The current primary system is ridiculous. Every year it seems the voting starts sooner and sooner because certain states want to be first. These are traditionally Iowa and New Hampshire. Still, other states who are jealous a looking to hop them. The Primaries were supposed to start on Feb 6th with Iowa until FL tried hopping the processing by holding their primary on Jan. 30th. Thus Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina had to hop back in front of them and voting happens in Iowa on January 3rd. Here is my idea to solve this problem.
Divide the states into 5 regions. I have divided the states as seen below
Some of the states don’t fit their typical region name, most notable probably is Nebraska which is never called “Southwest” but the lines were drawn the way they were in order to get 10 states in each region.
So instead of the way the current system works, each election one of the 5 regions would have the honor of being the first to vote. I did a random draw and came with the following order: Southwest, Southeast, Northeast, West, Midwest.
The nomination voting would begin on the first Tuesday in February and only 1 state would be voting that day. In the example here to Southwest would be the representative and a state randomly chosen within that region would be 1st. In my test case Arkansas won that random selection as they would be the 1st in the nation. Two weeks later states from regions 2-4 would have a state vote, in this test case West Virginia from the Southeast, New Hampshire from the Northeast and California from the West. One week after than another 3 states (CO, IN, WI). One week later, 3 more states (NM, FL, RI). So within 1 month we have completed phase 1 where 10 states have voted, 2 from each region.
After phase one is phase 2 where every 2 weeks there are 10 primaries, 2 from each region. After these 8 weeks all 50 states will have voted. 1 week later DC and all other nomination territories vote (ie. Puerto Rico, Guam).
Under this method there is fairness and the process does not get stale. Both large and small, swing and non-swing, rural and urban states get a say. It does favor the smaller states since there is more of them, but this good as smaller states typically have more retail politics.
So lets scrap the current system and use this one or a tweak of this one.
