days before anybody else votes) would move from Jan. 14 to Jan. 4 or earlier.

There's more turmoil brewing. The Michigan Senate voted last week to move that state's primary to Jan. 15, and the Michigan House is slated to consider the bill this week. That would push New Hampshire to at least Jan. 8 and could mean Iowans would caucus in 2007, although Iowa Gov. Chet Culver says he won't let that happen.

"We're committed to going in January 2008," he says.

While other states moved forward to steal some of New Hampshire and Iowa's thunder, they haven't diminished the early states' importance. "What's actually happened in a strange way is the exact opposite," says Chris Kofinis, communications director for Democratic candidate John Edwards. "It really is a dogfight as to who is going to win Iowa and get that momentum and momentum is going to supplant any firewall" a candidate may have built in later states.

With just four months until then, campaigns have been forced to adjust. "For all of us that are running, this is a real juggling act," says former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Republican contender who leads in national polls.

Giuliani and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads in surveys among Democrats, initially planned to demonstrate their broad appeal in Florida and the big states voting on Feb. 5 — a group that now includes California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Now both have been forced to shift more attention, staff and money to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Among the campaign changes:

• Edwards this month moved some staffers from Nevada to Iowa because of the likelihood of earlier caucuses there. The former North Carolina senator, who finished second in Iowa in 2004, has long planned to use a win there to propel him through the contests that follow. Now he faces more intense competition in the state by Clinton and Obama.

• Obama cites changes in the calendar as the reason he's limiting the number of debates he'll participate in between Labor Day and the Iowa caucuses. (The Illinois senator already has committed to eight.) Campaign manager Plouffe says the time involved to prepare for the forums is needed instead "for engaging with voters in the early states."

• Clinton shuffled her top Iowa staff and this month began broadcasting her first TV ad of the year there, opening with scenes of a bucolic farm. "It probably looks like everything is going to get pushed up and our take is we're along for the ride," says Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee. "We're just going to play the cards that are dealt us."

• Giuliani announced in early June he wouldn't compete in Iowa's summer straw poll, leaving the field to rival Mitt Romney, but in the past six weeks or so began devoting more time to campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. He's been airing radio ads in both states since last month.

Strategists in other camps are doing the same. More than 95% of the $7.9 million spent on TV ads as of Aug. 6 went for exposure in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to TNS Media Intelligence. A study by the firm's Campaign Media Analysis Group found that ad spending was significantly more concentrated on those first three states than at this point in the 2004 campaign.

Campaigns calculate that the momentum and media attention generated from winning in Iowa or New Hampshire will allow a candidate to "hydroplane" through the primaries that quickly follow, Democratic pollster Peter Hart says.

"It doesn't give the electorate and the parties time for second thoughts," says William Mayer, a political scientist at Northeastern University and co-author of The Front-Loading Problem in Presidential Nominations, published in 2004. In contrast, under a primary schedule that would start in late January and stretch until May or June, "people have a chance to say, 'This guy won in New Hampshire, but is this really the guy we want to be our party's candidate?' "

Meanwhile, candidates who don't do well in Iowa or New Hampshire may find it difficult to break through on Feb. 5. With so many states voting, several candidates are likely to be victorious.

The biggest beneficiary of the changing calendar could be Romney, who from the start has focused his campaign schedule and media spending on Iowa and New Hampshire. While the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll this month puts the former Massachusetts governor fourth in the Republican race nationally, he leads in surveys taken this month in both early states.

"We have long planned around what we believe the schedule was going to look like" in the end, says political director Carl Forti. He says the campaign's assumptions were "somewhere close" to where the calendar seems to be heading.

Romney also might be boosted by an early primary in Michigan, his native state and one where his father was twice elected governor.

What if everyone's wrong?

If the front-loaded schedule doesn't produce nominees by Feb. 5, the big states that didn't move up their contests could be decisive during an unpredictable period. Contests are strung out through June 3: Maryland and Virginia on Feb. 12, Wisconsin on Feb. 19, Ohio and Texas on March 4; and Pennsylvania on April 22.

Long shots stand to lose

The biggest losers in the rush to hold primaries earlier: long shots.

"In the past, for an outsider candidate to succeed, he had to build momentum," says Mark Siegel, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. "He would come in second in Iowa, and money would come in, and he would be able to do well in New Hampshire, maybe even win, three weeks later. It takes a while for an outsider, a non-front-runner, to build up a head of steam." The new calendar no longer allows enough time for that to happen, he says.

"To have a real shot at winning the nomination, you have to have either some real strong early-state strength or you have to have a solid national base," says Bill Lacy, campaign manager for former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson's "testing-the-waters" committee.

Critics have unveiled proposals to change the calendar for 2012. Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman — both past presidential contenders — and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar have submitted a bill for Congress to set a rotating schedule of regional primaries that would stretch from March to June. It's based on a plan adopted by the National Association of Secretaries of State in 2000.

The current system "starts too early, costs too much, discourages, maybe, the best candidates and only a handful of voters plus media and money make the decision" of who will be president, says Alexander, who ran for the GOP nomination in 1996 and 2000.

Some Republicans are trying to revive a proposal known as the Delaware plan — it would have to be enacted at the 2008 convention next September — that would organize states into four groups by size and schedule their contests at one-month intervals, from smallest to largest.

Such proposals have been made before, and the parties have been unwilling or unable to impose abiding limits on what states do, and when. And in 2008, at least, the nominees are likely to be chosen while snow is still on the ground.

That has "doomed" the public-financing system for presidential campaigns, former DNC official Siegel says. Candidates who agree to public financing and its limits can't get the money until they are formally nominated at the end of the summer, and no candidate will be able to wait that long to begin organizing a campaign and advertising on TV.

This time, Americans should brace themselves for the longest general-election campaign in U.S. history: 10 months of TV ads, policy papers, major speeches — and attacks and counterattacks.

"I don't think there's enough mud in the Mississippi for the length of the process after Feb. 5," Brazile says.