The national audition

TWO GREAT FEARS loom over the competition for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations in 2008. One is that the race will end too soon. The other is that it will never end.

These seemingly contradictory concerns aren’t a sign of political schizophrenia. They are a rational response to two changes transforming the way the parties pick their presidential nominees.

On the one hand, the candidates are now running at full speed earlier than ever, as they engage in what amounts to a national audition for the presidency: an unprecedented, public competition for donors, endorsements, support from activists and media attention that began almost immediately after the 2006 midterm election.

On the other hand, the amount of time reserved for voters to actually render a verdict on the candidates is shrinking as the primaries and caucuses are compressed into a narrower window early next year. With half a dozen states planning to vote in January, and at least 21 states scheduling their contests for “Tsunami Tuesday” on Feb. 5, it is probable that both parties will pick their nominees in little more than a one-month blur -- and that the process will be concluded fully nine months before the November election.

Together, these developments raise the incongruous prospect that the longest nomination race in American history will end with a rush to judgment. They also threaten to shift power over the selection of the nominees from rank-and-file voters back toward political insiders -- partly reversing the most important modern change in the way we pick our presidents.

Party insiders -- donors, elected officials, local bosses -- dominated the presidential nomination process for most of U.S. history because they controlled the appointment of state delegations to the party nominating conventions. But after insiders engineered the selection of Vice President Hubert Humphrey over antiwar champion Eugene McCarthy in 1968, the Democratic Party reformed its rules to shift decisive control to delegates chosen by voters through primaries and caucuses. Republicans followed suit.

Those reforms, first instituted in 1972, created a new nominating system with two distinct phases. During the year before the voting, candidates assembled campaign organizations, raised generally modest amounts of money and courted voters in diners and living rooms in the critical first two states of Iowa and New Hampshire. This period was often described as “the invisible primary” because it unfolded with relatively little public attention beyond those two states.

That attention clicked in during the second phase -- the actual voting in primaries and caucuses. During the 1970s and 1980s, this period typically sprawled from Iowa in January through mega-states such as California and New Jersey in June, offering voters as much as five months to measure the contenders after the first states winnowed the field.

This system also allowed lesser-known candidates to catapult themselves into contention with strong showings in the first states. Jimmy Carter was at 4% in a national Gallup poll -- behind seven other Democrats -- before victories in Iowa and New Hampshire ignited his march to the Democratic nomination in 1976. Democrat Gary Hart, scuffling along at just 3% in national polls, had raised so little money before New Hampshire in 1984 that he was forced to take out a second mortgage on his home to buy TV ads there. But after he stunned front-runner Walter Mondale by winning New Hampshire, Hart generated enough cash and support to battle the former vice president step for step until falling just short in June.

Starting in the late 1980s, this system for picking presidential nominees began unraveling as more states moved their primaries and caucus contests to the front of the calendar in the hope of maximizing their influence. This year’s changes accelerated that frontloading process to the point where meaningful voting could be compressed into as little as four or five weeks in the winter.

Frontloading in turn has compelled candidates to intensify their activity in the year before the voting. At the same time, the proliferation of media outlets focused on the race -- on the Internet, talk radio and cable TV -- has created a supply-side demand for more visibility. So has a financial arms race that is pressuring the candidates not only to raise more money but to raise their profiles in ways that help attract donors. The result is that the candidates are already jostling -- through debates, policy addresses and pointed exchanges -- at a level formerly unseen until the eve of the actual voting.

Together these changes have transformed the invisible primary into the national audition, and steadily reduced the actual voting -- the period in which rank-and-file voters exert the most influence -- from a marathon to a sprint to a spasm.

This new path to the presidency is not without benefits. Whether measured by the number of donors, the size of the crowds at campaign events or the online throngs flocking to the candidates’ pages on YouTube and MySpace, the number of Americans actively engaged this far from the first voting is probably unprecedented. And for those who are engaged, the national audition is providing unparalleled opportunities this year to prod, poke and measure the candidates.

Changes such as these have convinced Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist with a futurist bent, that the emerging primary system is an improvement. “The process is opening up; I don’t think it is getting more closed,” said Rosenberg, president of the advocacy group NDN. “It seems to me a healthier way of doing this. The more people get asked to participate, the more they are participating.”

That’s true -- but the costs of this new system could be substantial too. Veteran Republican pollster Bill McInturff notes that, although surveys show that the overall level of interest is up, they also show that voters outside of Iowa and New Hampshire are not displaying “the intense interest that we’re seeing in the early states.” Although the first candidate debates have drawn up to 3 million viewers, that’s a small fraction of the 20-million-plus voters who have participated in past primaries.

That means that for all the frenzy underway now, millions of primary voters in the big states probably won’t fully tune in to the race until the voting begins in Iowa. For those already riveted by every turn in the contest, the race may seem interminable by the time the nominees are chosen; for everyone else, the race literally may be over almost as soon as it starts.

There’s another cost. Iowa and New Hampshire offered opportunity to dark-horse candidates like Carter and Hart partly because it didn’t cost much to compete in those states, but mostly because voters were willing to take a chance on candidates who had not demonstrated substantial national support. It’s not clear that is true today. Because the national audition so heavily emphasizes national poll results and the fundraising competition, voters in New Hampshire and Iowa are being bombarded with messages from the media about which candidates are “viable” and which are not.

As a result, candidates who are not seen as front-rank national competitors face a steeper hill in Iowa and New Hampshire than outsiders did in an earlier generation. “The idea that you can isolate out these small states from the national conversation is an antiquated way of looking at politics,” Rosenberg said. “Essentially, every election is nationalized.”

To the extent that even the voters in the early states are being influenced by perceptions of national viability, power flows to those who shape those perceptions -- primarily the donors (who decide the fundraising competition that has become a crucial yardstick of strength) and the media, which devote far more coverage to candidates they deem viable than to those they do not.

The new system isn’t bringing back the bosses’ smoke-filled room, but it is increasing the clout of the air-conditioned television studio and the elegant drawing room in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. And it is presenting dark-horse candidates with something like a closed circle. Even in the initial states with the power to confer national viability, voters appear increasingly inclined to reward only the candidates who have already demonstrated it, in part because those are the only candidates they hear much about in the national media.

Voters in the first states could still toss a wrench into this system by elevating a candidate from outside the first tier. But everything in the process -- the disparities in media attention, money and credibility -- appears stacked against such a breakthrough.

“I think the window for a breakthrough candidate is still there, but it is much, much narrower,” Hart said. “To replicate [now] what I was able to do is virtually impossible.”

The new way of picking presidential nominees is creating vibrant opportunities for any voter who wants to participate in the political process -- as a volunteer, a contributor or just a viewer. But it does not appear that those opportunities will extend to selecting a nominee who has not been sanctioned as viable by the new generation of power brokers orchestrating the national audition.