A Seat at the Table

Yesterday's Comic Strip of the Day included a cartoon of mine that I had posted to my Facebook and Xitter pages after this week's New Hampshire primary:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 1988

I'm honored and flattered, and accept the mild criticism leveled at it. The thing, however, is that it's a 36-year-old cartoon.

The first-in-the-nation status of Iowa's presidential caucus and New Hampshire's presidential primary are cherished among media types and natives of those two states, but have long been resented elsewhere. The states are predominantly rural and overwhelmingly white, and rather unrepresentative of the nation at large. The candidates have months to meet and mingle with the hoi polloi there, who talk jokingly of deciding against a particular candidate because they got to meet him or her only once.

In years when the race is still competitive after New Hampshire, the candidates dash through the ensuing states — blink and they're gone. This year, of course, the media have declared the race over and are impatiently tapping their toes for Trump and Biden to give their nomination acceptance speeches, the other 48 states rendered irrelevant to having any say in who will be on the November ballot (take that, Colorado and Maine!).

I was a college student in Minnesota in 1980 when that state tried to move its presidential caucuses to the same date as New Hampshire's primary. The Democratic Party punished Minnesota for that effrontery, warning that the delegates Minnesota caucus-goers selected that night would not be seated at the national convention — since it had been the 1976 New Hampshire that vaulted Jimmy Carter from obscurity to front-runner status, the incumbent president owed the Granite State that much consideration.

If one were to pick some state to replace Iowa and New Hampshire at the front of the line, which one is more representative of the nation at large?

How about Illinois?

It's got urban. It's got rural. It's got Chicago and Cairo. It's got Blacks, Latinos, Italians, Poles, Irish, Swedes, Serbs, and Lithuanians. It's got corn and coastline. It's got baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It's got hundreds of undocumented immigrants stuck at O'Hare. It's got weekend hunters and career criminals, both of whom cherish their stockpile of guns and screw the rest of Illinoisans who get in their way. It's got Boystown and Cardinal Cupich.

Let's see Iowa or New Hampshire top that!

Q Toon: Yes, We Have No Palmettos

If the polls are to be believed, Pete Buttigieg has soared into the lead among Democratic candidates for president in first in the nation contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But even if December polling translates into actual voting in February, the next stop on the campaign trail is in South Carolina, where Mayor Pete is polling just slightly ahead of A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick.

Whereas Iowa and New Hampshire electorates are among the whitest in the nation, South Carolina Democrats rank among the blackest. Not that race has helped black candidates there; even if you added Cory Booker's numbers and those of Kamala Harris before she suspended her candidacy this week, you'd still fall well short of former Vice President Joe Biden's support among South Carolina Democrats. Apparently, being anti-malarkey is a big selling point down there.

I don't hold a lot of stock in polls this far before any actual voting, however, especially where Democrats are concerned. Democratic candidates are like a bunch of cats in a room, and the polls are like a laser pointer shining on one of them. The rest all attack that spot of light until it lands on one of the other kitties.

Remember: at this point in 2003, Howard Dean led the polls; Hillary Clinton had a substantial lead over Barack Obama in December of 2007.

But once the cattle calls debates are over and the caucuses and primaries are underway, my cartoons will have to focus on issues, not who's up and who's down. My deadline for cartoons that will appear after the polls close is well before the polls open. So if I'm gonna comment on the horse race, I have to do it now.

Q Toon: Judging by Its Cover

Caitlyn Jenner is going to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing nothing but an American flag and an Olympic medal.

There's not a whole lot of point getting worked up about that, so let's talk about the West Virginia primary.

There's not much point in getting worked up about that, either. It's late in the primary process; the Republican contest has already been decided, and the state's Democrats have a history of voting against the front-runner.

Or do they?

Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton 51% to 36%; it's hard to imagine that coal mining enthusiasts who disagree with Hillary Clinton that there's little future in coal mining found much more in Sanders's position on mining to agree with. (On guns, maybe. Mining, no.) Indeed, an additional 9% of the vote went to a protest candidate, Paul Farrell, upset with the two candidates' attitude against coal mining, and 2% went to Keith Judd. In 2012, Judd, a felon who filed from a Texas prison to be on the Democratic primary ballot, garnered 41% of the vote against President Obama. And in 2008, Democrats there were just fine with Hillary Clinton, voting overwhelmingly for her over the presumptive nominee, The Black Guy.

44% of Sanders voters in West Virginia's open primary plan to vote for Donald Trump in November, even if Sanders somehow seizes the nomination from Clinton. There might very well have been down-ballot races of interest to genuine Democrats, but I suspect that a significant chunk of Sanders's so-called support could be chalked up to Trump voters making mischief in the Democratic race. (Trump himself told his supporters there not to bother to voting for him.)

I confidently predict that West Virginia will vote against the Democratic nominee in May and November of 2020. And 2024. And 2028. Even if any of those nominees are Donald Berzilius Trump.

The problem here isn't with West Virginia; it's with the presidential primary and caucus system. Come May, one or both parties have no contest remaining, leaving the voters in the late states — including the largest one in the nation — no voice in deciding who will be on the ballot in November. Who is more likely to bother to vote at this point: someone who is fine with the choice made by the early state voters, or someone who thinks that choice is full of crap?

Candidates spend a full year campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the whitest states in the union. Those states are followed by South Carolina, then "Super Tuesday" throughout the South, so moderate candidates tend to be out of the race by February. Any candidate running third in March is viewed as a joke no matter how serious his or her issues are. By April, at least one of the contests is usually in the bag, which is why the New York primary forces voters to declare way back in October which race they plan to vote in.

In a country the size of the U.S.A., I don't know what system would work better. A national primary would put lesser-funded candidates at an even greater disadvantage than U.S. v. Citizens United already has, and regional primaries would tilt the race in favor of the predominant biases of whoever comes first.

Maybe states should vote by month the same way voters do in line at the polls: states A through D in February, E through L in March, M through R in April, and S through Z in May. Four years later, rotate the order just to be fair.

Okay, fine, Iowa and New Hampshire can get to be first all the time. But at the conventions, their delegations don't get to cast their votes until after the balloons have dropped for the winner.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Last week's cartoon was about Ron Paul, who was surging in the Iowa polls when I drew it. Then Rick Santorum essentially tied for first in the Iowa caucuses

Drawing this week's cartoon about Rick Santorum when he's not particularly likely to repeat that performance in New Hampshire tomorrow may have been kind of foolish. But on the other hand, why save this cartoon for later when the history of polling this year suggests that second place is followed very quickly by oblivion?

Q Toon: Snow Job

State legislatures in Iowa and New Hampshire are wasting no time repealing marriage equality in those states (a judge's ruling in the former, and state law recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages in the latter).

Well, actually, they are wasting a little time in New Hampshire, where the veto-proof Republican majority is taking a page out of the Karl Rove playbook. They plan to have marriage inequality on the ballot along with the presidential race in 2012.