Conventional Wisdom: It's time to make the Presidential Conventions relevant again.

Conventional Wisdom:
It's time to make the Presidential Conventions relevant again.

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A “race to be first” is emerging in the Presidential Primary race. In 2004, fourth place John Kerry shocked the longtime front-runner Howard Dean by winning the Iowa Caucus. The upset rolled over into the New Hampshire primary nine days later, handing John Kerry another upset victory. From there, reports of each Kerry victory made his winning the DNC nomination seem more and more inevitable. By the time the Primaries were held months later in states like Oregon (May) and South Dakota (June), there wasn’t any point in even voting because no other Democratic candidate could win enough states to defeat Kerry. The “vote” of people in those later states was essentially stolen from them. Their right to choose their own candidate taken away by states that held their primaries earlier.

It wasn’t always this way. When Senator John F. Kennedy found out he had won the Democratic Party’s nomination AT the 1960 Democratic National Convention, he didn’t even know who his Vice President would be. And except for the educated guesses of polls, no one knew “for sure” Kennedy had even won the Democratic nomination for president UNTIL the votes were counted AT the convention.



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...is it any wonder the networks don’t want to broadcast the conventions, and no one watches when they do?

The solution to all this is simple: DO NOT ALLOW STATES TO REVEAL THE RESULTS OF THEIR PRIMARIES UNTIL THE CONVENTION. just as they did before television started broadcasting the result of primaries from coast-to-coast.

On election night every November of a National election, the media is prohibited from announcing the poll results of each state until ALL the polls have closed in the United States (I’m not sure whether Hawaii is included in that) to prevent the results of earlier East Coast states influencing the voting of states in the West. So does it make any sense to reveal the results of the PRIMARIES before later states have voted?

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Nominating Conventions served an important political function for almost 200 years in this country. It’s time to make them relevant again.