Super Tuesday: Where's the Candidate That Represents Me?

"I'd rather vote for what I want and not get it," said Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times in the first two decades of the 20th century, "than vote for what I don't want, and get it."

On Tsunami Tuesday, Feb. 5, I was really hoping to have the opportunity to vote for what I want.

For years, the presidential primary here in California, where nearly 13 percent of all Americans reside, was not held until June. This consistently meant that election after election, nearly 13 percent of all Americans exercised absolutely no influence at all on the selection of the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

However, when my state this year joined more than 20 others in scheduling our primary for the first week in February, many of us hoped that, at last, we would be able to vote on a full field of candidates who would come before us debating the full range of issues confronting our nation and our world.

No such luck.

With only seven primaries or caucuses down for the Republicans, and a mere four for the Democrats, most of the original candidates, in both parties, are already gone. Before even the end of January, the Republican field had been whittled down to just four candidates and the Democrats down to just two.

So in the end, tens of millions of voters, in both parties, in more than 40 states, will simply not have the opportunity to cast a vote for their first choice for president.

This disenfranchisement was particularly excruciating, after last Wednesday's withdrawal of John Edwards, for what the late Paul Wellstone called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." That wing is hardly insubstantial. Progressive Democrats of America claims to be the fastest-growing political advocacy group in the country. The new Air America radio network is thriving. Millions of "netroots" citizens, every day, not only visit websites like AlterNet, Common Dreams, DailyKos, and MoveOn -- but also use them to generate collective political action.

But not one of us will have the opportunity next Tuesday to express our political sentiments by voting for an unambiguously progressive presidential candidate.

This profoundly undemocratic dynamic hardly applies only to those who share my politics. The same frustrations will be severe next Tuesday for conservative voters who might have wanted to vote for candidates like, oh, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson or Duncan Hunter. I have little more than contempt for voters whose primary political agenda is to bash immigrants. Nevertheless, our democracy is hardly well served when most of those voters, nationwide, never get the opportunity to express those sentiments by casting a vote for Tom Tancredo.

Votes cast for longshot candidates in both parties could have had an enormous impact on the health of our democracy ... if only those candidates had not been forced out so early. If all voters nationwide had the chance to cast votes for all candidates, they could send powerful messages to the eventual nominees about what they hope to see incorporated into both party platforms and the next presidency. If certain candidates failed but still did well nationwide, or even "better than expected" -- in money, in volunteers and in votes -- then the nominee might have concluded that there was a critical mass of support for the things that candidate was about.

But not if virtually all the candidates are gone before the end of January.

In addition, if the primaries and caucuses in this volatile political season do not decisively settle on party candidates, the results will be hammered out at the conventions -- in Denver in August for the Democrats, in St. Paul in September for the Republicans. If 2008 sees the first brokered conventions in a generation, failed candidates, wielding small but critical contingents of delegates, could have emerged as the crucial powerbrokers in choosing the nominees. Although most had given up on him actually winning the nomination, that was certainly the scenario many Edwards supporters had begun to envision after the results came in from two state primaries and two state caucuses.