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Show High Aspirations in the Rocky Mountains: The Push for a Western Region Presidential Primary Peter C. Carlston Media The States' Perspective. Similar to the western states' hopes, the southern states believed that scheduling a large block of southern primaries on the same early dates would bring an exceptional amount of media attention to the primaries and to the issues of importance to the south. They scheduled their primary right after New Hampshire's, anticipating the heavy coverage the news media usually give to the early contests.4 However, the south's media goals were not achieved. In fact, the opposite effect took place. Paul-Henri Gurian of the University of Georgia analyzed the media coverage of Super Tuesdays, and posited the following results of a regional primary: Contrary to the intentions of the creators of Super Tuesday, scheduling contests simultaneously may depress media attention. Because time and space are limited in broadcast and print media, respectively, when several contests are scheduled on the same day, each of them is likely to receive less coverage than if scheduled singly...It may be that clustering so many contests on one day serves to diminish, rather than enhance, the attention devoted to those contests (1991). Gurian found that the southern states received less coverage than normally would be expected considering the early date and large number of delegates at stake. He shared this alarming finding: The clustering of southern primaries apparently had an effect contrary to what was intended. The fourteen southern Super Tuesday states received 27.9 percent of national coverage in 1976, 18 percent in 1980 and 20.1 percent in 1984. However, in 1988 when these fourteen states scheduled their contests simultaneously, they received only 9.0 percent of the coverage. In fact, seven of the fourteen states received less coverage in 1988 as part of Super Tuesday than they had in any of the other three campaigns (1993). The numbers of the western states were not comparatively analyzed, but the State of Utah might want to take note of another finding of Gurian (1993): ...[A]ny state that was part of a regional primary received 1.11% less coverage than a similarly situated state which was not part of a regional primary. Since mean news coverage is slightly less than 2%, this represents a loss of more than half for an average state. In terms o{ delegates, joining a regional primary result in a decrease of news coverage equivalent to reducing the state delegation hy 58 delegates. (The mean size of Democratic delegations in 1988 was 73.) Utah's Democratic party joined with Colorado, Maryland, and Georgia on the first Tuesday of March 1992 to hold its presidential primary-it was nicknamed "Junior Tuesday". Supposedly it would bring more attention to Utah; however, that turned out not to be the case. Robert D. Loevy (1995, 81) concludes that states with small populations- such as Utah-will not receive much attention when holding primaries on the same day as more populated states. "Utah 4 Gurian's analysis of 1984 data showed that "for each week earlier a contest is heid, media coverage is expected to increase hy 0.17 percent" (1991). had so few delegates at stake-23 compared to Colorado's [the only other Rocky Mountain state scheduled that day] 47, Maryland's 67, and Georgia's 76-that both the candidates and the news media tended to overlook it." How do the statistics of the south's media attention apply to the west? Do they? One might consider that Utah is starting from ground zero in the presidential politics arena (at least in terms of media and candidate attention), and there is "nowhere to go but up." For the State of Utah and the intermountain west generally, perhaps something is better than nothing. The region is not heard much in the first place. Although Utah as a state might not get much more individual attention, perhaps the region will. After all, Governor Leavitt has always referred to the region, not just his home state, when addressing the regional primary issue (1998; Sheehan 1998a). The larger markets in Colorado, Arizona, and perhaps Utah probably would receive the most attention and represent the region, though more sparsely populated states such as Montana and Idaho probably would benefit from the illumination of western issues, albeit indirectly. The Candidates' Perspective. In terms of candidates' use of media, western leaders assert that a western regional primary would be beneficial to campaign finances. In an individual state contest, the candidates must saturate the big markets with expensive media. In a larger, regional contest, less expensive mediums are used, such as radio and direct mailing. Speaking of television, the dominant form of communication, the Western Governor's Association (WGA) points to the advantage of a western primary: "More delegates are reached for fewer dollars spent. For a Democratic candidate to run 100 television ads that reach 80% of California voters that will send 423 delegates to the convention, it would cost $6.5 million. But to run 100 spots to reach 80% of the voters in Western Primary states who will send 413 delegates to the convention, it would cost only $4 million. The numbers are even better for Republican candidates: Spend $2.5 million less in the Western Primary states for 120 more delegates" (quoted in Burgess and O'Donnell 1998). Would the increase of mass media campaigning in the western states translate into more political clout for Utah and the West, or just more advertising revenue for the media? Candidate/Campaign Attention Charles D. Hadley of the University of New Orleans and Harold W. Stanley of the University of Rochester studied the regional results and national implications of Super Tuesday 1988. Related to the southern states' hopes that candidates would pay more attention to the south, they found that Super Tuesday had adverse effects rather than positive results: Super Tuesday reformers desired to downplay the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, but this backfired: the delegates at stake on Super Tuesday increased the importance candi- 44 |
