Rotating Regional Primary System

The Rotating Regional Primary System is a proposed system for reform of the United States presidential primary process, in which the country would be divided into four regions for primary elections. The plan has been promoted since 1999 by the National Association of Secretaries of State.

The plan provides that the individual state primaries (or caucuses) would be grouped into 4 regions, each region voting in a different month--either March, April, May or June. Individual states in a region would vote on or soon after the first Tuesday of their month, though not necessarily on the same day. The first year, the order would be determined by lottery, and subsequently rotate for each election.

To continue traditional early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, they would be permitted to hold their primaries or caucus before any of the regions.

Regional Groupings:

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been lukewarm to the concept. In 2000, the Republican National Committee's Advisory Commission on the Presidential Nominating Process passed over the Rotating Regional plan in favor of the Delaware Plan. In 2005, the Democratic National Committee's Commission on Presidential Nomination Timing and Scheduling ranked it ninth on a list of ten priorities, just above keeping the status quo.

The size of the initial regional primary may be large enough to prevent less-funded candidates from being able to compete.

Also, several of the regions (most notably the South and East regions) show significant political bias one way or the other. Overall, this may be seen as a liberal bias: the South is quite conservative, the Midwest is neutral, the West is moderately liberal, and the East is more strongly liberal. With 2 liberal-leaning regions vs. only one conservative-leaning region, in more elections the parties may be tilted toward liberal candidates. This flaw can be corrected with politically neutral regions, mentioned below.

Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, proposed a lottery system in his book, A More Perfect Constitution. This would use the same regions as above, but would wait until about 6 months before the first primary before selecting the order of the primaries. This would prevent candidates from "camping out" in early primary states.

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