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Contest type -- whether primary or caucus -- has been a topic of discussion in and out of national party rules-making circles in the time since 2016. That Sanders saw successes in that format and Clinton problems essentially forced mode of allocation into rules discussions on the Democratic side. And even Republicans have ventured into talks about potentially providing incentives to states with primaries rather than caucuses for 2020. But most of the action thus far on this front has been on the state level. Maine and Minnesota have both adopted through the legislative process presidential primaries to replace the caucus format for 2020. And Colorado arrived at the same endpoint but via ballot initiative in 2016. In a mark of the type of energy exists behind efforts to shift from caucuses to primaries in the presidential nomination process, two bills have been even been introduced in Hawaii. Now, the Aloha state has traditionally held caucuses rather than a presidential primary. F...

Similar to a 2016 push , legislation to establish a separate presidential primary has stalled in the Nebraska legislature. Same sponsor, same intent, same opposition. Senator John Murante ( 49th, Gretna ) introduced legislation -- LB 1032 -- to create a new statewide presidential primary election, severe it from the consolidated May primary, and shift the new election into March. The 2018 legislation is basically the same as the bill from 2016, but rather than move the new election to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March, the 2018 version would schedule the primary for the second Tuesday in March . In a late February hearing on the bill in the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, Murante, via the Lincoln Journal Star , argued for an earlier Nebraska role in the nomination process: "Trump won Indiana and Cruz withdrew from the race and that ended Nebraska's opportunity to have a voice," Murante said.   An early presidential primary election wo...

The Democratic National Committee is coming off its 2018 winter meeting, a meeting that culminated with the acceptance of an interim report on the 2020 rules . That report followed continued discussions by the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) in conjunction with the winter meeting and a previous preparatory RBC meeting just a week before. FHQ tuned in to both rounds of RBC discussions and continues to be struck by the framing of the rules discussions in media accounts. By far the most dominant lens through which those rules discussions are being viewed is the lingering Clinton-Sanders tensions in the broader party coalition. And it is not that those depictions are wrong. Rather, it is that they are overly simplistic and have missed some important developments along the way that run against that frame. This phenomenon is at its most stark with respect to the party's efforts on superdelegates, the unpledged elected officials and party leaders that have periodically been controvers...

Below is the interim report that the Rules and Bylaws Committee will submit to the Democratic National Committee at its Winter 2018 meeting. The report serves as a progress update on the RBC consideration of the Unity Reform Commission report from December 2017. Rules and Bylaws Committee Interim Report to the DNC Winter Meeting 2018 by frontloading_hq on Scribd

Edward-Isaac Dovere at Politico reports on the strategizing among the nascent campaign team in former Vice President Joe Biden's orbit: " ...a tight circle of aides has been brainstorming a range of tear-up-the-playbook ideas for a White House run, according to people who’ve been part of the discussions or told about them.   On the list: announcing his candidacy either really early or really late in the primary process so that he’d define the field around him or let it define itself before scrambling the field; skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and going straight to South Carolina , where he has always had a strong base of support; announcing a running mate right out of the gate and possibly picking one from outside of politics; and making a pitch that he can be a bridge not just to disaffected Democrats, but to Republicans revolting against President Donald Trump. " It is kind of early in the cycle for the " skipping states " discussion, but with 2020 giving al...

Part One: Setting Expectations for the Next Round Part Two: Early Proposals Part Three: A Reflection on Delegate Incentives -- What lessons do past encouragement structures hold for the potential Republican caucus-to-primary incentives? There are a few main principles arising from the previous exploration of past national party experimentation in motivating state decisions on contest scheduling that may have implications for an incentive program to entice current caucus states, in whole or in part, to adopt primaries.      1) Conditions matter In sum, the deep dive on past incentives hammers home a point that is often echoed in the context of electoral politics: timing is everything. Republicans in 2000 and Democrats in 2008 had ineffective incentives programs to curb frontloading mainly because of poor timing. Those regimes were instituted ahead of cycles where the motivation for states/state parties to frontload primaries and caucuses was at its peak: when there were ...

Part One: Setting Expectations for the Next Round Part Two: Early Proposals Part Four: A Caucus-to-Primary Incentive? -- The history of incentives programs Whether the intention of a caucus-to-primary incentive is applied to a narrow list of targets or anything broader, they all belie the fact that such bonus delegate incentive programs have not historically been effective (or effective in the absence of certain conditions).     Early experimentation The RNC first used a bonus delegate system to entice states to later dates on the primary calendar for the 2000 cycle. To curb frontloading, the goal was to provide a bonus of five percent to states in the March 15-April 14 window, a 7.5 percent addition for contests in April 15-May 14 window, and a ten precent bonus for states with primaries or caucuses scheduled from May 15 through the third Tuesday in June. However, the experiment was met by a collective cold shoulder from the states. Only three states moved back beyond the Mar...

Part One: Setting Expectations for the Next Round Part Three: A Reflection on Delegate Incentives Part Four: A Caucus-to-Primary Incentive? -- And what is the Republican Temporary Committee on the Presidential Nominating Process looking at potentially changing for 2020? At the most recent RNC meeting -- the 2018 Winter meeting in Washington -- the Temporary Committee on the Presidential Nominating Process (TCPNP) reconvened, and the chatter coming out of that meeting was muted compared to the often Clinton-Sanders-themed talk that emerged from the periodic Democratic Unity Reform Commission meetings. But the points of emphasis in the Republican discussion fit expectations . The discussed changes were minimal, incremental, and tailored to the president's experiences/problems with the 2016 process. The headliner change proposal coming out of the Winter meeting was an  incentive structure intended to promote primaries over caucuses  as the mode of delegate  allocation . Unde...

Part Two: Early Proposals Part Three: A Reflection on Delegate Incentives Part Four: A Caucus-to-Primary Incentive? -- On the occasion last month of the 2018 Republican National Committee winter meeting in Washington, DC, the Temporary Committee on the Presidential Nominating Process (TCPNP) reconvened to discuss potential rules changes for the 2020 cycle. From a comparative standpoint, the chatter on rules tweaking for 2020 on the Republican side has been far quieter than the open discussions the Democratic Unity Reform Commission had throughout 2017 . However, that near silence should not necessarily be read as inactivity. Rather, it is a function of a party that 1) remains new to tinkering on its presidential nominating rules outside of a convention setting, 2) tends to conduct its temporary committee functions largely outside of the public eye, and 3) currently holds the White House. The first two factors are unique to the RNC while the third is not. It was not, for instanc...

As day two of the second DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) meeting of 2018 gets underway, FHQ will revisit a topic that hovered around the periphery of the group's first meeting in January and is likely to be dealt with in a more concerted manner at this stage of the RBC's work: caucuses. Specifically, part of the news coming out of the first RBC meeting was a petition making the rounds external to the meeting to resurrect a tabled amendment/section on caucuses left off the Unity Reform Commission (URC) report . The narrative of the petition, spearheaded by Adam Parhomenko, a former Clinton campaign operative, amounts to the following: The Unity Reform Commission resolution/mandate called for the encouragement of expanded primary use. While the URC deliberations and report included provisions attempting to open up/ease primary and caucus participation and pushed to make caucuses more primary-like, the group failed to more forcefully "encourage the expanded use of pri...