This sucks.  So now the entire election will be decided by oh, late February?

It is getting clearer and clearer the massive frontloading is being designed by the DC insiders to nominate HRC by Valentines Day. By wiring the system to get the nomination over with thirty days it eliminate any chance for a strong challenger to HRC.

New Hampshire's history of toppling the frontrunner is fueling much of this behind the scences activity by the beltway crowd. They fear real voters playing a role. With all these states scheduled on top of each other it will be about who has the best tv ads, spinmeisters and friends in DC.

There will never be another "insurgent" candidacy, the monied special interest DC based powerbrokers will now control the outcome.

When the netroots wake up in March 2008, they are going be looking around asking "what happened?" as they go put their HRC bumper stickers on their cars.

I can't help but think this is the worst possible news for Dems.  I still think the way to go is to alternate two states per week from the same area (North & South Carolina one week; North & South Dakota the next).  Move the primaries all around the country two-by-two.  You get more national exposure, you get more power to the people, you draw out the primary season.  

Now, it's going all In on one big hand.

It would certainly help Wes Clark. I believe the Alabama Dem Party has been in contact with him for over a year about running, and about an over all Southern Strategy.

Being a Clark supporter, I'm thrilled to read this.

Only one thing is for sure, this will have unintended consequences.  We can talk all day and all night about who these primary shifts help, hurt, whatever...but this is impossible to engineer.  I think any front loading just makes Iowa more important unless Vilsack runs, does well and drive out major candidates.  Any contest before New Hampshire makes New Hampshire a little less important, just a little.  It is probably harder for an unknown to rise up than in, say, 1976.  Front loading, on the other hand, might make it harder to recover if the front runner stumbles early (like Mondale in 1984).

What is lost in all the positioning, engineering & posturing is what should be most important -- how do we pick the best nominee?.  Picking the nominee for a November election in late January or early February can't be the best way to do things.  

All the first states are conservative.  Not a good way to get the base fired up at all.

I agree with the above comments.  The main effect of frontloading is to increase the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire (yes, I said increase).  The secondary effect is to make it easier for the frontrunner.

On increasing the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, no candidate is going to be spending much time in Alabama until after the New Hampshire primary.  Think about this from the candidate's perspective.  The only reason to campaign in any of these early primary states is to get "momentum" (essentially, media coverage).  The delegate totals don't cut it.  You get the most momentum from winning the first primary and the first caucus.  It makes absolutely no sense to forgo the chance of winning the first primary, to increase your chances of winning the second primary, which will bring less momementum.  Everyone will still focus their efforts on the first primary, and pay attention to the second only after the first primary is over.  It doesn't matter if the second primary is one day later or three months later.

So the result is that Alabama just cut the time candidates will be spending in that state down to one week.

Now look at things from the perspective of the voters.  They get treated to an endless round of stories about how voters in Iowa and New Hampshire really screen the candidates, have them over for coffee, atttend endless town meetings, etc.  Then they get a handful of campaign appearances by the candidates in the week between New Hampshire or Iowa and their primary or caucus.  What they do in this situation is to vote to defer to the New Hampshire and Iowa voters, who obviously have been able to see much more of the candidates up close.  With a longer period between primaries, then you see some of the fabled retail campaigning in other states, but you aren't going to get that in a frontloaded system.

All this helps the frontrunner.  Because the frontrunner's task in a frontloaded system is easy:  win Iowa and New Hampshire.  It seems the caucus rules allow condiserable insider manipulation of Iowa, so much the better.  Win Iowa and New Hampshire in the frontloaded system effectively means winning the nomination, because the other primaries become a referendum on whether Iowa and New Hampshire voters should pick the nominee (this sounds nonsensical, but actually its a referendum on the value of retail campaigning, the only retail campaigns are in those two states).  However, if the frontrunner loses he or she can still make a comeback, like Mondale and Clinton did, due to his or her large warchest and the ability to simply buy the media coverage that would normally go to the early primary winner.  A challenger can't do that, so if he or she can't win in the two early states, that campaign is toast.

Putting the money and politics involved aside...

I think it makes most sense to break the country into 5 geographic regions consisting of 10 states each:

Northeast, south, midwest, plains/mountain, and west.

Similarly, assign each state a group based on size of party population.

Set 10 primary dates starting with the second Tuesday of January and running every third Tuesday from their to July.

Select one state from each of the 5 geographic regions and as close as possible have those selections similarly consist of one from each of the 5 party population groupings.

Each primary date would have a guarenteed geographic and population diversity. Candidates would have to log more flying miles and decisions might be made by some candidates to skip particular states on given primary dates. Don't lock any state into any date. Every 4 years the population groupings are recalculated and the selections for what states get what primary dates are re-done with a guarentee that no state remains at the same place on the calendar as it appeared before. Continual rotation until each state has appeared on each of the 10 dates and then it starts all over again completely randomly.

A mathematical, non-political, non-financial, solution. Every state gets its turn and, I believe, such a 3 week, 5 state, 6 month schedule, would even out the importance of each primary date.

First dates will always be important under any scheme because they will always be barometers of who is considered a serious contender.

The diversity and 3 week pace will make it more likely that multiple contenders will last til the end (except on those occasions where an exceptional candidate is running) making the final dates extremely important.

