“I have no regrets.” That is Nikki Haley, on Wednesday morning, suspending a campaign that had just lost fourteen of fifteen contests in a single day. She did not endorse the winner, which is the part of the statement that will be quoted, and it is the least consequential thing about the week.
The belief this piece is testing is the one every civics lesson teaches: that primaries are how the parties choose. Tuesday is being reported as the day the choosing finished. The record suggests the choosing had finished some time ago and Tuesday was the paperwork.
What the day actually produced
Fifteen Republican contests, of which Donald Trump won fourteen. Haley took Vermont. On the Democratic side Joe Biden won everywhere that mattered and the rematch became, in the standard phrase, all but official.
Hold that phrase for a second, because it is doing a lot of work. All but official means the outcome was known and the mechanism had not yet caught up with it. That gap is the subject.
The first thing the record shows: the field cleared before the voting
By the time anybody voted on Tuesday, the Republican field consisted of two people, and it had consisted of two people since January.
The others did not lose. They withdrew, mostly before or immediately after the first contests, on the basis of polling and money rather than votes. A candidate who leaves in December has been eliminated by donors and by survey research, both of which operate months ahead of any ballot.
So the selection that primaries are supposed to perform, narrowing many to one, had already been performed by a different process, and the primaries inherited a field of two.
The second thing: the calendar decided who could compete
Super Tuesday is called that because a large number of states vote at once, and voting at once has a specific effect. It rewards whoever can campaign in fifteen places simultaneously, which is a function of money and organization rather than of persuasion.
A candidate cannot visit fifteen states in a week in any meaningful way. What they can do is buy advertising in fifteen media markets and have staff in fifteen places, and that capacity is set long before the day. The design of the calendar therefore selects for the same qualities the pre-primary winnowing selected for, which means it confirms rather than tests.
This is not a complaint about a stitch-up. It is a description of what a simultaneous multi-state contest can and cannot measure.
The third thing: the vote counted delegates, not preferences
The unit being accumulated on Tuesday was delegates, allocated under rules each state party writes for itself, several of which award everything to a plurality winner.
Under winner-take-all, a candidate taking a little over half the vote in a state can take all of its delegates. Repeat that across a dozen states in one day and the delegate count moves much faster than the underlying division among voters, which is what makes a race mathematically over while a substantial minority is still voting the other way.
Haley’s support was not trivial. It was distributed in a way the rules convert into almost nothing, which is a property of the allocation method rather than a measure of how many people held that view.
Worth saying plainly: no rule here was written for this race. Winner-take-all allocation predates every candidate on the ballot, and state parties adopted it for the ordinary reason that it makes their state decisive earlier. The effect it had on Tuesday is the effect it was designed to have, applied to a field that had already been narrowed by other means.
The fourth thing: the general election now runs for eight months
A nomination settled in the first week of March produces a campaign longer than most countries permit for an entire electoral cycle, and length is not a neutral property.
An eight month general election is expensive in a way that compounds. Money raised in March is money that must be spent before November or lose its purpose, and the capacity to raise continuously for eight months is not evenly distributed. It also exhausts the electorate, which is the least measurable effect and probably the largest: by October, a voter has been receiving campaign material for over half a year, and the marginal persuasive value of the next piece is close to nothing.
Length also changes what the campaigns are for. A short campaign is about persuasion, because there is no time for anything else. A long one becomes primarily about turnout operations, data and the slow construction of a field organization, which are the activities that reward incumbency and institutional money.
None of that was decided by anyone. It follows from the states having scheduled their primaries where they did, which they did for reasons of their own having nothing to do with the length of a general election.
What primaries do instead
If they are not choosing, it is worth being precise about what they are doing, because they are not doing nothing.
They confer legitimacy. A nomination that has survived an election, however foregone, is a different object from one conferred in a room, and the difference matters to the people who have to go and work for it in November.
They also produce data. Tuesday generated a county-level map of where a losing candidate’s vote was concentrated, which is a suburban map, and both campaigns will spend the summer reading it. That information does not exist without the vote, and it is the most useful thing the day produced.
And they set a clock. The nomination becoming settled in early March means a general election campaign of eight months, which is a choice the calendar makes on everybody’s behalf.
Put the three together and the reversal states itself. The primary system is usually defended as the democratization of a process that used to happen among party officials. On the evidence of this cycle it has not replaced that process so much as moved it earlier and handed it to different people: donors, pollsters and the organizations that can operate in fifteen states at once.
Voters then ratify, which is a real function and a smaller one than advertised. It is the difference between choosing a candidate and signing for a delivery, and the signature is not worthless: it is what makes the package yours.
What Wednesday leaves
A general election that began in the first week of March, between two men who have already run against each other, with the outcome of the nominating contests known before the largest day of voting occurred.
The remaining primaries will be held on schedule. States that have not voted yet will vote, at public expense, in contests whose results cannot change the nomination, and turnout in those contests will be reported as a measure of enthusiasm rather than as a measure of whether anybody thinks their vote is still doing anything.
