California’s early primary has re-shaped the presidential race
March 16, 2007Governor Arnold yesterday signed a law that moves California’s primary all the way up to February 5. As a former California resident, I understand the motivation. It’s a huge state and yet their late primary meant that often the candidates had already been decided before getting to California. Thus candidates could afford to kinda ignore the state and its needs. Obviously in the general election California was always hugely important, but in the primaries it played second fiddle because it was late in the process.
Now it becomes the show-stopper. A primary candidate must win California, the loss of that state early in the primaries would probably be unrecoverable. Mathematically it would still be possible to win the primary without California, but the psychological effect of losing that huge chunk of votes so early in the process would cost money and momentum.
So ironically moving California up in the primaries has also upped the importance of the few January contests like New Hampshire and South Carolina. Before, if you lost those early contests you had time to re-gather and re-focus and go on to win the nomination. John Kerry did, for example.
Now that becomes impossible. California becomes this huge mountain to climb, and the only way to climb it is if you first have climbed to the top of the January contests. Whoever wins the early contests is going to be the nominee, I’m willing to bet on that.
It also means the eventual winner will be whoever can raise the ginormous sums of money needed to campaign in California. That primary is now less than eleven months away, not much time to raise a hundred million dollars or so.
Don’t know which candidate that will be on the Republican side. But on the Democratic side this dramatically improves Hillary’s chances. She’s going to be the big moneybags in the early fundraising, plus her husband easily won California when he ran.