With TV images of bucolic campaign scenes in Iowa and New Hampshire, Montana politicians dream of having their presidential candidates chatting with folks here at picnics, fairs and small-town cafes.
Trouble is, it's never worked that way here. Montana, for the most part, has been ignored by presidential candidates. Our checkered primaries usually attract, at best, second-fiddle presidential candidates and relatives of the front-liners.
On June 3, 2008, Montanans are scheduled to cast their votes for their respective party's presidential candidates in a meaningless civic exercise.
Montana and South Dakota have the nation's last scheduled presidential primaries. With the “frontloading” of primaries and caucuses much earlier in 2008, pols believe both Republicans and Democrats will have unofficially picked their respective nominees by early February or March.
Earlier this year, the Montana Legislature killed a bill by Rep. Duane Ankney, R-Colstrip, to set a Montana presidential primary in February or March 2008. The measure's $1 million price tag doomed it.
Now leaders of the Montana Republican Party want to set up a party presidential nominating caucus on Feb. 5, 2008. It would be a winner-take-all race, with the results binding on delegates to the party's national convention next summer.
On Saturday, the state Republican Central Committee approved the caucus proposal. It now goes to the Republican National Committee for its expected OK.
The intent is good. The caucus would give Montana Republicans a chance to make their picks for president when it's still a contest nationally.
However, the GOP proposal limits the potential participants to a maximum of about 3,000 Montanans - local and state Republican leaders and precinct committee people and statewide and county GOP elected officials. However, 1,200 of these GOP precinct committee people's seats are now vacant, so the caucus figures to attract volunteers to fill these jobs so they can vote for a presidential candidate.
Still, 3,000 potential caucus participants is a tiny fraction of the 112,747 Montanans who voted for Republican presidential candidates in the June 2004 primary.
Under the caucus plan, the great masses of Montanans who call themselves Republicans would get no say, but the GOP leaders would make the decision. That's like the old smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear where power brokers from both parties separately decided what was best for the rest of the great unwashed.
In 1984, the Democratic National Committee forced Montana Democrats to hold a caucus instead of a presidential primary after a long legal fight. The DNC objected to Montana's open primary, which doesn't require voters to register by party.
All people who signed statements proclaiming themselves Democrats could vote in the March 25, 1984 caucus, which drew 11,739 votes. Still, that was a fraction of the 130,059 people who voted in the Democratic presidential primary four years earlier.
After considerable lobbying, Montana Democratic leaders were able to get their national party to drop the caucus demand. They've used presidential primaries ever since, albeit in June.
Montana first gained the right to a presidential primary early in the last century, thanks to the Progressive movement. The People's Power League of Montana put it on the ballot as an initiative in 1912, along with several measures. Nearly four out of five voters backed it.
The state's first presidential primary went off without a hitch in 1916. However, those running for delegate seats weren't required to state their preference for president. And delegates to national conventions weren't required to vote for the state winner.
Montana's presidential primary was ripe for manipulation, and that's just what happened in 1920. The Nonpartisan League, an agrarian group that some considered radical, decided to back California's progressive U.S. Sen. Hiram Johnson in Montana's presidential primary to block Warren G. Harding, the eventual nominee.
The architect was one Oliver Hazard Perry Shelley, a Red Lodge newspaperman considered a nuisance by the Republican old guard. Shelley preferred to go by his initials, O.H.P., and his political enemies mocked him as One Horse Power Shelley.
Shelly took advantage of the law's failure to require rotation of the names of candidates for delegates. At the 11th hour, Shelley dropped off petitions for eight obscure Johnson delegates. The last names of five of them began with the letter “A,” while two had last names starting with “B” and one with a last name beginning with “D.”
It worked. Johnson won the Republican primary. All eight of Shelley's “A-B-D” candidates were elected delegates, along with some others. It left critics fuming.
Montana's 1924 presidential race drew a low turnout. That fall, Montanans approved a referendum to put this law out of its misery.
Thirty years later, Montanans voted by more than 2-to-1 for a 1954 ballot issue to reinstate the presidential primary.
The next presidential primary in 1956 also proved a flop, when neither Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower nor eventual Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson bothered to enter here. Three years later, the Legislature eliminated the presidential primary.
It resurfaced when the 1974 Legislature, controlled by Democrats, reinstituted the primary. The vote came in the wake of a bitter party convention split in 1972 between backers and opponents of South Dakota Sen. George McGovern.
Whether it's a presidential primary or caucus, Montana has shown it can't match New Hampshire and Iowa in drawing interest. It's hard to imagine that a Republican caucus limiting the participants to party officers and insiders will change that, but we shall see.
Chuck Johnson is chief of the Missoulian State Bureau in Helena. He can be reached at (800) 525-4920 or by e-mail at chuck.johnson@lee.net.
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