AH Challenge: Worst Primary Season

What is needed to create the "worst" primary season on record in the US? By worst, I mean having it drawn out to an incredible length, have a myriad amount of candidates (many of them unworthy), have a lack of available campaign monies, etc.

Your POD must be somewhere after the rise of television as an international medium.
 
Maybe a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party writ large: all the southern states hold an "official", effectively whites-only primary and then a splinter organisation holds a desegregated one. Results differ widely between the two, and it's not known whose delegates will get seated. Therefore, each candidate insists that the other doesn't have enough delegates by picking and choosing primaries, so they continue to campaign until the convention, when there are riots as thousands of delegates are not seated...
 
Well, I can make this year's Republican primaries into such.

POD: Fred Thompson announces his entry into the race on July 4, not September 5. Late, but the two months' extra campaigning allows him to prevent the complete collapse of his campaign in December OTL. Otherwise, things go similarly; Huckabee booms in Iowa, Romney remains as the early-state frontrunner, McCain's campaign begins to revive. The main casualty is Rudy Giuliani, with a lot of his earlier support going to other candidates.

Huckabee wins Iowa in what is effectively a three-way tie with Romney and Thompson. McCain wins New Hampshire, Romney wins Michigan. Here Thompson's early focus on South Carolina pays off, with a narrow victory in the primary. Four candidates can all claim the momentum, and McCain never gains the early support from disaffected Rudyites and 'lesser of evils' voters that he did in OTL. Florida ends in a mess, with the winner, Romney, on 23% of the vote, narrowly ahead of Giuliani, who decides to press on until after February 5 (hoping to take advantage of a divided field)

February 5 arrives, and it's an absolute mess. The split field allows Ron Paul to claim victories in Montana, Alaska and North Dakota, with only a quarter of the vote in each. Huckabee wins the deep south, Romney wins the caucuses and California, Thompson wins the upper south and Missouri, Giuliani wins New York and McCain wins everywhere else. The delegate leader at the end of the day is Romney, but no candidate is raising any funds, all their supporters hate each other, every candidate has more than 100 delegates and every candidate still considers themselves to have a decent shot at the nomination.

Nightmarish? It gets worse, as Newt Gingrich seeks to be 'the compromise candidate', taking advantage of a weak field. He jumps in at CPAC on February 8; he takes Virginia the next week, with McCain triumphing in Maryland and DC. Giuliani and Thompson endorse McCain, giving him a narrow delegate lead over Romney. Huckabee's evangelical supporters take advantage of the split in the 'mainstream conservative' vote between McCain, Romney and Gingrich, to give him a 30% victory in Wisconsin. To this point, no one has won a primary outside their home state with more than 40% of the vote.

On March 4, McCain wins Vermont and Rhode Island; Romney wins Ohio; and Gingrich wins Texas, narrowly. The six weeks until the next primary are a nightmare of sniping, leaking, staff defections, massive debt accumulation, negative advertising and religious slurs. Gingrich, whose campaign failed to raise sufficient funds once the novelty wore off, drops out, endorsing Romney. McCain mortgages three houses to pay for campaign expenses. Ron Paul, with 56 delegates, is wooed by all three candidates; this is seen as a reason for Romney's increasing hawkishness on immigration and Huckabee's coded appeal to anti-war sentiment.

McCain wins Pennsylvania on April 22, and Indiana the next week. Huckabee endorses McCain for a guaranteed spot as vice-president. Romney, decrying a 'crooked bargain', announces his intention to run as an independent candidate in the general election, and withdraws from the race. McCain still loses Idaho and South Dakota to Romney even after he leaves.

In the end, the primary has cost hundreds of millions of dollars; destroyed the political credibility of the Republican primary; resulted in a winner with less than 40% of the popular vote and less than half the delegates; and leaves McCain a crippled nominee for the fall.

That's not as bad as it could be, but it's close enough.
 
Someone falls dead

A dead candidate or two at the right (wrong) time could really turn things inside out. All you would need is a clear winnder going into the convention to die, and the fight is wide open.

Candidate 2 did reasonably well early on, but was a distinct second, and so dropped out, either for lack of funds or because he didn't want a long, drawn out primary to hurt the party, and his chances for a run later on.
Candidate 3 stays to the bitter end, but gets marginal vote totals...but because he stayed in through the entire primary season, he has a few more delegates than candidate 2.

The winner, tho's now dead..assassination, accident, whatever...was in the center of the party's general ideology, while 2 and 3 are widely differing, and polarize both the delagates and the voters...

Just as bad, a debate among the candidates for either party is blown sky-high half way through primary season, and only fringe candidates are left.
 
Riding high on a tide of anti-war sentiment and general disillusionment with the state of affairs in a nation dominated by the Republican Party since 2000, the Democrats are confident of victory in 2008. So confident, in fact, that the Democratic Primary produces not one, but TWO, historic front-runners. One is a female Senator from New York, who has absolutely ZERO cross-party appeal, is absolutely reviled in many circles, and is seen even by some of her supporters as manipulative and out for herself. The OTHER candidate is a young, first-term Senator with zero foreign policy credentials in a race where foreign policy will be an absolutely crucial issue, and considered to be the #1 Liberal-with-a-capital-L in Congress. By the way, he is also black, has a Muslim name, and has reported ties to both fundamentalist Islam AND confirmed ties to a militant, white-hating, black pastor, who makes Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson look downright sane.

If this wasn't enough, the nomination fight continues through early June, long after the Republican nominee was in place and campaigning nationally.

The Democratic Party was proving once again that the only people who could defeat the Democrats were the Democrats themselves.

God, I'm evil. I must hate the Democrats. Good thing this is an AH board, because this could NEVER happen in real life. No way are the Democrats that dumb. :rolleyes:
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
Riding high on a tide of anti-war sentiment and general disillusionment with the state of affairs in a nation dominated by the Republican Party since 2000, the Democrats are confident of victory in 2008. So confident, in fact, that the Democratic Primary produces not one, but TWO, historic front-runners. One is a female Senator from New York, who has absolutely ZERO cross-party appeal, is absolutely reviled in many circles, and is seen even by some of her supporters as manipulative and out for herself. The OTHER candidate is a young, first-term Senator with zero foreign policy credentials in a race where foreign policy will be an absolutely crucial issue, and considered to be the #1 Liberal-with-a-capital-L in Congress. By the way, he is also black, has a Muslim name, and has reported ties to both fundamentalist Islam AND confirmed ties to a militant, white-hating, black pastor, who makes Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson look downright sane.

If this wasn't enough, the nomination fight continues through early June, long after the Republican nominee was in place and campaigning nationally.

The Democratic Party was proving once again that the only people who could defeat the Democrats were the Democrats themselves.

God, I'm evil. I must hate the Democrats. Good thing this is an AH board, because this could NEVER happen in real life. No way are the Democrats that dumb. :rolleyes:

Hey, it could come worse, after #2 wins the nomination with a margin of just half a dozen electoral votes, #1 announces to run as an independent, completely pissing the entire party establishment of.

Two month later #1 and his VP nominee are assasinated, so the only potential candidate (in a very shortly organisted 2. convention) is a former VP and nobel peace prize winner.
Well actually hw e isn't, since he has decided to support #2s independent campaign, since he was the VP of her husband.

or what?
 
Top