Next up in the US elections: Michigan

Tuesday brings Michigan’s primaries, which will be a bit odd as most of the top Democrat candidates aren’t on the ballot paper. Why?

It’s all because of the ongoing friction between individual states and the party machines over the timing of primaries/caucuses. The problem is that for any individual state it makes sense to want to be in near the start of the election calendar as otherwise there is a risk that the result will be decided before the election gets to you, and so the state will largely be neglected by the different Presidential campaigns. For example, California’s primary has been pretty much a dead contest in recent Presidential selections because it took place towards the end of the primary season, by when the results were cut and dried.

So states keep on bringing forward the dates of their own contests, including California this time. But if you bring forward your date, and then someone else brings forward their date, you’ve got to bring forward your own date yet again – and it all teeters on the edge of chaos.

In order to stop the election calendar collapsing into a complete mess (and at the current rate of change, next time round Iowa may well even have to bring forward its caucuses into the preceding year to keep its first place), the Republican and Democrat parties impose sanctions to supplement their attempts at using diplomacy to ensure some sort of order.

One of the few sanctions they have is to reduce or remove the number of delegates to the party’s convention that a state gets to select in its primary or caucus. However, most early contests are more much about momentum and show rather than actual delegate numbers: does it matter how many delegates McCain won in New Hampshire? No, what matters is that he won the first primary – just as in the UK winning a Parliamentary by-election can have much more impact on the political scene than the fact that only one MP was elected in it. Therefore these sanctions don’t always work.

Which brings us to Michigan. On the Republican side, the number of delegates have been cut in half, but all the candidates are fighting the contest. With the score one each so far to Huckabee (Iowa caucus), Romney (Wyoming caucus) and McCain (New Hampshire primary), it is likely to be an important opportunity for one of them to firmly seize the mantle of front-runner.

On the Democrat side, the attempts to make Michigan toe the line came closer to success, with the result that both Edwards and Obama (but not Clinton) said they would boycott the contest. “Uncommitted” (i.e. elect a delegate to the national convention who isn’t pledged to support a particular candidate) is on the ballot paper.

The risk for Clinton is that it makes this a no-win event: if she romps to victory, well of course she should have given the lack of opponents, but if she wins by less than an overwhelming margin, well that’s a slap in the face for her.

We will soon see.