Gordon S. Hanson, "Out of Cash: US Presidential Pre-Nominations," Party Politics, 6 (January 2000), 47-59.

First Paragraph:
The American practice of nominating presidential candidates through a series of local primary elections is a fairly recent historical development. It is rooted in an extra-legal tradition of choosing delegates to national party conventions, where the actual nominating would take place. But in 1968, supporters of Democratic anti-war presidential candidates found themselves largely excluded from most of the state-level processes. In an attempt to keep the peace within the party at the convention itself, it was agreed that a commission would be appointed to establish official guidelines for the selection of delegates to future conventions (Shafer, 1983: 29-40).

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Third or worse in New Hampshire, 1976-1996
Table 2: Duration of candidacy in days (Y) beyond New Hampshire with anomalous strategy variable
Table 3: Duration of candidacy in days (Y) beyond New Hampshire without anomalous strategy variable

Last Paragraph:
A series of regional primaries with wide time intervals between them could minimize campaign expenditures and give defeated candidates recovery rime, but the actual implementation would be complicated by the absence of any formal legal means of enforcement in the US federal system. Reinstating banned forms of delegate selection, such as the delegate primary (see note 1), could circumvent most of the problems associated with divisive factional competition, as well as the financial difficulties, but would be a hard sell in a political culture that places a high value on direct popular nominations of candidates for all offices. And yet none of the reformers had envisioned or favored a Grand National form of presidential pre-nomination competition in which most of the riders are unhorsed at the first hazard.