If you are old enough to have taken a code writing class during your formative years, you will have had the unhappy experience of "debugging" your program: looking for the missing parenthesis or quotation mark or command that crashed your whole project. At Loyola, back in the day, though punch cards were even then long obsolete, we had to look for improperly punched cards (hanging chads long before 2000), or cards that had somehow gotten into the wrong order.
The English language expands over time. When talking of many different systems now, not just computers, we talk about "bugs." The maddening way in which modern appliances die two weeks after the expiration of their warranties, for example. But, say economists, planned obsolesence is a feature, not a bug: If you could keep your refrigerator going for 30 years, like your parents kept theirs going, look at all the factory workers who'd be idled. This is supposed to appease you as you shell out for a shiny new appliance that will inevitably fail in five years' (and two weeks) time, just like the one you're replacing.
Whether something is a feature, as opposed to a bug, will oft depend on point of view. If you sell appliances, as long as no one remembers how to make, or is willing to make, the stoves and refrigerators that could last 30 years (that is, as long as everyone makes and markets the same kind of dreck), the short life-cycle is a feature. For those who use the appliances, planned obsolescence is a very big, slimy, poisonous bug.
As it is with appliances, so too with politics. Having an eternity between candidate filing and the actual election helps politicians keep non-politicians from entering the system. A lot of your neighbors may think that they will have an opportunity to 'throw the rascals out' at the next election -- in November 2026. It's not that they're dumb; it just what they were taught in Civics class. But nearly all the rascals will be already safely in place long before then. In Illinois, some rascals may have to face other rascals in March -- but that's still nearly eight months before the election.
For politicians, this absurd primary calendar is a feature, not a bug.
Politicians are in the business of getting elected... and re-elected. Early primaries are one way of accomplishing this. Although it may be impolite to say so, holding early primaries is absolutely a form of voter suppression, albeit one tactic that receives strong bipartisan support, even in these fractious times. Because you are a regular FWIW reader, you may not have noticed this -- because you would vote whenever an election was held -- you would head out to the polls during a blizzard or a hurricane. You are politically active and (if you do say so yourself) aware. But you are, in fact, a unicorn. Most people, however, being not-unicorns, do not vote in primaries ("I don't want to declare a party" is one of the better-sounding, but still-frivolous, excuses). The earlier the primary, the fewer people who actually vote.
That is exactly the way the politicians want it. Political professionals don't want big turnouts. That's 1960s League of Women Voters stuff. Political professionals want reliable, predictable turnouts -- and, as a practical matter, that means the fewer voters, the better.
Remember the Bad Old Days? Remember when the unofficial motto of the Cook County Democratic Party was 'we don't want nobody that nobody sent'? You don't? You say you are too young to remember the reign of Richard J. Daley?
Well, perhaps you are too young -- but I have sad news for you, bunky -- the Bad Old Days never went away. Some FWIW readers may think they're welcome to participate in politics, even though nobody sent them. But you, friends, are not welcome. Your checkbooks are.
Many FWIW readers hope someday to serve in the judiciary. So they need to get involved in politics. They learn who to call, who to cultivate, what tickets to buy, what things to say. They are lawyers -- and lawyers are very good problem solvers -- and, thankfully, in every election cycle, some good lawyers figure out the system well enough to get on the bench. They don't necessarily have to believe the slogans they are forced to spout in order to get elected (although many presumably do); the issues that consume politicians tend not to surface in Traffic Court. And, while (not being an insider) I can't say this with certainty, I strongly suspect that the politicians really don't mind that some judges are, at best, agnostic on their Great Issues... because judges don't make laws, they only apply the laws the politicians make to the cases that come before them. In other words (and I don't mean this to be hurtful, I'm only saying it because it is true) judges just aren't all that important to the ordinary operation of the political establishment. There's a reason why you need a lot more signatures to run for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District than to run for the bench....
But we could do so much better. If we tried.
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UPDATE: Bad as our March primary is, NBC News reports this evening that the Illinois Democratic Party is lobbying to move our 2028 primary up. Why? Well, a February primary helped Illinois favorite son Barack Obama secure the White House. Gov. Pritzker is apparently hoping for a similar boost. *Sigh*
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