Why the 2008 campaign has already started

By Sylvia Smith

The Journal Gazette


WASHINGTON – President Hillary. Bayh! in ’08. Has John McCain shaken his jones for the White House? Is Kerry really thinking about going for it again? Do the Dems need an anti-Hillary? Will the GOP pick a governor from the country’s bluest state? Who’s ahead in the polls?

The polls? You mean the 2008 presidential polls?

Yes, indeed. The presidential campaign is in full buzz mode three years before most Americans contemplate the optimum placement for a yard sign of their favorite candidate, a mere seven months after the start of President Bush’s second term.

In fact, it began in November.

“Bush got Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,” Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor, said about the news coverage and political chatter immediately after Election Day 2004, but “we were talking about ’08 that weekend.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was more restrained. He waited until mid-November to visit New Hampshire, the state with the nation’s first primary and the focus of intense candidate attention. New Hampshire is accustomed to being wooed by presidential contenders, but not this early in the process.

“We’re seeing the activity in ’05 that we would normally see in ’06,” said James Pindell, managing editor of PoliticsNH.com, an online publication that covers New Hampshire politics in detail.

Pindell ticked off the indicators: Eight Republicans and five Democrats – none of whom has announced a presidential campaign, but all of whom are laying the groundwork – have been to the state since the end of the 2004 campaign. John Kerry’s political action committee is paying the salary of the sole campaign staffer for a candidate for mayor of Manchester, the state’s largest city. Staffers for John Edwards have moved to New Hampshire.

Iowa, which holds party caucuses early in presidential election years, has also seen a procession of potential candidates. Sen. Evan Bayh, for instance, spent three days earlier this month, and he was hardly the first to start a four-year courtship with the state.

“This is the stage at which people are deciding whether they really do have enough support potential to make it worthwhile (to run) and the stage at which they try to line up the activists to work for them. … You have to have good people to turn out supporters,” said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

The key reasons for the early activity: incumbency, the truncated primary season and money.

No front-runners

For the first time in more than 50 years, no incumbent president or sitting vice president is running. Vice President Cheney has stated – emphatically – that he will not run for the GOP nomination.

When a party has no early front-runner, no one has that juicy advantage. It’s a rule of thumb in politics that when there’s no incumbent, the number of contestants multiplies.

Because there’s no heir apparent in the Republican Party, the field of potential contenders for the GOP nomination is lush:

McCain; Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney; Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; New York Gov. George Pataki; Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel; Virginia Sen. George Allen; Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback.

Although Kerry and Sen. Hillary Clinton have the widest name recognition among Democrats, there is no consensus that either is the right or likely nominee. Among the others consistently mentioned as possible candidates: Bayh; Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack; Delaware Sen. Joe Biden; Virginia Gov. Mark Warner; Edwards; Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; Wesley Clark.

Front-loading

When the political parties shifted from nominating conventions to primaries in 1972, the nominees didn’t emerge until June because the primaries were more spread out, said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. Now, primaries are clustered in January, February and early March, so “the nomination is resolved very quickly, within a matter of weeks. Every year, there’s more frontloading, there’s more compression of the (primary) dates.”

Last year, all the Democratic candidates melted away – except for Kerry – by early March, when 29 states and the District of Columbia had conducted their primaries. States with later primaries, such as Indiana, have no role to play in the presidential nominating process.

“States keep scrambling to get to try to get to the front of the line,” Green said. “Many, many years ago, the California primary was one of the very last primaries, held in June. That was the crowning part of the campaign. Whoever won California, that sort of sealed the victory. But then, the nominations started getting decided in March, and California was completely irrelevant. So California moved their primary up to March.”

The money factor

The presidential campaign starts a little earlier every cycle because the costs keep rising, and “it takes so long to raise the entry fee,” Sabato said. Nowadays, a candidate who expects to campaign through the March primaries needs a $30 million cushion.

