Late Kansas presidential primary elections mean voters don’t get a say. Here’s a fix

Pity poor Iowa. Thanks to its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the Hawkeye State has long enjoyed a political prominence that eludes its rural Midwestern neighbors — a status that made kingmakers of ordinary Iowans, and the state a destination for every half-baked politician with delusions of grandeur.

No longer.

Democrats now plan to start their 2024 presidential nominating process in South Carolina. The Palmetto State gave President Joe Biden his first big victory on the way to his party’s nomination in 2020, so there’s some sentiment involved. Democrats also believe that South Carolina looks more like its racially diverse coalition of voters than Iowa, which is 90% white. It’s time to give Black voters “a louder and earlier voice in the process,” Biden wrote in a letter advocating the change.

Iowa Democrats are seething. There’s an opportunity here, though. If the party is going to suddenly and radically shake up the political calendar, it’s time for Kansans to step forward an ask a question:

We don’t need to go first. Can we not go so close to last, though?

There’s some personal frustration at work for this Sunflower State native. I went into the 2020 presidential election cycle rooting for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But I never had a chance to vote for her. Kansas held its election — by mail, thanks to COVID-19 — on May 2. Warren had dropped out two months earlier after suffering a series of defeats in the early primaries. Biden’s main rival that year, Sen. Bernie Sanders, dropped out in April.

By the time Kansas Democrats got to make their voice heard, the contest was decided. Biden was effectively the nominee. The rest was commentary.

Kansas’ irrelevance was baked into the calendar. Before the pandemic hit, the original 2020 nominating calendar called for 47 other states and territories to cast their primary votes before us. It didn’t quite work out that way, because lockdowns forced a number of earlier primary states — Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania among them — to delay their votes. It says something about how front-loaded the process is that even without those big states weighing in, Biden already had the nomination wrapped up by the time my state voted.

That’s not very democratic.

So if we’re going to reimagine the primary calendar, let’s really reimagine it. Let’s make it more democratic and let everybody have a say instead of a few voters in a few early primary states.

“Making presidential nominations more democratic is, after all, the reason primary contests exist in the first place,” The Week’s Matthew Walther noted in 2020. “Before 1972, primaries, if they were held at all, were essentially straw polls; nominees would be chosen by party insiders without regard for the outcome.”

His proposal: a single-day national primary held in late spring or early summer of election year.

Kansans would get to vote for their favorite presidential nominee on the same day as Iowans and South Carolinians and everybody else. Voters across the nation would get to determine their party’s nominee, instead of a few fortunate souls in a few early states getting outsize influence in the process. That seems fair, right?

An obvious objection: A one-day primary would knock out-of-nowhere presidential wannabes out of the running before they even got started — folks who need to appeal to a small group of voters in one state in hopes that they can slowly build momentum and broad support for their campaigns. Would Jimmy Carter have become president without his unexpected victory in the 1976 Iowa caucuses? That victory was nearly 50 years ago, though.

Kansans are used to being ignored in presidential politics. We’re a red state whose electoral votes go reliably to Republicans. So if the state’s Democrats don’t get a real voice in the primaries, they’re effectively locked out of the process. We don’t need to replace Iowa or South Carolina at the head of the line — but Kansans should get to vote while it still matters.