ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a brief overview of the evolution of the presidential nominating process, including the rise of presidential primaries, the acceleration of front-loading, and the role of Iowa and New Hampshire as first-in-the-nation contests, or carve-out states, that are regularly exempted from national party timing rules. Emphasis in this chapter is placed on the incongruity between the post-1968 reforms which sought to ensure all party voters a meaningful choice in the selection of their party’s nominee and the emergence of a sequential, front-loaded process which privileges voters in early-in-the-calendar states while those in later-voting states are left with a constrained choice or even no choice in the selection of a nominee. The chapter introduces the scholarly debate over the relative advantages and disadvantages of a prolonged intra-party contest (the divisive primary thesis) and the question of who controls the nominating process: party elites in the invisible primary stage or the voters through the selection of convention delegates under the momentum model.