A Brief History of Super Tuesday for Jane Austen Jr, and other people not from the USA

Jane, I saw your comment where you asked what Super Tuesday was and I saw MNMom's answer but I wanted to expand on things a bit and explain to you how what Super Tuesday is and how it came to be. Maybe after reading this history of Super Tuesday you'll appreciate the fine political system you have in Canada more.

Many years ago it was decided that the first political events of the election year were to be held in states that get little attention otherwise and those states are Iowa


and New Hampshire.
The leaders of the two major political parties decided that it was best to kick things off in two states that had relatively stable populations and who's citizens had little more to do in the depths of winter than entertain political candidates. After all, and don't get pissed at me Cheesecake Maven, there isn't much to do in Iowa until the corn crop comes in, so that leaves plenty of time to sit around with wealthy older white guys and the odd female or black dude who might be running for President.

Iowa is corn, corn is Iowa. It's the law baby, get used to it.

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The process in Iowa by which they choose delegates to the national convention who will vote to nominate a candidate later in the summer is called a caucus. Near as I can tell a caucus is where a bunch of people get together in a room and they gab about which candidate they like best. Then they split up and and stand with other people in that room who also support the same candidate. This process is favored by people living in the upper Midwest, the rust belt states, and some western states. The reason they like this process is because it offers them a chance to get out of the cold for a few hours and to hang out with their neighbors.

But in New Hampshire, a state little bigger than a pallet of picante sauce that one finds at Sam's Club or any other warehouse superstore, they don't use the caucus system, they use a primary to select their delegates. This means that people in New Hampshire, the majority of whom look like this:don't have to see their neighbors and they can go into a little booth and do their dirty electoral business.

This meant for years that two smallish states had an oversized effect on the outcome of the Presidential nominating process here in the USA. Many millions of dollars and millions of hours were spent in places like Des Moines and Council Bluffs and whatever cities there are in New Hampshire, if indeed there are any cities there at all. These two states, Iowa with it's caucus and New Hampshire with it's primary, got a shitload of attention every four years from all the candidates and from all the people in the corporate media. When the nominating process was spread out over several months it was not crucial to do well in either of those states, one had time to make up for a bad finish later down the line, but not with the advent of the compressed primary/caucus calender.

In the early 90's states like California and New York got jealous of the attention lavished on Iowa and NH. They wanted their primaries to be held sooner so that their primaries would be just as important as the early ones. Apparently it was not enough for these two large states to be the trendstetters and economic engines of this nation, they wanted to be as big a player in the Presidential race as the first two states were. So they asked the national parties if they could move up their primaries. The national parties said no, it's tradition that Iowa and NH are first so please stop whining.

The people in CA and NY were not pleased so they banded together with some other states and they decided to all hold their primary/caucuses on the same day soon after the NH primary. A bunch of other states jumped on board because this meant that much more money would be spent buying ads and feeding and housing all the candidates and the blood suckers in the corporate media in their states. It seemed like a good thing idea and it sped the process along considerably. (Bill Clinton was the first candidate to grasp that a quick primary season meant that he'd have months to hammer away at his Repbulican opponent if he got nominated quickly and it would boost his chances of winning in November. It turns out he was right.) Since elections are held on Tuesday in this country the day that all these states decided to have their primaries/caucuses on was dubbed "Super Tuesday" by the corporate media jackals because they love to reduce things to simple easily manipulated slogans for the masses who buy their bull shit.

Things went fine with this new system and most states were happy that now their citizens had more of a say in choosing who was going to be nominated to run for President, that is until 2007. Michigan and Florida got their noses out of joint and they decided that they wanted to have a bigger impact than they had previously had before. So they moved up the dates of their primaries. The Republicans didn't care but the Democratic Party said no dice, we don't want to piss off people in CA and NY so we will not recognize the results of your primaries if you hold them before Super Tuesday and your delegates will not be seated in the convention, which means that they will not get to vote to nominate which ever candidate wins their primaries. Michigan and Florida said, "Feck off, we're holding our primaries when we want," and they did just that. It remains to be seen if delegates from those states will be allowed to vote in the national party convention later this summer, I have a suspicion if Hillary needs the votes she'll manipulate the party leaders into seating the delegates so she can get their votes, she won both primaries by the way.

I realize it's a confusing process we've got here in the USA but to me it seems natural since it's the one I've grown up with. As I get older and I read and watch how other countries do it, I see how fucked up and money driven our system is. Running for President has become a full time job and it begins the day after whoever gets sworn in on inauguration day in January. I'd much prefer to have a election system like that of Great Britain, France, or Canada. It would be much shorter and instead of being out raising such obscene amounts of money, our legislators and President would instead have time to actually get something done that might benefit us. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them to do anything that actually benefits the people, after all it's not like we give them money like the lobbyists and big business does.