COLUMN: We’re stuck with Biden and our current election system
Thanks to the COVID-19 situation, Georgians who long to have their voice heard in the Presidential primary are going to have to wait a few more months. We were already scheduled to come to the party relatively late in the process as it was, but now it feels as if we’ve been rendered almost irrelevant.
In previous years we were part of the big Super Tuesday event along with a lot of other states, but election officials decided to move our primary to later in March this year. Presumably the hope was that our state would get special attention from the candidates since we were the only state holding a primary on that day.
Even before the virus-related delay, the strategy didn’t seem to be working out as well as they probably hoped it would. The problem with holding our primary after so many other states held theirs is that many candidates drop out of the race if they don’t do well in the early contests. That has proved to be especially true this year.
The Democratic field quickly winnowed down from over a dozen candidates before the first caucus was held in February to just two legitimate contenders left standing by the time the dust settled on Super Tuesday. The moderate wing of the party quickly fell in line behind former Vice President Joe Biden after his impressive showing and Bernie Sanders emerged as the champion of the party’s left flank.
Subsequent primaries appear to have given Biden enough momentum that he’s already being considered the likely victor in the race. So our state is probably going to be a non-factor in the nomination process this year.
When people asked my opinion about the candidates over the last few months I told them I wasn’t paying much attention to the race until it got closer to the date when our state was holding its primary. I knew that some of the people running at the time would have dropped out by the time Georgia got to have its say. It’s a good thing I didn’t get attached to anyone who was still in the contest a month ago.
Neither Sanders nor Biden would have been my first choice if we had the same slate of candidates running as the folks in Iowa had to choose from in early February. Nor would either of them have been my second choice, or maybe even my third. And that is frustrating.
The process the two major parties use to determine their nominee is haphazard and unfair to Americans who aren’t fortunate enough to live in one of the “early voting” states. Those states play an unfair, outsized role in determining the legitimacy of a candidate’s presidential campaign, and the system cries out for reform.
One suggestion I’ve heard that I think has merit would be to hold regional primaries, where groups of states from particular geographic sections of the country would vote in succession over a period of months. That would allow candidates to visit one specific part of the country at a time, meeting voters in person, holding debates, and doing all the other fun things a candidate does when they’re out shilling for votes.
The order in which each region got to hold its primary would be rotated with each election cycle, making the process much more fair to the country as a whole than the current system. It would keep the same small subset of states from eliminating candidates so early in every primary season.
But for now this is the system we are stuck with, and it looks like Joe Biden is going to be the man that this less-than-ideal process is going to provide us with as an alternative to the agent of chaos who currently occupies the White House.
I think we could certainly do better than Biden, but we know we could do worse as well. For those of us who are horrified by what has happened to our country since 2016, he’ll have to do.
Bill Ferguson is a resident of Warner Robins. Readers can write him at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.
