The NY Times has a neat advice column for states considering moving up their primaries. States haev been looking to do this for $ millions of reasons.For Iowa and New Hampshire, the primaries and caucuses have been economic windfalls, with candidates and news organizations spending money on hotels, restaurants, bars, and rental cars, and the campaigns devoting huge sums for advertising on local television stations. But faced with such an expansive playing field and the fact that much of the campaigning in the Feb. 5 states will take place in the week before the voting, reporters and candidates will be spending so much time on planes that they probably won’t have time to spend much money on the ground. As for television, some of the campaigns — trying to figure out how to run an advertising campaign in 20 states — are already talking about simply buying national television time rather than time on local stations.
So why not wait? If Feb. 5 is inconclusive, there are going to a lot fewer states competing for the candidates’ time and attention. There are going to be many fairly empty Tuesdays on the primary calendar next spring; pick the right one and one of those states might end up putting a candidates over the top.
