The Primary Question: Does length matter?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast for this brief aside on Presidential Politics:

After 3 (or 4, if you work for the Romney Campaign) primaries, here’s the score:

Huckabee-1
McCain- 1
Romney-1…or 2.

My glorious NY roommate “L.L.” hopes for a Huckabee win in SC followed by a Giuliani win in Florida.

This would be both entertaining and possibly good for the Democrats, if we have our nominee earlier (which may itself not occur).

A tactical question: Is it good or bad for the Democrats for the Republicans to have a long, drawn-out primary? Intuition says good, since the sooner you have a nominee the longer you have to raise funds, build a national campaign, and lock-in (or shift to the center) your national message.

However, there is a good argument to be made for the alternative. A serious primary galvanizes a party's base, increases organizing, attracts national media attention, which makes it seem like something interesting is happening within the Republican party.

The historical example I think of is organizing competition between the AFL and CIO pre-merger. Organizers competed to organize workers, and it was the heyday for Union organizing. Though the analogy is tenuous, and may break down: there was a giant, essentially "unlimited" pool of unorganized workers, compared to a fixed Republican group of Republican voters.

A good indicator might be turnout in SC: Republican turnout has been lower than Democratic turnout so far (more than 2:1 in Iowa). If Republican turnout is high in SC and Florida, then it points to a galvanizing effect.

It's almost like a balance-of-power question in Diplomacy or Risk.