Blog P.I.

One year from this week, we might already have our Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. Early? Definitely. Too early? Debatable. Impossible? Might be unavoidable. One reason might be Howard Dean and his 50-state strategy.

In just the past month, a few very large states have started talking about moving their presidential primaries to the first week in February. Those states include Illinois, Florida, New Jersey and the fifth-largest economy in the world, California. This shouldn’t be a surprise: the parties want a bigger say in presidential nominations, and the rest of each state wants a bigger slice of that billion-dollar pie. What’s more, Illinois would like to give favorite son Barack Obama a major boost — and they can’t do it if their primary still comes after Super Tuesday. According to The Green Papers, at least nine other states have taken steps to move their primaries up.

Primary front-loading is a perennial good-government gripe about the nomination process. Coincidentally or not, it continues unabated. And it’s not just the primaries — the presidential debates are starting even earlier this year. The rules are different on the Republican side, but over time, Republicans have generally adopted changes first proposed by the (more process-oriented) Democrats.

This time around the Democratic National Committee, under superlative-magnet chairman Howard Dean, deliberately enabled some noteworthy front-loading: Nevada’s caucus and South Carolina’s primary were both moved up to late January so union members and African-Americans would have a say in the process, whereas they would not in right-to-work Iowa and 97% white New Hampshire. Everybody else can go starting Feb. 5.

Remember that when Howard Dean ascended to party chair in early 2005, the Washington establishment balked. Dean’s support among liberal bloggers might have been a foregone conclusion, but one idea they shared with Dean — a plan to rebuild the party’s national reach by contesting races and spending money all around the country, even in districts previously abandoned to the GOP — helped him win over the state-based committee members who put him over the top.

Needless to say, this has been controversial inside the Beltway, especially after Dean’s slow fundraising start. The party has enjoyed fundraising success under Dean since then, but he’s given so much of it to state parties that the old complaints gave way to new ones.

Of course, the state parties love the arrangement. State party executive directors — they control state party budgets, not the unpaid, figurehead party chairs — queued up to accept their party-building money. For Dean, it was probably a smart move — it may have pre-empted James Carville’s would-be coup before it got very far.

But Dean’s indulgence of the state parties cuts both ways: Yes, he has their support when negotiating with the Beltway establishment. But the nomination process isn’t about that — it’s every state for themselves. And the state executive directors also know Dean won’t be in charge of the party forever: once a nominee is chosen, he or she becomes the de facto leader of the party, and who knows what happens after that. Are the states pressing their advantage now because they know Dean won’t say no to them?

I bet this wouldn’t be happening under Terry McAuliffe. To be sure, McAuliffe was complicit in front-loading the process himself — his big idea was to front-load things just enough to produce a nominee early to take on Bush. In practice, the John Kerry electability meme took hold around the same time and was decisive. (What meme will be temporarily entrenched a year from yesterday?) But his base of power was firmly inside the Beltway — the Clintons and their donors — and not in the states.

The DNC chair can invalidate a state’s primary, or withhold funds, or threaten to do these things. Certainly in public, Dean has said nothing of the sort, even though New Hampshire secretary of state William Gardner is ready to hopscotch Nevada and Florida is openly talking about moving its primary to Jan. 29 — a week ahead of the agreed-upon window.

When it comes to the nomination schedule, how far can the state parties go? What, if anything, can Dean do about it?

Let’s imagine that the big four states move their primaries up to the first Tuesday in February. (If not 2008, then 2012.) Along with the states already camped out here, that day will be worth more than 1,000 delegates (1,098 using 2004 figures). That’s almost exactly what Super Tuesday (March 2) was worth in 2004. If this happened, there wouldn’t be much of a Super Tuesday left, and the whole thing could be settled two weeks after the Iowa caucuses — where’s the fun in that?

So what do we call this… Mega Tuesday? There’s already been one of those. Uber Tuesday? Perhaps a little too Teutonic. Colossal Tuesday? You can never really count on naming these things, but for now I’m calling it Ginormous Tuesday.