Rethinking Presidential Primaries

The historic 2008 presidential election is now almost a year past, but my thoughts last week at a panel on presidential primaries hosted in Washington by the Brookings Institution returned to that election and a presidential candidate who never was - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In 2007, before the presidential primary season officially got underway, a close political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg told me that Mr. Bloomberg was most likely to enter the race as a third-party alternative if the major parties nominated Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton and Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee. The thinking was that the former Arkansas first lady and the former Arkansas governor would be the most polarizing candidates in their respective parties, fueling disaffection among independents and soft partisans that would pave a middle, split-the-difference path for the fiscally conservative, socially liberal New York mayor.

What Mr. Bloomberg may not realize is that his presidential aspirations, if indeed conditional on a Clinton-Huckabee matchup, may have been doomed from the outset by the nominating rules each party used in 2008. Those rules may change significantly by the 2012 election, but before turning to the future, the Bloomberg nonstarter scenario requires a bit of explaining.

Elaine Kamarck was the featured speaker at the Brookings event. An expert on presidential nominations, particularly on the Democratic side where she has been an adviser to nomination commissions and twice a so-called "superdelegate" to the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Kamarck discussed her new book, "Primary Politics."

During her remarks, she argued that last year the Democrats' proportional allocation rule for delegates prevented Mrs. Clinton from racking up delegates in the big primary states she won, including New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Had all state contests been winner-take-all, Kamarck estimates the former New York senator would have won the primary by about 300 delegates. Mr. Huckabee, she said, suffered the reverse curse: After splitting the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary with John McCain, he watched the Arizona senator parlay narrow wins in big, winner-take-all states like Florida, New Jersey and Virginia into a huge delegate lead.