For what it’s worth … I see a lot of folks saying that all states should vote at once in the primaries. I don’t have time for a longer take on this, but I actually think the sequential nature of the primaries isn’t a problem — in fact, it’s potentially a more robust process. Voters get to react to previous results, and candidates have to show some stamina and endurance. They can’t benefit just by happening to have the whole election conducted in the midst of a favorable news cycle. BUT I think you have to create some incentives so that there isn’t a huge benefit to going first. That probably means some combination of (i) giving a larger delegate bonus to states that vote later in the process — the DNC already does this, but it could use a more aggressive weighting scheme — and (ii) allowing later-voting states to be partially winner-take-all.
