With as many as 19 states rushing to move their primaries up into February, the traditional primary campaign may be consigned to history. Candidates can no longer depend upon the momentum gathered from early showings in smaller states to bring them support and money to compete in the later, larger states. Dick Morris writes in The Hill:

The effect of this gigantic sea change will be that whoever is the frontrunner in each party by the fall of 2007 will be virtually certain to win the nomination because only the frontrunner can possibly hope to amass enough money to compete in half the country at once. Nobody but the likely winner in each party will be able to compete at that level on Feb. 5.

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The financial demands of competing in each of these states are so onerous that only the richest of candidates can hope to win. That kind of money only goes to frontrunners. As a result, the process will be sufficiently top-heavy that the candidates who enjoy clear leads in the polls after the summer of 2007 will have a virtual lock on the nomination before anybody has cast a vote on anything in any state!

The danger, of course, is that the frontrunner will have been anointed without ever actually holding a primary. The effect will be to strip the primary process of its power -- for the first time since it became the central way of selecting candidates in the aftermath of the 1972 reforms -- and give the power to designate candidates to national public-opinion polls conducted among random representative samples of the voters. It is the triumph of the pollsters and fundraisers.

Read it all at the link above. The trend towards earlier primaries has been going on for some time, of course, and it has been a long time since there was a seriously contested race in either party by mid-April. Sure, the leader may not have "clinched" a majority of delegate votes by then, but he usually has such a commanding lead that only a total collapse or fatal scandal could derail him, and that hasn't happened in the late stages since the primary system became the determining factor in party nominations.

The last time nominations were in doubt that late was 1976, when challengers in both parties still had some chance. In 1988, Gore's failure to run the table on "Super Tuesday" meant Dukakis was unstoppable from a practical point of view. Now, as Morris notes, it won't even go into March.

This will affect the Democrats more than Republicans because, as I noted yesterday, the GOP invariably goes with its early frontrunner. Democrats have often chosen a "dark horse" from the pack in the past, but now there will not be time for one to emerge and gain traction before the nomination is effectively clinched.