80 Politics and elections
cratic nomination: Senator Paul Tsongas from Massachusetts, Governor
Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, former Governor
Jerry Brown of California, and Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. A number
of other prominent Democrats hovered on the sidelines, but for one reason
or another decided not to declare themselves as candidates for the nomina-
tion. The first primary was held on 18 February in New Hampshire. Senator
Tsongas won, as was to be expected as he himself was from New England, but
Bill Clinton came a good second. A week later the South Dakota primary was
won by Senator Kerrey, and Clinton achieved only 19 per cent of the votes.
In early March Clinton, the Governor of Arkansas, won a convincing victory
in the southern state of Georgia, came second to Tsongas in Maryland and
Utah, and came second to Brown in Colorado. At this point no candidate
had established a position of dominance, but Clinton was doing better than
anyone else. He had only 198 delegates committed to him – he needed 2,145
to secure the nomination – but he had more delegates than any other candi-
date. At this point Kerrey and Harkin withdrew from the race.
The stage was set for Super Tuesday, 10 March. When the Democratic
Party decided in 1988 to stage a group of primaries in the South early on the
same day in the campaign it was in order to give a clear indication that one
candidate had strong support in that section. It worked well for Clinton in
- He won by large margins in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Ten-
nessee and Texas. Only in the New England states of Massachusetts and
Rhode Island, where the primaries were held on the same day, did he lose to
Tsongas. Clinton went on to win in Illinois and Michigan later in the month,
and Senator Tsongas decided that he would not actively contest any further
primaries. Only Jerry Brown remained a threat to Clinton. In early April
Clinton won the primaries in New York and Wisconsin; although his majori-
ties over Brown were not convincing, particularly in Wisconsin where Clinton
managed only 37.9 per cent to Brown’s 35 per cent, it had become clear that
Clinton was the front-runner, and could not be caught. Although many voters
distrusted him, he went on to win in state after state, eventually winning
thirty of the thirty-six primaries that he contested. By the end of the primary
season in June he had the support of more than enough of the delegates to
the forthcoming convention to secure the nomination.
In 2004 a similarly open situation existed for the nomination of the presi-
dential candidate of the Democratic Party. The incumbent President, George
W. Bush, was running for re-election, so there was no real interest in the
Republican primaries; the outcome was a foregone conclusion. For the Dem-
ocrats the situation was very different; the defeated candidate in the 2000
election, Al Gore, had decided not to run for the nomination in 2004, and
the field was wide open. Ten candidates put themselves forward. Initially the
front runner was Howard Dean, a former Governor of the state of Vermont;
seven other candidates were, or had been, US Senators, including John Kerry
of Massachusetts, John Edwards of North Carolina and Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut. The other two hopefuls were Richard Gephardt, a Member of the