By Lauren FitzPatrick
GateHouse News Service
Mike Boland looked across the Mississippi River from East Moline and felt a little jealous of his early-voting neighbors and the wide choice of candidates they would have come primary election day.
So Boland, an Illinois state representative, co-sponsored the bill to move his state’s primary day to Feb. 5, also known as Super Tuesday, from the third week of March.
“I think by moving it up we did get more of a say-so in who’s going to be the final candidate,” he said.
For all six states that bumped their primary elections or caucuses to Feb. 5, the tactic worked, say the architects behind the move. Voters in those states – Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Colorado and New Jersey – turned out in higher numbers than usual and also were able to make a real choice instead of staging a coronation of the obvious nominee.
Republican turnout broke records in 11 states, including Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri and Oklahoma, according to an American University study.
And Democrats broke voter turnout records in 12 states, including Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri and New York, the study reported.
Early voting means power
A lot of Illinoisans enjoyed having a legitimate choice.
“This is a history-making election,” said Glencoe resident Leonard Thigpen. “For a black guy like me, to see a black man have an opportunity to be president – bring it, guy.”
Colorado State Sen. Brandon C. Shaffer, a Democrat who helped move up that state’s primary, said early states also saw more of the candidates. Colorado was visited by Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Hillary surrogate Bill Clinton.
That’s why so many states rushed to the head of the primary season, said Bernard Ivan Tamas, a political science professor at Illinois State University.
“The thing with the states is, you gain more power by how much candidates have to compete,” he said. “All these other states were getting left out.”
Limited choices
Voting early in a compressed primary calendar, Tamas said, is “better for the states because they can get more stuff from the presidents … (and) better for the party because they want to squeeze it in, to get it over with and get the insurgents out of the way.”
Even so, Feb. 5 voters had a limited field of candidates. Republican Rudy Giuliani left the race the week before, throwing his support behind John McCain. And John Edwards also dropped out, leaving only two choices for Democrats.
“I thought more would be hanging around by the time it got to us,” said Boland, who admitted his other motive was to support the local contender. “Part of the reason was to help Barack Obama, our home-state guy, and that actually did work.”
Still, some voters didn’t like their choices at all.
Mattia Nanfria, of Evanston, didn’t vote.
“I cannot make up my mind between which of these bunches of idiots to vote for,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in the crop.”
Obama is too “wet behind the ears” to earn her enthusiasm, she said. “I’d vote for Obama 10 years from now,” she said. “I used to like Hillary, but that was 10 years ago.”
Oddly enough, the day of mass voting ended up deciding nothing on the Democratic ticket.
Clinton and Obama still need to double their delegates to secure the nomination.
After Tuesday’s split verdict and looking at a lot of divided victories in the states coming up in the next few weeks, Clinton’s campaign advisers expect the nominee will not be chosen until the party convention this summer.
Political strategy key
Some observers think compressing primary dates is going to complicate issues by simplifying candidates’ messages to their bottom lines. The more people candidates have to reach, the less personal and the more expensive their campaigns become, said Dale S. Kuehne, a political scientist at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire.
“Super Tuesday is a problem,” Kuehne said.
With such tight bunching, political strategy supercedes all, he said.
“If any state of political consequence (votes early), what you have is not a face-to-face, person-to-person campaign. What you have is a media campaign that’s going from one media event to another media event,” Kuehne said. “It’s television advertising, and it’s high-profile events in which the purpose of the event is for the televised audience and not for the people in the room.”
Contributing: Sun-Times News Group
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