I don't get no respect. I played hide-and-seek, and they wouldn't even look for me.
-- Rodney Dangerfield

Wyoming Republicans must know how Rodney feels. They attempted to get some media attention (and some attention from the candidates) by passing an impossibility into law, but nobody noticed. No respect indeed.

I first pointed this out as a side issue when I was attempting to give a complete overview of the early Republican primaries:

The state of Wyoming (hello Equality Staters, or perhaps I should say Cowboy Staters?) has rashly passed a law to move their Republican presidential primary up to (and I quote) "the same day as New Hampshire's primary." Democrats were smarter, and refused to move their primary up past [Super Duper Tsunami Tuesday]. Because by doing so legislatively, Wyoming risks opening a time-space vortex. The reason I say this is that New Hampshire's primary calendar states "our primary will precede all other state primaries by two weeks."

You can easily spot the temporal paradox in these two laws. Does not compute. One state says "our primary will be two weeks before anyone else" and yet another state says "our primary will be on the same day," and the possibilities for opening a rift in the space-time continuum is just too great to ignore. Myself, I personally plan to be as far as I can be from Green Bay, Wisconsin (the approximate geographic midpoint between the two states) the entire month of January next year.

All kidding aside, Wyoming poll data seems to be completely non-existent. This is completely understandable, seeing as how the county I grew up in had more people in it than the state of Wyoming. Anyone who can provide accurate polling data for the state of Wyoming (either party) will earn my undying respect, at this point.

I'm still waiting on that poll data, by the way -- which only reinforces my suspicion that it doesn't actually exist.

But consider the difference between Wyoming and South Carolina. South Carolina Republicans announced recently that they will be moving their primary up, possibly forcing New Hampshire and Iowa to also move their dates up. The mainstream media covered the story extensively. So as to not appear belligerent to New Hampshire, the South Carolina official who announced this news did so from New Hampshire's state capital -- a stunt that worked, given the media's coverage of the event.

Wyoming, on the other hand, is directly challenging New Hampshire's "first in the nation" primary status, and there is not a peep from the media. Maybe it's "coastal elitism" -- maybe all those jokes about the media ignoring "flyover country" are correct. Maybe the media couldn't find Wyoming on a map with both hands and a flashlight. I honestly don't know.

Lest you think I am making this up, here is some data from Lexis-Nexis. For the past six months, if you do a search on "New Hampshire primary" you get 218 articles in major newspapers. If you do the same search and add "South Carolina" you get 92 articles. If you do the search on "New Hampshire primary" and "Wyoming" you get 10 articles. Of these 10, only two were published since the beginning of July. One of these articles is about the Arkansas primary, which mentions Wyoming in passing (in a list of six states), and the other is about South Carolina's primary move, which mentions Wyoming in a sidebar (another list of states). Neither one mentions the legal dilemma Wyoming's law has created.

Of course, the biggest reason nobody's giving Wyoming any respect is that fewer people live in Wyoming than any other state. Which means fewer delegates to the party convention than anyone else.

But you'd think someone would at least mention it.

Wyoming's not alone in being ignored by the media, of course. When it gets right down to it, most of the country will be ignored by the media during both the primaries and the general election. Which is a shame, and which leads me to propose a sweeping change to the way the primary calendar is arranged.

I realize that this proposal has almost no chance of becoming reality, and that there are many such proposals out there competing with my idea. But the idea itself, I think, has merit.

Each state's position in the primary calendar should depend on the percentage of eligible voters who voted in the previous election. The more citizens who vote in your state, the earlier you get to vote next time around.

This would be a way to apply some "positive reinforcement" which would encourage people to vote. There are any number of ways to set up the details, but the basic concept should be: highest participation votes first, lowest votes last.

This could be based on the percentage of votes from the previous primary, or the percentage from the general election, or a combination of the two. But it has to be eligible voters, and not registered voters. The media in general don't like talking about "eligible" voters, because the percentages are so dismal. Something like half of eligible voters don't even register to vote. Of those registered, half don't show up to vote. The only fair way to figure the percentage of voter participation is to look at the eligible numbers, and not the registered numbers.

To preserve the "retail" politics which New Hampshire and Iowa constantly boast about, perhaps let four states vote before all the others. Divide the country into four regions, and then pick the highest percentage from each region of the country to vote before all the other states. Among those four, whoever has the highest percentage votes first. Iowa and New Hampshire continually remind the rest of the country that they should go first because of how seriously they take the campaign, and how they (more than other states), really think hard about who to vote for. OK, fine, but you have to back that claim up with some hard numbers. If New Hampshire really is that committed to taking voting seriously, then they should have the highest percent turnout in the entire country, right? If they don't (if they can't back their claim up) then they don't get to go first next time around.

The other 46 states could be scheduled individually, in groups, or some combination of the two. Have the top 5 states vote first, and then each successive group vote afterwards, separated by a week. Or have 12 states vote one month, then the next 12 the next month. But the order of the calendar would strictly follow the percentages from the last presidential election.

There would be an overwhelming motivation for states to cheat, of course, so there would have to be some sort of national monitoring of each state's percentage.

But the best thing about this crazy scheme is that the primary calendar would likely be very different for each and every election cycle. States would vie with one another to move to the front of the line, because an early spot would mean candidates will likely address that state's issues (and pay more attention to that state in general) during the next election.

Who knows? If Wyoming gets everyone out to vote better than any other state, maybe they actually will get to go first! Then the media would be forced into giving them some respect.

[Footnote: The joke at the top was Rodney Dangerfield's first ever "no respect" joke, from his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The epitaph on his gravestone reads: "There goes the neighborhood."]

-- Chris Weigant