Primary season gets confusing

What was already a somewhat surreal season of presidential primaries in the United States becomes more so this week. There’s no longer much doubt about who the parties’ nominees will be, but getting to a definitive result will still take some time.

The primary calendar used to be fundamentally simple: first Iowa, then New Hampshire, then Nevada and South Carolina, then Super Tuesday. Sometimes the parties would vary their dates for Nevada and South Carolina, but they were never very different. (In 2016, for example, Democrats voted in Nevada a week before South Carolina, while for the Republicans South Carolina went first with Nevada three days later.)

This year, however, it’s complicated. Iowa’s Republicans duly held their caucuses three weeks ago; Democrats caucused at the same time, but only to elect unpledged delegates, with a separate postal ballot (closing on 5 March) to decide which candidate they should support. Then New Hampshire voted the following week, but the Democrat primary contravened the party’s rules about timing, so it was penalised in terms of delegates and the main candidate, president Joe Biden, didn’t appear on the ballot.

And now the timetable comes apart badly. Democrats voted yesterday (Saturday in the US) in South Carolina, but Republicans there don’t vote for another three weeks, on 24 February. This Wednesday (Tuesday there) there’s a Democrat primary in Nevada, but the Republican one on the same day is state-run and disavowed by the party organisation. Instead, there are party-run caucuses two days later.

The calendars coincide again on 27 February when both parties vote in Michigan, although the Republican primary is non-binding. Then it’s on to Super Tuesday on 5 March. (The Green Papers has the schedule in full detail.)

Biden won the New Hampshire primary without being on the ballot paper; 63.8% of Democrats voted for him as a write-in, against 19.7% for Dean Phillips and 4.0% for Marianne Williamson. It remained to be seen if Phillips’s relatively strong performance could be leveraged into a real challenge, or whether it was just a product of being the only serious candidate officially in the race.

Now we know the answer to that: Biden does even better when voters have his name in front of them. In South Carolina he won 96.2% of the vote and all 55 delegates. Phillips was relegated to third place with 1.7%, behind Williamson on 2.1%. Unless he voluntarily decides to bow out (or is forced out through ill health), there’s now no doubt that Biden will be the Democrat candidate.

It’s almost as certain that Donald Trump will be his opponent, but he still has one serious opponent in the field, in the shape of Nikki Haley. And this week won’t clarify things much because they’re not running against each other: Haley is running in the primary and Trump in the caucuses.

Because the Republican Party objected to the state-run primary, it ruled that candidates could not run in both it and the caucuses, which will actually choose the delegates. Pressed to a choice, Haley, Mike Pence and Tim Scott opted for the primary, while Trump, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy went for the caucuses. The others have now withdrawn, leaving Haley and Trump essentially unopposed.

The relative turnouts and the votes for unserious candidates might tell us something, but basically we’re going to have to wait until South Carolina – Haley’s home state – on 24 February. And unless she can pull something quite unexpected out of the hat, that looks like being the end of her campaign.