As John Edwards labors to keep his presidential campaign alive in today's 10-state Super Tuesday showdown, it may be that one of his biggest setbacks occurred long before the North Carolina senator even announced his candidacy. That was two years ago, when the Democratic National Committee, with little fanfare or dissent, endorsed a schedule for the 2004 nominating contest that was earlier and more compact than ever.
With Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) far ahead in a sprint toward the Democratic nomination, there is every sign that a process designed to produce a nominee before the start of spring is working exactly as party officials intended.
But this success is causing rumblings of complaint. A variety of Edwards supporters, independent political operatives and academics assert that the 2004 calendar has favored speed over fairness and put a greater-than-ever premium on the ephemeral -- and some say irrational -- phenomenon of political "momentum." Among those disadvantaged in a "front-loaded" system, critics say, are candidates such as Edwards who show clear potential but still trail after the early-state contests, and voters who may need more time for careful comparison shopping. Skeptics also say the early winner in this system may not necessarily be the strongest candidate.
"Front-loading generally is bad precisely because it is hard for voters to give candidates a second look," said Andrew Busch, a University of Denver political scientist and co-author of a recent book on nominating schedules. "The first person to win obtains an aura of invincibility very, very early, and it becomes hard for someone to challenge that."
Momentum, the intangible but undeniable effect by which even modest victories in early states create a voter stampede, has rarely if ever played so dramatic a role in a nominating contest as it did with Democrats this year. Even New Hampshire voters, by legend so discerning and independent-minded, seemed to bounce like a dashboard needle in response to Kerry's victory in the Iowa caucuses. Kerry won New Hampshire, even though just before his Iowa comeback he was in third place and falling in a state next door to his native Massachusetts.
If Kerry continues his romp and effectively ends the Democratic race today or later this month, some advantages of this year's nominating schedule will be manifest. Polls suggest he will have a unified party behind him, as even most Democrats backing Kerry rivals say they are more devoted to beating President Bush than to any particular candidate. And Kerry could begin preparing immediately for the fall general election, rather than devoting himself to an expensive intramural contest this spring.
'A real testing'
Even Democratic strategists who like the way this year's nominating contest has been organized and are pleased that Kerry has benefited acknowledge the strikingly random quality of the result. A shift of a few thousand votes into Edwards's column from Kerry's in Iowa -- which Kerry won with 38 percent to 32 percent for Edwards -- would have given the senator from North Carolina a victory. That almost certainly would have radically altered the trajectory of the year, giving Edwards a front-runner's surge that instead went to Kerry.
"Iowa is supposed to be the beginning of the process, but instead it was almost the end of it," pollster Patrick Caddell said. "What you don't get in this process is a real testing," in which candidates get poked and prodded by voters, not just reporters and insiders, over a sustained period.
During the 1970s and 1980s, primaries and caucuses were distributed much more evenly from February to June, and there were fewer massive blocks of delegates chosen in several states in one day.
The current system gives little time for an appealing candidate to recover from an early stumble, and it can give a weak candidate a false impression of strength. Exit polls from Wisconsin, where Edwards outperformed expectations with a solid second-place finish, showed he drew more support than Kerry from Republicans and independents, suggesting he may be a better candidate against Bush. But the calendar gives Edwards few opportunities to catch up.
"Kerry may be the Democratic Bob Dole," Caddell said, in a reference to the 1996 Republican nominee who was the clear and early choice of the party establishment but was a poor candidate in the general election.
Logically, there is no reason that voters in large states such as Michigan, which Kerry won overwhelmingly after hardly registering in polls there a few months earlier, should necessarily ratify the results of Iowa and New Hampshire. But, as a practical matter, this is often what happens. Some say the answer lies as much in human psychology as in any political calculation.
'What other people are doing'
Are voters who respond to political momentum acting rationally? Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, said voter behavior can be partly explained by a 1950s experiment by psychologist Solomon Asch in which people were told to look at a row of vertical lines in which two lines were the same length while the others were of plainly different lengths. Then people were asked to identify which two lines were the same. The catch was that everyone in the room but one person was in on the experiment, and intentionally gave the wrong answer. Consistently, the one unknowing subject also gave the wrong answer, even though the correct answer was obvious.
"People make decisions based on what other people are doing. We do this all the time in our daily decisions, so that we should do this in political decision-making also is really not surprising," said Watts, who wrote about his theory for the online magazine Slate.
In the case of finding a good nominee -- in which opinions are inherently subjective and there is no "correct answer" -- group behavior is even more exaggerated. Watts said: "The effect gets stronger and stronger the more ambivalent we are. In this year, people are looking for a winner more than they are for any particular winner. . . . It's like if you go to a restaurant that's really popular, you know there's a good chance it's probably all right."
Although not strictly logical -- and maddening for candidates who slip early like former Vermont governor Howard Dean -- the amplifying effect of political momentum has a useful purpose. What a political party "really wants is for someone to look like a strong winner, not someone who barely beat" his opponents, Watts said.
The Democratic National Committee was following this thinking -- though without reference to psychology or sociology -- when it endorsed this year's schedule in January 2002. Democratic officials were impressed by the way George W. Bush wrapped up the GOP nomination early in 2000 and began to focus on fundraising and his message for the general election. In addition, many large states complained chronically that their position later in the calendar gave them reduced influence. Although Iowa and New Hampshire retained their first-in-the-nation status, several large states were moved up right on their heels.
"I think this has been a perfect balance," said Josh Wachs, chief operating officer for the DNC. "It's given more states to have input. . . . And I think there's no question there's going to be a unified party whether this contest continues on several more weeks or ends sooner than that."
Even so, the frustrations are undeniable for Edwards aides, who believe their candidate usually performs well -- and at Kerry's expense -- whenever he gets to spend sustained time in a state. "The rapid pace between primaries and the front-loaded nature has created a calendar in which if a candidate gets momentum, it is more difficult to slow it down and turn it around," said Edwards campaign manager Nick Baldick. "In an ideal world, would we want it more spread out? Sure, but as my mother said, 'I don't worry about something I can't do anything about.' "