That amount of money can’t be generated in a short time. A candidate who started raising money on Jan. 1 would have to take in $833,300 a month to have $30 million before the Iowa caucuses in January 2008. A candidate who delays fundraising until Jan. 1, 2006, would have to raise $1.25 million a month to catch up.

Because the primary season is so short, Green said, “you have to have raised all your money, or 99 percent of it, before the primaries begin.”

Most of the pols who have White House aspirations have created political action committees to collect – and spend – money for their campaign explorations. Bayh’s All America PAC, for instance, has raised nearly $1.2 million since Jan. 1. It pays eight full- or part-time staffers in Washington, New York, California and Texas, and picks up Bayh’s travel expenses.

The advantage a PAC has over a traditional campaign account is that individuals can give $5,000 a year to a PAC but just $2,100 to a presidential candidate’s campaign account. (That amount will rise slightly by 2008, and a candidate who does not accept public money for the general election will be allowed to collect double that amount from individuals.) Even so, compared to $30 million, the $5,000 checks amount to “small dribbles,” Sabato said.

“To be a credible campaign you have to raise a lot of money, but to raise a lot of money, you have to be seen as credible,” Goldford said.

The three factors – no incumbent, front-loaded primaries and the cost of a modern presidential campaign – mean there’s little opportunity for someone to assess the situation in, say, early 2007.

“It’s kind of like an arms race. If I build my war chest, you have to build up your war chest. And pretty soon we’ve made everything perhaps more expensive than it needed to be because we started really early,” Green said. “The problem is that essentially eliminates some candidates who might be good and whose voices might be useful to have in the primaries, but they can’t do this early, sustained organizing.”

It may be a lively battle for the years leading up to 2007, but only the politicians, the consultants and pollsters who make money from campaigns, the political journalists and the pundits are paying attention.

A USA Today-Gallup-CNN poll issued last week found that 83 percent of Americans are not focused on the 2008 race, haven’t chosen a favorite and aren’t paying attention to news coverage of the bouquet of candidates.

But just because voters are tuned out now doesn’t mean what’s happening now is useless, Green said.

“If the participants are vetted by the media, anybody with a horrendous problem is weeded out,” he said.

The downside to a four-year presidential campaign, some argue, is that it can warp public policy or short-change constituents who elected the potential presidential candidate to do a different job, such as run the state as a governor or attend to duties in Congress.

“The permanent campaign aspect is one that makes the policy-making process much more problematic,” said Robert Richie, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Voting.

Bayh’s recent vote against the Central American Free Trade Agreement was in contrast to his pro-trade views of the past.

“One can never be totally sure,” Richie said, “but if he wasn’t thinking nationally, I suspect he wouldn’t have changed his historic position. It did become a very important issue within the Democratic Party, and if you want to be a representative of that party and win its nomination and, indeed, be its spokesperson, then you have to make a decision: Do you want to be where most of the people in the party want you to be?”

Like Bayh, the other Democratic senators who are considering a presidential campaign voted against CAFTA.

On the other hand, Green said, politics – and jockeying for political advantage – enters into most decisions politicians make, whether they’re running for president or not.

“I tend to see everything as political. To me the only question is, is it good politics or bad politics in terms of the ultimate outcome?” he said.

The League of Women Voters says the biggest harm to a perpetual campaign that is focused on just a handful of states is that voters are largely cut out of a fundamental of democracy – choosing their candidates and then picking a winner.

“Too often, by the time the voters start paying attention, it’s all over. And then, of course, unless you happen to live in a swing state, you’re out of it altogether,” said Kay Maxwell, the group’s national president.

In the 2004 campaign, the two tickets – the candidates and their wives – visited the 14 battleground states 1,274 times, an average of 89 times. They made 976 trips to the 37 other states and the District of Columbia, an average of 26 times. Of the 16 non-swing states whose primaries were after March 15, the candidates and their wives made just 186 visits in the 2004 campaign, an average of fewer than 12 times, underscoring the reality of the modern presidential contest.

“In some ways, it starts too early and ends too quickly,” Maxwell said.