The latest poll at HeraldNet.com had one thing in common with the state’s presidential primary. Neither has any bearing on who will be the next president of the United States.
Since the next primary will cost taxpayers $11.5 million, that’s a problem.
At this point, Democrats plan to ignore the 2016 primary election results and choose their convention delegates based on caucuses. Republicans will choose half their delegates in the primary, but there’s virtually no chance the race will still be competitive when Washington gets around to voting in May.
Secretary of State Kim Wyman has been trying to head this off. To do so, she needs to get legislators and Democratic and Republican party leaders to agree on changes. Her enthusiasm for herding cats is admirable.
Wyman’s two proposals trailed in third and fourth place in our non-scientific poll, but each had some support. Requiring the major parties to assign delegates based on the primary garnered 22 percent of the vote; and 19 percent said to hold the election earlier.
The most popular choice was to keep it as a meaningless beauty contest. But that only had a plurality of 33 percent, so we can’t say we have consensus.
In second place was the nuclear option: get rid of the primary and stick to caucuses. That got only 27 percent of the vote, so most people favored keeping the primary in some form.
All in all, we didn’t get a clear answer. I guess if we really wanted one, we could spend millions of dollars sending a ballot to every registered voter, even though the result doesn’t carry any weight.
But we’d have to be insane to do that.
— Doug Parry, Herald Web editor: dparry@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @ParryRacer
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