But an actual contest of that sort will then give additional weight to the dates inbetween as a well thought out campaign strategy will make or break many a candidate somewhere in the middle.

I'll take on a couple of your points.

All of my comments are based on my belief that the party will find a way to only have approximately 5 or 6 states hold their primary/caucus on the first Tuesday of February.

In regard to candidate face time, the voters of Alabama have never had a candidate pay any attention to them with their June 8 primary. So just one week is an improvement. Frontloaded or not, the nomination was done at that point and there was no need to campaign there.

But even so, the candidates will spend more time than one week there. South Carolina had candidates visiting for months. They also had a decent sized investment by some campaigns who decided to target efforts there. Hell, the eventual nominee even had one of his eighteen campaign "kick offs" in that state.

I completely agree with all the commenters that if we end with 20 states voting the week after New Hampshire, the advantage goes to the perceived "front-runner" and its game over for any "outsider." Limit that primary to a handful of states, and a targeted campaign in a couple of those elections by someone who has a top 3 finish in Iowa and New Hampshire, can keep them competitive and alive in the process.

The DNC is developing a calendar that is going to be the worst calendar ever. There will be about 15 or 20 states voting on Feb. 5, and instead of doing something about it, the DNC is fiddling around trying to figure out whether to put a caucus between Iowa and NH. On Feb. 5, the candidate with the most money will win.  And it will be over. NH has been screaming about how frontloaded this proposed calendar is, even though it will make NH more important because it still will be the first primary. People should start listening to the one state that is consistently voting against the Washington insiders who are pushing this new, horrible calendar.

This is horrible.  The last thing we need to have a nominee by the end of Feb.  I'm not suggesting we wait until June, but geeze, give voters some time to choose.

The DNC should mandate that ALL contests must start in Feb, then sort out the order.  At least give the outsiders a bit more time!

The major problem last cycle was the mini-super tuesday in February, where 7 states had their primaries. THAT is what solidified John Kerry's victories. Imagine if the only 2 primaries that day had been Oklahoma and South Carolina? Or just South Carolina? The fact is, primaries should NOT be numerous in one day until Super Tuesday, I don't think there should be any more than 2 primaries in 1 week. That way, the primaries will not be front loaded anymore, gives a chance for insurgent candidates, but still allows for good candidates to cruise through.

What would you say if Feingold wins Iowa? I mean, afterall, he is from its neighboring state.

If you don't want a nominee in the first week of February, then call your state's DNC members and tell them to start paying more attention to what the DC insiders on the Rules Committee are doing. Which is fretting about Iowa and NH, and not figuring out how to stop the tsunami of states that will hit on Feb. 5, giving us our nominee nine months before the election.  They will tell you they are trying to lessen the influence of Iowa and NH by putting a couple of other states in there, but all they are doing is creating another Iowa and another NH.  It is a disaster.

I think it is important for people to remember that we are talking about a primary system here. When people call Iowa and NH "conservative" I am not sure they understand that it is Democrats that vote in the primary and caucus. The Democrats in IA and NH surely are not conservative.

I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. We're going to have quite a few strong candidates in 2008 (Feingold, Clark, Warner, Clinton, Edwards, and more...). Some argue that holding several primaries on the 1st Tuesday in February will increase the kingmaker status of the pre-February states (Iowa, New Hampshire, and any other early caucus states), based on the arguement that all of the early February primaries will rubber stamp the choice of these pre-February states.

This arguement is based on some assumptions from 2004 which won't necessarily be applicable to 2008. First of all, the pre-February states may not all vote the same way (as they did in 2004). Second, several strong candidates may be counting on winning early February primaries and choose not to run strong campaigns in the pre-Feb states. This may result in several different candidates winning victories on the 1st Tuesday in February, possibly including candidates who did not win any pre-Feb states. The result would be to have a number of candidates who have won at least one state by early February, making the race for the nomination more competitive, not less.

I don't expect a quick nomination in 2008, like we had in 2004. While Hillary Clinton may be the front runner from a CW perspective, her weak position on Iraq and questions about her electability will keep the race competitive. She's not going to be a lowest-common-denominator candidate that everyone can simply jump on board with (like John Kerry in 2004). I expect a competitive, drawn-out race. What do y'all think?

Small states are good places to stock the primary since it allows "insurgents" in that TV time is cheaper than than in states which border or include major television markets.

One solution (perhaps) for the DNC is to slap fundraising limits on each primary. The earlier the primary the lower the floor. That would give candidates the ability to run longer primary campaigns while still chortling party donors to keep giving. The donors would not like it, but the candidates don't have to be the villains.

One thing--

African Americans completely lack representation in NH and IA.  Adding SC or AL early will help that--

And I think you forget-- if Alabama had the first primary in 1984-- Jesse Jackson would have won the first Dem primary.

According to an article at MSNBC---

"U.S. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Democratic National Committeewoman Debbie Dingell of Michigan were instrumental in pushing for a special Democratic commission to look at changes in the Democrats' presidential calendar."

So in addition to contacting your state Dem Party, you could contact Carl Levin too.  Debbie Dingell is the wife (I think, perhaps daughter) of John Dingell, my guess is that messages to him would get to her too.