78 Politics and elections
In response five of the New England states held ‘Yankee primaries’ on the
same day in early May, in order to register their collective view. The pres-
sure to hold primaries earlier and earlier in the year continued in 2004. New
Hampshire held its place as the leader in late January, but by mid-March the
Democrats had already held primaries in twenty-four states, ten of them on
‘Super Tuesday’, 2 March. There are demands, from time to time, to simplify
the process of candidate selection by holding a single nation-wide primary,
but there is little likelihood that such a reform will be implemented.
Primaries are, therefore, in a sense a party matter, but they are by no
means discreetly conducted internal affairs. They are usually fought with as
much publicity, effort and bitterness as the elections proper for which they
are in theory only the preliminary rounds. Rival candidates for the party’s
nomination conduct public campaigns and engage in every electoral tactic,
including extreme attempts to discredit their opponents. Primaries are often
a battle between the chosen candidates of the established party organisa-
tion and challengers to their authority, who create their own organisations to
contest the primary. In Massachusetts this internecine strife is even further
institutionalised by the holding of a ‘pre-primary convention’, at which the
party delegates endorse a list of the contenders for nomination for various
offices as the official candidates in the primary. Yet the ‘official’ candidates
may subsequently be defeated in the primary and replaced by their success-
ful opponents as the party’s official representatives at the general election.
In those areas where only one party has any hope of winning at the general
election the primaries become the true battleground for office, where fac-
tions within the party fight out the contest for power, and where success in
the primary is tantamount to election.
The bitterness of the primary contests extends to the highest level of the
political system, the nominations for the presidency of the United States,
for here the most is to be gained and the most to be lost. The presidential
primaries may become the forum for bitter personal battles between the
foremost leaders of the same political party, carried on in the full glare of
publicity before the eyes of the whole country, indeed of the world. The 1964
Republican primaries in which Senator Goldwater and Governor Rockefeller
contended for the party’s presidential nomination were savage battles. When
the battles were over, Theodore H. White remarked, ‘the Republican Party
was so wounded that its leaders were fitter candidates for political hospitali-
sation than for governmental responsibility.’
Equally important may be the internal political divisions in the state where
a presidential primary is being held. Candidates for the presidential nomina-
tion inevitably become involved in the factional fights at state and local level,
for each aspiring president will have supporters in the state, who will hope
to gain in their local political struggles by the success of their champion at
the national level. However, the result of these cross-currents of national and
state politics may be very serious for contenders for the presidential office.