by Zach Bigalke

Created on: April 11, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

In this age of online polls and instant information, Americans have come to expect results in real time. Many people are more likely to vote for the next American Idol than for the next American president. More people - especially younger people - know about the saga of Sanjaya than the odyssey of Obama. We as a society want our answers now; we have no time to wait for ballots to be tallied and rechecked.

When Hunter S. Thompson went on the road with the McGovern campaign through the 1972 Democratic primary season, he spent four and a half months on the trail between Iowa on 24 January 1972 and the final primaries in South Dakota on 06 June 1972. Early front-runner candidates such as Ed Muskie cracked under the pressure of the primary season, exposing their weaknesses to the general public as they caved to various pressures. The beauty of an extended primary season is that it allows pause for reflection on each new result. In 1972, the busiest primary day was the last, with four states holding their primaries concurrently. Candidates were forced to mobilize their forces and show their faces in each primary state in an effort to either build on past momentum or rebuild a tarnished reputation for the next vote.

Contrast this to the current political situation. When New York governor Eliot Spitzer signed legislation yesterday moving the state's presidential primaries up the calendar to 05 February 2008, he pounded another nail into the coffin of primary significance. The 2004 elections saw eight primaries on the first Tuesday in February, and another ten primaries on the first Tuesday in March. The original premise of the "Super Tuesday" movement in presidential primaries was to band smaller states together on one primary day in an effort to bring greater significance to each individual poll. Now, with the movement of primaries in large states such as California and New York, the smaller states again fade into the background.

A simple analysis of presidential primaries since 1972 shows the birth of Super Tuesday in the political lexicon of the United States. With the scandal that was Watergate and the lingering pain of the conflict in Vietnam, primaries began to gain greater popular significance as people shrewdly evaluated the group of candidates from which the next president would arise. Wary of putting power into the hands of another Nixon, the primary process provided a litmus test by which the political parties could gauge the popularity of each candidate's

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