The authors are right, but … Front-loading has skewed the nomination process. It has given states holding early caucuses and primaries an advantage. They have more influence on the final outcome, more attention from the candidates and the news media, more economic benefit from the spending of the campaigns and the organizations that cover them, and more citizen involvement and higher voting turnout.

Since 1988, the front-loading trend has accelerated the beginning and condensed the period during which the nomination is effectively decided. William Mayer and Andrew Busch document and explain this trend and its impact. Their documentation is largely descriptive and their explanation both descriptive and analytic. The authors do a thorough job.

When they get to the consequences, however, Mayer and Busch impose their own value judgments on their empirical-based analysis. Front-loading is bad for the electorate, the parties, certain candidates, and the democratic process. It is bad for the electorate because “it greatly accelerates the voters' decision process and thus makes the whole system less deliberative, less rational, less flexible, and more chaotic” (p. 56).

Because voters must reach judgments more quickly on the basis of limited information, the authors conclude that the process is less deliberative. Less deliberative than what—the postreform pre-1988 nomination period? an ideal democratic process? The authors do not say.

Mayer and Busch do present poll data to show that the electorate initially has little information about the candidates and needs time to become informed about them. Of course, they are correct. As the Annenberg studies of the 2000 presidential nomination and the polls of the 2004 process reveal, much of the electorate does not tune in until the year of the election, after extensive media coverage and candidate advertising, and usually not until the campaign confronts them directly. As a consequence, many people lack detailed knowledge, and if they participate in primaries, may be forced to make superficial judgments. The authors contend that an elongated process would provide more time to acquire more information, a conclusion that Thomas Patterson disputes in his book The Vanishing Voter (2002). Whether more time would lead to greater rationality, more flexibility, and less chaos, terms which the authors do not define, much less operationalize, is also debatable.

Another of the authors' complaints is that “front-loading works to the advantage of the front-runner” (65). It does, but is that consequence detrimental to the party and its nominee's chances for victory in the general election? Does it adversely affect the party and its nominee's ability to govern? Well-known candidates who tend to be the front-runners tend to be more experienced in government, better acquainted with national and state party and elected leaders, and more likely to have an established public record that voters can assess.

Mayer and Busch properly raise the equity issue with respect to lesser-known candidates; they need more time to raise money, build an organization, and decide on their issue positions and priorities. They also need to demonstrate their qualifications for president. But as the condensed 2004 Democratic nomination process illustrates, Vermont Governor Howard Dean was still able to overcome many of these resource challenges. That Dean did not win the Democratic nomination was not a consequence of front-loading.

A third outcome of the front-loading process, which the authors consider detrimental, is the interregnum, the period between the date on which a candidate has effectively wrapped up the nomination and the date on which the convention officially anoints its standard-bearers. Mayer and Busch point out that the successful candidate needs to extend the campaign to the convention but may not have the financial capability of doing so. Nor can the national party help out as it did in 1996 and 2000 with soft-money-generated generic advertising. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002) prohibits national parties from soliciting contributions that exceed the federal limits, although a loophole for nonprofit, issue-oriented advocacy groups, the so-called 527s, was permitted in 2004 because the Federal Election Commission refused to rule on the issue before the election.

The interregnum, however, serves important functions for a lesser-known candidate and/or a candidate who is challenging an incumbent. It provides time for the candidate to repair an image that has been damaged by opponents in the nomination process, overcome a divisive battle within the party and help to unify it, energize its supporters, and transition from a partisan appeal to a more generic issue-oriented message. John Kerry's campaign during the 2004 interregnum illustrates the benefits of this period for a nonincumbent challenger. Kerry used the interregnum to help offset his opponent's financial advantage, to compete against the sitting president's “bully pulpit,” and to defend himself from his opponent's negative advertising. However, the Kerry experience also suggests that unless the campaign finance law is changed to permit fund-raising by a candidate who accepts matching funds, no serious candidate will participate in public funding at the nomination stage of the process.

If front-loading is so bad for many candidates, the party, and the democratic process, then why not change it? As the authors, who would like to change it, point out, it is not that easy. The beneficiaries—the states that hold their primaries early, the front-runner, and perhaps even some national party leaders—would probably oppose change. Mayer and Busch critique the comprehensive plans that have been advanced to alter the process. They contend that these proposals would not alleviate the problem and have negative consequences of their own. The authors, however, see more hope with incremental change. They favor increasing contribution limits and matching-fund ratios; providing incentives for states to hold their primaries later; easing ballot access and giving candidates more flexibility in slating delegates; removing fund-raising limits after the nominee has been effectively determined for a candidate who accepts public funds; and moving the beginning of the window period, the date at which caucuses and primaries can be held, to later in the year (p. 150).

There is much to recommend in these proposals and in The Front-Loading Problem in Presidential Nominations itself. The book is well written and accessible to undergraduate students. The authors support their arguments with both qualitative and quantitative data. Although the topic is relatively narrow for an elections course, the subject is treated comprehensively. For those bothered by front-loading or simply interested in exploring the subject, this is the book to read. Although it was written before the 2004 nominations, most of the authors' generalizations and many of their conclusions are applicable to that process as well.