Welcome, welcome back and thank you!
A few thoughts a year since the launch of FHQ Plus
A year ago on this date, not really knowing exactly what to expect, I launched FHQ Plus. A year in, I still don’t really know what to expect. It is easy to sit here on the other side of 366 days that included the conclusion of the invisible primary and the rapid denouement of the two major party presidential nomination races and say that it was going to be Biden and Trump all along.
Maybe it was, but that is not really what I’m getting at here when I talk about expectations. It is certainly part of it! No, what I’m getting at is the expectations for this site, this newsletter, this whatever one wants to call it. I took a risk a year ago. I gambled that folks would actually want to fork over one red cent, much less a full subscription fee, to read some of what they had gotten for free over at our sister site, FrontloadingHQ, for 16 years. I gambled that there was space for both a free version and a paid platform, and that I could figure out how to balance the two without completely undermining the original site. I’m still trying to figure out that right balance!
The point is, I gambled on myself and that can be a difficult leap. It was, is and will likely continue to be. But I wanted to take some time out at this mile marker along the road that the broader FHQ universe has traveled and offer a heartfelt note of thanks.
Thank you to everyone who found themselves at FHQ Plus over the last year and decided to click on the subscribe button.
And for those who went a step further and actually paid for access, I cannot thank you enough. It honestly means the world to me.
On some level, it still kind of boggles my mind that anyone wants to pay any attention to me or what I do. But I have done this long enough and have received a variety of “thank you for what you do’s” and “keep it up’s” to know that there is room for what I do. There is a market for it. It may be a niche market, but it is a market nonetheless.
And I keep persisting. I press on because I find the rules of the presidential nomination process in the United States fascinating. It is a crazy patchwork of a process stretched across two major political parties and 56 or 57 states and territories. It gets maddeningly complex exceedingly quickly. And there is and remains a need for both the boring cataloging what the various decision makers, be they national party actors, state legislators, secretaries of state or state party committees, are doing but also for some contextualization of the individual actions taken as well as the broader patterns in the rules changes enacted.
That need exists. It is there because the rules can be confusing. And changes to them can be misread and misinterpreted. And getting it right is important!
The rules and 2024
Did the rules changes for the 2024 cycle matter?
Well, clearly the rules did not disrupt the trajectory of the path toward the expected result. The 2024 general election will feature a rematch of the 2020 election. However, that is different than saying the delegate rules — the allocation rules, the calendar rules, etc. — did not matter. Arguably, they did matter. But for different reasons.
On the Democratic side, while the rules did not impact the outcome of the nomination, the attempt to change the early window of the calendar and the states in it was significant. No, not to 2024 necessarily, but disrupting the standard operating procedure — establishing a precedent, if not a new rotational protocol — will matter on the other side of November. That is to say that the changes will matter for 2028 and beyond for both parties.
For Republicans, there were 2024 implications to those rules changes, but they were felt more in the invisible primary. Yes, it borders on tautological to say that the Republican rules mattered because there was a battle over establishing new state-level rules or maintaining the old ones. But in much the same way that the Trump administration worked to establish favorable rules for the 2020 cycle in 2019, the Trump campaign focused on maintaining those rules and cleaning up some other ones in 2022-23 with 2024 in mind. That the effort this cycle was so successive was an early sign of not only how organized the Trump 2024 campaign was, but also of the receptiveness (at least at the state party level) of the party elite for a Trump alternative.
Now, as the series of state-level Republican rules primers will I hope attest, there was a fair amount of “snapping back” to what one might call competitive cycle rules in 2024 from a set four years ago that were more incumbent reelection cycle-driven. In some cases that meant not canceling contests as in 2020, but for more than a few states that meant relaxing or eliminating qualifying thresholds or simply returning to rules used the last time the Republican nomination was seriously contested. Even with those changes, however, the state-level rules were structured in a way in the Republican process that allowed Trump to accrue delegates at a quick enough clip to extinguish most of his viable competition by Super Tuesday, before even half of the delegates had been allocated.
Would the outcome have changed if the rules were any less frontrunner friendly than they were in 2024? No, it likely would not have been different. It may have taken Trump a little longer to wrap things up, but his support was always strong enough that the best case scenario for Trump alternatives, even late in the invisible primary, was to keep Trump under a majority of delegates during primary season. And that is not an argument that is easy to make to primary voters. Nor is it a sustainable one.
The road ahead for FHQ Plus
So primary season in 2024 was a little anticlimactic compared to other recent cycles. What does that mean for FHQ Plus moving forward?
It is a good question. And since folks are subscribing to this site and in many cases paying for access for the content here, you deserve some heads up about the answer to that question.
In the near term, the focus will remain on the state-level delegate selection rules for 2024. The plan is to complete those primers during the April lull in the primary calendar and to tie some nice and neat bows on some additional primary season stuff — questions that have arisen in the course of the process that probably did not get the attention they deserved at the time and some other general housekeeping on 2024. That should take us through the end of primary season in early June.
After that, FHQ Plus will redirect for the November election. The general election analysis and projection model that in years past was housed at FHQ will now be here. As with the delegate rules primers, there will be a hub set up at FHQ that will link to material over here, but most of the meat will be here with synopses, other summaries and short stuff over at FHQ.
My plan is to have that infrastructure up and running by mid- to late June and run that through the November election as has been the custom at FHQ since the 2008 cycle.
Following November, the focus will shift to 2028, but I will probably do that differently than in the past. Yes, that will include national party efforts at and after the national conventions this year as well as calendar activity as state legislatures reconvene early next year. However, part of tying nice and neat bows on the 2024 process is to lay the groundwork for a book project. That project will play out, in part, here. Paid subscribers will get early sneak peeks at that process and the fruits of those labors.
And I desperately want to revive a conversation that has withered on the vine in recent cycles. It used to be that rules nerds of the Democratic, Republican and academic persuasions would occasionally get together to partially hash this stuff out, partially commiserate about the challenges of implementing a presidential nomination process and partially strategize about common problems across both parties’ processes. And those efforts were not in vain. Due to those conversations, some of the calendar madness from 2008 was reined (at least in the rules), a standard that held until the dialog broke down over the last two cycles. I say that because I was invited to participate from 2012-15 in those informal discussion, and I was there when the dialog ceased thereafter.
That is still possible, even in these polarized times. FHQ Plus may or may not be the place to foster such a resurgence, but I can say that there are rules and rules-minded folks from both parties who are subscribers here. FHQ Plus can be that place. No, no one wants to think about 2028 at this point, but those conversations are better started sooner rather than later. If you fit into the above group of rules or rules-minded folks and are interested, please reach out and let me know. I would be more than happy to help facilitate that dialog (not a public-facing one necessarily, but a dialog nonetheless). It may not start where it left off in 2015 — with national party rules chairs involved — but it could be a start toward revived conversations on the common issues across party processes.
Thank you all again. Sincerely, thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing and for that subset of you who are paid subscribers, thank you for helping to keep FHQ going. I am eternally grateful. All of you have helped make the first year of FHQ Plus a success.
And if you have not already subscribed, then there is no time like now to remedy that.
All the best.
Josh