Rolling Stone - USA (2020-03)

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March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 43

gia’s leftward shift? Make Georgia the first pri-

mary state in 2024. Two-dozen presidential

candidates building grassroots organizations

and spending tens of millions of dollars on ad-

vertising will do wonders in Georgia.

Get rid of the debates

Let’s face it: Primary-season debates do more

harm than good. Candidates don’t have enough

time to adequately explain their positions on

nuanced issues. News organizations that host

the debates care more about conflict and rat-

ings than informing the public. And in the case

of the 2020 race, the DNC’s debate rules penal-

ized grassroots candidates (like Andrew Yang)

and non-East Coast candidates (like Govs. Jay

Inslee of Washington and Steve Bullock of Mon-

tana) who didn’t have high name recognition.

Save the debates until the general election.

Stick with town halls or issue-focused forums.

At least that way voters will learn something.

Reward states that

make it easy to vote

Democrats should reshuffle the order of their

primary states and reward those states that

make it easy to vote. Iowa, New Hampshire, and

South Carolina — three of the four opening con-

tests in 2020 — all have some of the most restric-

tive voting-rights laws in the country. The Dem-

ocratic Party must reward the states that use

automatic or same-day registration, secure vot-

ing technology, early voting, and mail-in ballots.

Demand candidates take a

‘Ban the Big Money’ pledge

As long as Republicans have power, Congress

won’t lift a finger to rein in the legalized brib-

ery and corruption unleashed by dec ades of

misguided legal decisions, including Citizens

United. In the meantime, Democrats should de-

mand that their primary candidates vow that

they won’t take money from Super PACs, use

wealthy bundlers, or accept corporate money.

Such a pledge would build trust with voters,

give upstart candidates a fair shot, and make

the Democratic Party responsive to the work-

ing people it claims to represent.

WHOEVER THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE is, the

usual choice between “turning out the base”

versus “winning over swing voters” is a false

one. Trump’s re-election campaign is spending

vast sums of money to not only mobilize those

who voted for him last time but to also find and

register millions of new voters. Democratic op-

eratives say it will take a multiracial movement

like the one that elected Obama in 2008 to in-

spire Democrats and independent voters alike.

“There’s a lot of headroom both for Trump

and for the Democratic nominee,” Ben Wikler,

chairman of the Democratic Party of Wiscon-

sin, says of the 2020 race. “It’s going to be rad-

ically different” from 2016.

The point of a presidential primary is to pick

a nominee and set up that candidate for suc-

cess in the general election. This time around,

it can feel as if the opposite has happened. Win

or lose in November, a reckoning is in order.

political consultant who ran Ted Cruz’s 2016

presidential campaign. “They wanted a new

generation of leadership — they didn’t get it.

They didn’t get any of the things they wanted.”

And that was before the calamitous Iowa cau-

cuses denied any of the candidates the spring-

board they’d hoped for, like the one that pro-

pelled Obama in 2008. Instead, the story out of

Iowa was about how the Democrats — who hold

themselves out as the defenders of safe and se-

cure elections — bungled a caucus they had four

years to prepare for and damaged the public’s

trust in the outcome. Whatever the opposite of

“hope and change” was, well, this was it.

The chaos of Iowa did, however, make the

strongest case yet for why the Democratic Par-

ty’s primary process must be revamped from

top to bottom. Here are four ideas.

Replace Iowa with Georgia

Why invest so much money and manpower in

a small, overwhelmingly white state with little

significance in the November general election?

If Democrats want to build the party of the fu-

ture, they should replace Iowa with Georgia. A

growing and diversifying state with a healthy

mix of urban and rural populations, Georgia is

already seen as a state that could turn purple,

thanks in large part to the voting-rights work

led by Stacey Abrams. Want to accelerate Geor-

A

S PRIMARY SEASON continues, trou-

bling questions and palpable dis-

may linger on the minds of many

voters. The same tired fights of 2016

are playing out yet again four years later, as

Donald Trump’s approval rating creeps high-

er while the Democratic unity looks like a pipe

dream. Defeating Trump was always going to

require a once-in-a-generation campaign. Now,

it’s beginning to feel like Trump could run away

with this thing. What happened?

Think back to the summer of 2019. The field

of 20-odd contenders was a rowdy and diverse

lot, a true cross-section of the modern Demo-

cratic Party. Senators and House members, gov-

ernors and mayors. Young and old, black and

white and Asian and brown, gay and straight.

They were, as DNC Chairman Tom Perez said,

“the most diverse field in our nation’s history.”

But by the time of the first primary contest,

the field had shrunk to a mostly old, mostly

white, mostly wealthy crop of established can-

didates who — apart from Mayor Pete Buttigieg

— could scarcely claim to represent something

new. At the same time, two billionaires, Tom

Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, had bought their

way into the top tier of candidates by spending

hundreds of millions of their private fortunes.

“They wanted a big, fluid, multicultural field

— they didn’t get it,” says Jeff Roe, a Republican

In Iowa, the

primary system’s

flaws have been

exposed.

By ANDY KROLL

Why the Democratic

Primary Is Broken and

How We Can Fix It

CAMPAIGN 2020

MONEY

ILL-SPENT

Democratic

presidential

candidates

spent nearly

$70 million on

TV ads — plus

millions more

on field orga-

nizing — in

Iowa leading

up to the

state’s first-

in-the-nation

caucus. The

result: a mess

of a result

with no clear

winner.