On May 15, the Illinois Senate passed HB 426 by a vote of 48-10. It moves the primary for all office from March to February 5.
It also moves the deadline for a qualified party to submit its presidential and vice-presidential candidates to September 5, to accomodate the Republican Party’s very late national convention. That convention will be held September 1-4, and is the latest major party presidential nominating convention in U.S. history.
Assuming the Governor signs the bill, Illinois will have the earliest primary (for office other than president) ever held in U.S. history. Always before, when a state has had a presidential primary as early as February, it has had a much later primary for other office. Illinois will probably be the first state to break that pattern, although chances are good that Texas will soon imitate it. Many commentators have noted that having primaries for office like Congress and Governor in February of an election year is an asset to incumbents.
In Illinois this bill has been known as The Obama Bill. Numerous people in power positions have remarked that it could help Obama for the Illinois primary to be early instead of late. They took a while longer to pass it than most of us expected.
One of the side effects of the bill is to move petitioning dates forward for qualified parties and independents. Now the deadline is the first week of November. I think pending legislation would move the independent deadline back to match the new party deadline which is June.
Petitioning for qualified parties now begins the first week of August. In a sense this is actually a silver lining for us, because it means that we get five weeks from early August through mid September to petition instead of five weeks from early November through mid December. Since the statewide requirement for a qualified party candidate for the primary is 5,000 signatures, that’s still a lot of work to do, at a point in time when enthusiasm is likely to be lower. This will actually slightly benefit the Green Party in Illinois, albeit by accident.
Here in Mississippi, we are electing all of our state and county officials this year. The primaries are in August, and yet the filing deadline for candidates– even independents– was March 1.
Prior to 1982, the filing deadline for independents was in September. So if the August primaries produced some “turkeys,” there was still time for one or more independents to qualify.
An early primary is definitely a prophylactic for incumbents, and an early filing deadline is even moreso.
Once, in the 1970s, there was a lawsuit aimed at disqualifying the winners of the Democratic primary. To be on the safe side, these Democratic nominees had their wives qualify as independents. The headline in the Jackson paper (no kidding) was, “Broad Field Qualifies…”