My pain has been heard. Slublog’s friend Joe from Indiana (lotsa smart guys in Indiana) has a plan to break the states up into three groups and have a three-month settled primary. Doc Rampage was on the same track in the comments here.

The plan divides the states up into three groups selected numerically from a rank-ordering according to number of electoral votes. Thus each group of states has roughly 30 percent of the delegates. (Go read the details at the link–it’s actually not even that complicated.) I propose a rotational wrinkle: That instead of Slublog’s Group 1 going first in every primary, they should rotate each election cycle, starting with the presidential election and keeping their slot until the next presidential election.

It’s a sound plan. Doc Rampage was right that my toss-off “have them all at once” negates good campaigning, or rather, probably rewards poor campaigning. It’s tempting, in the age of mass media and the plurality of the kinds of media involved (print, radio, TV, internet), to write off personal campaigning as unnecessary, but voters deserve a chance to see up front how the would-be president interacts with real people on the ground. So the rotational-group plan focuses the candidates’ attention on groups of states, the same as now, but different states and more of them, so that more voters get a chance to put their first-choice stamp on the proceedings instead of taking leftovers.

The downside: It seems likely that more elections would end without a majority winner. But given that most of us have to give up our first choice and rally behind somebody we’re lukewarm at best about, that would just be putting into numbers the actual feeling of the voters. Isn’t that what elections are supposed to do?