Unintended Consequences of Late Primaries
Golisano's Millions Will Crowd the Shrunken Election Season
By Joseph Mercurio
[This column appeared in The New York Sun on September 16, 2002.]
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has astutely proposed changing the date for the New York State primaries back to June, and Governor Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Bruno are wisely open to the idea. Mr. Pataki -- or a future governor such as McCall -- may gain even more sympathy for the idea in the next few months as one or both fall victim to one of the pitfalls of the short General Election season: the compressed amount of time in which to buy television and radio advertising. What has been an accepted bug in New York's electoral system will almost certainly be exacerbated by the presence of wealthy Independence Party candidate Thomas Golisano, who will burn through precious airtime and also make it more expensive for the other candidates.
Currently we have a June primary to elect presidential nominees. But for state offices, New York has an early September primary. This is not unusual. About half the country's primaries are after June. But New York has a special problem. It is more difficult to reach voters in the expensive Empire State media market, which tends to favor incumbents with large budgets and networks of support.
Yet the legislature did not set up September primaries to help incumbents -- the law of unintended consequences intervened.
In 1977, Governor Hugh Carey was dissatisfied with the fiscal condition of New York City and how Mayor Abe Beam's administration was dealing with it. To allow more time for his favored candidate, Mario Cuomo, to enter the race for mayor and become a competitive candidate in the primary, the Governor persuaded the legislature to move the primary to September. Despite Carey's efforts, Mr. Cuomo ended up losing to Rep. Edward Koch in the primary, a runoff, and then the November election (Mr. Cuomo was on the Liberal Party line).
Carey's scheme may have failed, but the September primary was here to stay, and it has had a number of consequences not necessarily intended by those who fixed the date. The most significant of these is the way in which it compresses the window for buying radio and television ads.
The way political advertising buying works is as follows: Candidates are given political rate cards. Rich and poor, connected or not, every candidate gets the same prices. It is generally a higher price than product advertising since product advertising is usually done in higher volume and over longer periods of time than candidate advertising. When a candidate asks for rates they are given several prices for the same spot position. The different prices relate to preemptability and the amount of competition for the spot.
In the past this did not present much of a problem. Candidates in expensive states like New York never reached saturation levels so there were plenty of low-cost spots to buy. At worst a candidate would miss out on a desirable program in the last weeks. The playing field was level.
Today, candidates with vast personal wealth or access to unusually large amounts of special interest money are buying radio and television advertising in huge volume, and when they have no major party primaries they can place their media buys early and corner a sizable portion of a market's inventory at cheap rates. When other candidates come in later, the spots are no longer available or the candidate is forced to pay a more expensive rate to get good positions, but the well-financed candidate who got there early has first shot. A bidding war begins.
The September primary magnifies the problem. Candidates with major party primaries cannot even begin to order advertising for the November election until mid-September. Moreover, they cannot realistically begin to raise money until after their primary victory.
Because the primary is so late there are few weeks in which to place advertising. If a candidate wanted to run a television campaign that averaged 1,000 GRPs (gross rating points) a week for 13 weeks in each market in New York State -- a modest media level in a contested election anywhere in the country -- it would cost upwards of $26 million, because New York State contains the most expensive market in the country.
If candidates for governor have $20 million, $40 million or even $60 million dollars each to spend on media after a June primary, there is still enough inventory for the markets to handle the business without disrupting prices. And each side has enough time to raise the needed money. However, when the time frame is compressed into less than eight weeks after a September primary an imbalance is created.
This problem was magnified in the last New York City mayor's race. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent more than $30 million on television (that would be roughly the equivalent of more than $60 million statewide in a governor's race). His opponent had far less money and a much shorter period in which to place his buy. Few spots with good political audiences were available and the price was higher than normal.
This year's governor's race has three candidates, one with an unlimited budget, the second with vast fundraising and no major party primary, and a third who has only just come out of his primary. Mr. Pataki's race will be complicated quite a bit by Mr. Golisano, though he has had the opportunity to set up a good portion of his media buys in advance. H. Carl McCall is not so lucky, and now must find a way to compete.
Governor Carey's primary date change is clearly going to have an especially significant unintended consequence this time around. The question is whether New York's future governor will take this experience to heart and even out the field for future battles by creating some breathing room between the primary and general elections.
