After I wrote an op-ed against moving California’s next Presidential Primary to early February, a local radio show invited me to debate Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign – who is pushing the state legislature to make it happen. One thing that we agreed on in yesterday’s program is that the system of presidential primaries is broken and works against the interest of progressives. But while I believe that pushing up California’s primary will only compress the schedule without giving us more influence, how do we create a system that doesn’t make the establishment candidate always win?

As long as each state gets to decide when they hold their primary, the system will always be broken. Every state wants to have an early primary, so we will never stop the front-loaded schedule that favors wealthy candidates -- until the national parties step in and demand a fair compromise. One proposal – called the American Plan -- could help end front-loading, give under-dog candidates a prayer, ensure a diversity of voices and be fair to both large and small states. The California Democratic Party has endorsed it, as have the Young Democrats of America, the Center on Voting and Democracy, and Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. But while the Plan has been floated around for over a decade, nobody wants to try it until 2012 at the earliest.

Written by San Francisco State professor Tom Gangale, the American Plan goes like this. The presidential primary schedule would be spread out over a five-month period with ten series of state primaries held every two weeks. This would stretch out the process so insurgent candidates could slowly gain momentum without being drowned out by money, and other candidates who suffer early defeats could make a “come-back” and win some primaries later on. The first round would include states that have a combined total of eight congressional districts (for example, Nevada (3) and Connecticut (5)), followed by 16 in the second round, 24 in the third, and then adding eight more in each successive round. Actual states chosen for each series will be selected at random.

But California has 53 Congressional districts, meaning that under such a system it would always be at the end of the pack – when the nominee might already be chosen. To account for this problem, the Plan slightly changes the order in the following way: 8, 16, 24, 56, 32, 64, 40, 72, 48 and 80. Under this process, California could hold its primary as early as the fourth series – after only 11% of the country has voted. The American Plan guarantees a measured schedule of primaries that slowly build up in size – avoiding the front-loaded scenario where insurgent candidates lose because, even if they win Iowa or New Hampshire, they later get overwhelmed by the avalanche of money required to compete on Super Tuesday.

The problem with our current system isn’t that small states go first. Iowa and New Hampshire may be predominantly white, rural states with parochial interests – but their small size forces candidates to run grass-roots campaigns. I’d be happy replacing New Hamsphire with New Mexico – a small state with a more diverse population. But because it’s so expensive to campaign statewide in California, it makes no sense to start the primary season with it. Give California a chance to be influential early on, but don’t let it drive the initial cost of running for president that it drowns out most voices.

The American Plan has picked up substantial grass-roots support among California Democrats, who understand its instinctive fairness to fix our broken primary system. It’s also preferable to other reforms that have been suggested. Unlike the Delaware Plan (which the Republican Party flirted with in the late Nineties), no state gets unfairly locked into a certain place forever. Unlike the Regional Primary approach (which many Secretaries of State have advocated), it does not kick off the primary season with a series of front-loaded primaries that quickly winnow out the field.

In December 2005, the Democratic National Committee recommended that the American Plan be “studied” for the 2012 presidential cycle. In January 2006 – over a year ago – the California Democratic Party unanimously voted to request the D.N.C. to implement it for 2012, and state party chair Art Torres has personally lobbied Howard Dean about it. But if this has been considered for years (Professor Gangale began working on it in 1992), why not go ahead and do it for the 2008 election cycle and spare us yet another front-loaded primary season -- rather than wait yet another four years?

Everyone I’ve talked to for this article says that it’s “too late” now to deal with 2008 – the schedule is set and states will do what they please. But many states (including California) are still contemplating moving their primaries up – so it’s not too late now, and it certainly wasn’t too late a year ago. In 2005, the D.N.C. believed that it was too late to move ahead on the American Plan because they would need time to coordinate with Republicans and have the R.N.C. approve the same plan. Ironically, the Republicans killed another reform effort several years ago for the same reason.

The 2008 Presidential Election will be unique – for the first time in eighty years, no incumbent President or sitting Vice President will be running in either party’s primary. This allows the potential for a wide-open field without an “anointed” leader who quickly gets the nomination under the auspices of inevitability. As someone who organized for the late Senator Paul Wellstone when he considered challenging Vice President Gore in 2000 for the Democratic nomination, I cannot begin to tell you how hard it is to take on the entire weight of the party establishment.

Opportunities like this don’t happen all the time. If only we had a sane primary schedule so that progressive candidates who run grass-roots campaigns that offer something different could have a chance in hell, we would have a real democracy. And it shouldn’t be too late to do it this time.

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