The Remnants of
Super Tuesday
By CPT John C. Kuzenski, assistant professor of political science and
co-director of The
Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics, at The
Citadel -- The Military College of South Carolina
 |
It is likely that George W. Bush and Al Gore have never crossed paths with the French political scientist Maurice Duverger -- which is a bit of a shame given that the latter's work is so important in terms of helping make sense of the 2000 U.S. presidential primaries, and may be a key to understanding what is likely to be a process which confirms both Bush and Gore as the contenders in this Fall's presidential race. Duverger gave us, after all, some manner of assessing the likely outcomes which will once again bind most American voters to one of two candidates who represent two leviathan parties in our two-party dominant electoral system this November. As Paul R. Abramson et al have pointed out in the Fall, 1995 issue of Political Science Quarterly,1 some "voters who prefer a candidate … that they think cannot win will cast a vote for their first choice among [the leading candidates]. This behavior is often called 'sophisticated' or 'strategic' voting."
When it was finally introduced by a cooperative of states of the old confederacy in 1988, Super Tuesday was intended to be a check on the power of this element of Duverger's Law -- all the states of the South, on one glorious day, would simultaneously hold their presidential primaries and produce in an instant (hopefully) one moderate-to-conservative Southern front-runner. This was particularly so within Democratic ranks, to counter the increasing strength of what was usually a liberal or otherwise "unpalatable to Dixie" type of candidate who had built early steam in the Northern primaries and caucuses. Unfortunately for its planners, Super Tuesday turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. In Democratic ranks, Jesse Jackson and Mike Dukakis wound up claiming the greatest victories in Super Tuesday 1988 -- hardly the type of candidates its sponsors had intended -- and even in the GOP, which otherwise could have laughed heartily at the woes this Democratic plot had loosed upon itself, there were problems with Pat Buchanan "springing back to life" to challenge the anointed standard-bearer, Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, and ensure a less-than-routine Republican convention later in the year. Even in terms of media attention of this "super event," political scientist Paul-Henri Gurian contends, southern participants in Super Tuesday 1988 "received less coverage than would normally be expected considering the early date and large number of delegates at stake."2
The Past Twelve Years
What has happened in the South over the past twelve years as a result of the lessons learned from the Super Tuesday debacle? Most notably, and as with so many other elements of its late-twentieth-century politics and culture, the South has largely discovered that its distinctiveness as a sociopolitical region is continuing to fade. It is continuing its headlong march into assimilating into a national norm as native non-Southerners migrate into the sunbelt for jobs, native Southerners migrate into the rim-and-non South for better educational opportunities or more cosmopolitan lifestyles, and African-Americans continue to progress from their isolated, rural and disfranchised past into a new century of political activism, educational opportunities and slow-but-steady slippage into the American middle class. If there continues to be such a thing as "the Southern perspective" in political culture or ideology at the dawning of the twenty-first century, it is limited to an understanding of Southern identity as reported in the history books, or as told to Southern children by their parents and grandparents. To be sure, Southern politics as an area of study still revolves around critical issues such as redistricting, urban black empowerment in major cities, voting rights and the confederate flag symbolism issue, among others. On the national stage, however, and to whatever minimal extent it may be molded by these sub-themes of its once-weighty regional concerns, Southern politics is becoming more of an amalgam.
Ironically, it was once the principle of the independent and autonomous state in our federal system which provided much of the ideological impetus to fight in the "Great Unpleasantness," to which the Civil War is still euphemistically referred in parts of genteel Charleston where it began. It is now this desire to re-emphasize independence, autonomy and importance in the presidential primary system that has driven a majority of Southern states away from the Super Tuesday concept. Of the eleven states of the old confederacy, only five will hold their primaries on the same day: Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, on March 14. South Carolina, hoping to capitalize on its importance to the GOP, will hold its Republican contest on February 19; its Democratic primary will be held with Georgia's joint primaries on March 7 (a full week before the "Sub-Super Tuesday" contest of March 14). The Old Dominion has a somewhat convoluted process in which Republicans select part of their delegation to the national convention on February 29, but will choose the rest throughout May and June while Virginia Democrats will select them throughout April and May. Alabama (June 6), Arkansas (May 23) and North Carolina (May 2) have also long since abandoned the Super Tuesday concept, reverting to the traditional preferences of their state legislatures and giving their voters more time to see which horse in each of the two great races before them is leading the pack in the home stretch of the contest.
A Two-Southerner Race?
It is in knowing how Super Tuesday has fallen so greatly apart in the 1990s that the importance of Duverger re-enters the discussion of the 2000 primaries. And it is again ironic that traditional American electoral forces have produced what is likely to be a two-Southerner race for the presidency where Super Tuesday failed to do so. In a mid-December CNN poll, George W. Bush captured sixty-four percent of the support of likely Republican primary voters, leaving John McCain at a distant second place of eighteen percent and the other four official candidates in single digits. Al Gore led Bill Bradley by a margin of fifty-four to forty percent. Bush and Gore are not leading because they are Southern; they are leading by virtue of their national name recognition, their organization, their money and their expeditious stumping of early (and non-Southern) primary states.
Applying Duverger's principle, it is not necessary that these two candidates lay any further groundwork in support of an activist attempt to win the hearts and minds of voters within their respective parties. It will be enough that they shift their campaigns, throughout Spring 2000, into defensive actions that simply quash the occasional incursions of the also-rans. Perhaps it is to this extent only that their "Southernness" will benefit Bush and Gore between March and the end of May; if their defensive operations go awry beforehand and a legitimate challenger springs to the fore, this critical period in the 2000 primaries will be played on their home turf. As in a World Wrestling Federation "free for all" match the likes of which their working-class Southern bretheren so dearly embrace, most supporters of the early-vanquished contenders may be expected to switch allegiance readily to the one with the smell of victory in the name of party unity and team spirit heading into November. To this extent, the South will not be the cause of primary victory for either Democrat or Republican this year, as Super Tuesday sponsors had originally hoped. It also cannot, at this early juncture in the primary season, be used to justify the assumption that the result of each party's contest is a foregone conclusion -- there is still a wide margin for strategic mistake in both the Bush and Gore campaigns, which will only begin to narrow by the end of March. The South in 2000 will, nevertheless, provide a somewhat slanted playing field to the benefit of the home contestants during a very critical stage of the primary process.
NOTES
1 Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, Phil Paolino and David W. Rohde (1995). "Third-Party and Independent Candidates in American Politics: Wallace, Anderson and Perot." Political Science Quarterly 110:3 (Fall 1995), p. 349.
2 Paul-Henri Gurian (1993). "The Distribution of News Coverage in the Presidential Primaries." Journalism Quarterly 70:2 (Summer 1993), p. 336.
