Congressional offices sit empty, governors' mansions collect dust and even the houses of former mayors are growing cold. These civil servants are not on vacation -- they are in New Hampshire and Iowa, almost a year before the presidential primaries will occur.
This phenomenon, a response to the so-called "front-loading" of the primary system, is intended to give more voters the opportunity to choose the parties' candidates. At the same time, though, many scholars and political organizations believe this situation is potentially damaging to the country's electorate and the political system as a whole.
"We may have an ill-suited nominee, a turned-off public and a Congressional agenda hijacked by the election a year before the election happens," said government professor and former Rockefeller Center director Linda Fowler, who studies the New Hampshire primary.
In 1996, the New Hampshire primary was held on Feb. 20. By 2004, it was bumped up by over a month.
For the 2008 election year, current schedules identify Jan. 22 as the primary date, although this will not be finalized until November.
Most scholars appear to agree that candidates campaign early because the primaries are early.
Primaries are early, in turn, because the states want their voters to be involved in choosing presidential candidates before their choice is rendered irrelevant by earlier primaries.
"You get these momentum effects in primary elections where the people who win are the ones who already won," Fowler said. "A lot of states basically say 'We have more electoral votes, we are a broader cross-section of the country, so why should we let two white rural states, New Hampshire and Iowa, decide who the nominees are going to be?'"
New Hampshire state law requires that its primary be at least one week ahead of any other primary or "similar contest."
"So as other states have pushed up, [New Hampshire] pushed up," Fowler said.
This jockeying among the states first began with the inception in the mid-1980s of "Super Tuesday," a day in March when many of the states hold their primaries simultaneously.
"It was in reaction to the fact that southern Democrats felt that the national party was nominating candidates that were too liberal to win in the south," Fowler said.
The most recent incarnation of this struggle among the states, and within the parties, occurred this past summer when officials at the Democratic National Committee, amid a well-covered media frenzy, sought to hold the Nevada caucus between New Hampshire and Iowa's events and to hold South Carolina's primary shortly thereafter.
This was a strategic effort to expand the Democratic party's minority base, as Nevada and South Carolina are much more diverse than New Hampshire. New Hampshire, in response, has threatened to ban candidates who ignore its law from campaigning in the state.
The result of these events is that the candidates for the two major parties are identified by March, even though the conventions, during which the candidates are formally chosen, are not until that August or September.
"In the good old days you had several months to put an organization in place and to raise money to take you through the subsequent contests," Fowler said.
"Now because it is so compressed you basically have no time to raise money and to create quality organizations."
This situation, Fowler explained, has led to the need for early campaigning, along with larger-scale fundraising.
"The dirty little secret, in what's called the invisible primary, which is happening now, is that at least in 1996, 2000 and 2004, the candidate that had the most money in October was the one that won," Fowler said.
States and parties justify the ever-compressed schedule by saying that it further enfranchises voters as they are given the opportunity to choose a candidate before enough primaries have passed that such a choice has already been made for them.
"I don't think that it disenfranchises voters," Andy Reynolds '09, president of the Dartmouth College Democrats, said. (Reynolds is also a member of The Dartmouth Staff.)
Fowler, along with several other political theoreticians, disagrees.
She believes the compression of the primary schedule forces voters to choose candidates based on issues that may not be important at election time. It can also turn off voters from the political process earlier and affect governance, as politicians running for office are absent from the offices of their elected position.
"Senators are so preoccupied with the fact that they are all running that there isn't going to be much serious work done on some pressing issues," Fowler said. "McCain, for example, wasn't even at the debate [on the non-binding Iraq resolution] last Sunday."
This sentiment is echoed by Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center and an associate professor of political science.
"I think it disenfranchises voters because voters become less important -- all they will see of candidates are big events and T.V. commercials," Smith said. "I expect turnout to be lower in states than it has been in past years."
Others on the Dartmouth campus share this rationale.
"I think moving the election cycle up as a whole is damaging because we are campaigning two years before the presidential election," said Rahul Sangwan '07, former president of the College Republicans and state vice-chairman for the New Hampshire College Republicans.
"Not only can it damage a president's ability to govern but it also removes all attention from governing to campaigning."
Ultimately, scholars agree that voters will have less access to the candidates. As a result, the front-loading of America's primaries calls into question whether voters will be able to make informed decisions.
"Basically, now is the time to see candidates, because we may not see them in January," Fowler said.
