Things were not looking too good a year ago for Georgia’s top elections officer as he tried to stitch together a mega-presidential primary in the US South.
Efforts to bring Alabama and Arkansas online had stalled. Tennessee was threatening to defect.
But Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp kept working the phones, arguing that a bloc of Southern states all voting on March 1 was the only way to make US presidential candidates pay attention to the region.
Eventually key state leaders came around and their effort seems to have paid off.
Candidates have campaigned more in the South this election year in an effort to woo a group of states voting early on so-called Super Tuesday than Kemp can recall seeing in any contemporary primary. And the seven states holding contests in the region appear poised to play a pivotal role in selecting the Republican and Democratic nominees for the November 8 race.
Elections officials nationally are watching how the concurrent races in the South play out on Tuesday, and are talking about possibly replicating the strategy in other parts of the country to win a greater say in the primaries.
Kemp has dubbed the coordinated Southern races that he’s orchestrated the “SEC primary” - or Southeastern Conference primary - after a regional college athletic conference.
It was not easy.
A year ago, Kemp stood in his statehouse office fretting that bills to set the primary date in Alabama and Arkansas were not going to pass. An Alabama state party chair was worried her state would get lost in a big group, he said, but Kemp argued that Alabama would still be better off by voting when it was early enough to matter.
In Arkansas, the bill to change the primary date did not pass until it was included in a special legislative session.
Four other states, from Alaska to Vermont, also hold contests to award delegates on Super Tuesday.
Candidates began showing up once the regional primary was in place. A rally for Republican billionaire businessman Donald Trump drew as many as 30,000 people to a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama in August, for example.
The primaries in the politically conservative South got a boost in significance this year from the size and unpredictability of the Republican presidential field.
On the Democratic side, the region’s large concentrations of African-American voters are seen as a test of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s and US Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders’ appeal with a key Democratic voting bloc.
While the South has not seen such a coordinated effort in decades, it is not the first time the states have tried to gang up.
Yet in 1988, when the region almost entirely held primaries on March 8, votes were split among Democratic candidates and the contest left the South to be settled elsewhere. A number of states eventually walked away from the plan.
