Already, critics and fans of George W. Bush are getting ready to make their voice heard in the 2004 presidential race. Pity that many of them will be too late. One of the more discouraging developments in the 2000 race was the near-complete lack of any chance for involvement of most states' voters in the selection of our next president. Both Bush and Gore had their party nominations essentially locked in before a single primary vote was cast; later, the Fiasco of Florida masked the reality that one of the closest Electoral College elections in history was a close contest in only a handful of swing states, border states on the Red/Blue frontier.

It may be worse in 2004. In many states, it's already guaranteed to be.

Here in Washington state, the state legislature is convening next week for a special, one-day session with only one announced purpose: to cancel our state's scheduled March 2, 2004 Super Tuesday primary. Democrats had already scrapped their plan to select presidential nominating delegates using results of both the primary and party caucuses; instead, they'll draw all of their delegates from Feb. 7 party caucuses held across the state. Assuming Dubya doesn't keel over, Republicans already know who their nominee will be. So why not cancel the primary, saving a desperately needed $7 million for the state's budget?

Moreover, only three of the nine major Democratic candidates--Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich--are mounting meaningful campaigns in our state. Both Dean and Kucinich drew national momentum from well-attended events in Seattle this year. But Kucinich has virtually no chance of getting the nomination, and the state is considered Dean's to lose in the Feb. 7 caucuses.

Our state is hardly unique. In fact, it's home to a number of major donors, and although it's recently been a "Blue" Democratic state in presidential elections, it's on many analyst's list of swing states that could go either way in 2004--something 35 or so states can't claim. In state after state, the Democratic nomination boils down to a media-anointed "favorite"--usually Dean--who will either gain or lose "momentum" depending on his showing. Only a handful of states--Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, California--will have a chance to bestow such momentum before the nomination is a fait accompli. Beyond those states, virtually none have meaningful campaign organizations for more than two or three of the nine Democrats running hard.

The reason is simple: beyond those early momentum states, voters' desires are basically irrelevant. In many ways, party voters here have already "spoken"--15,000 did, anyway, when they turned out on August 25 to hear Howard Dean at a Seattle appearance.

That event remains a high point in Dean's national campaign, and signaled to DC insiders that the Internet-based Dean "revolution" involved real, flesh-and-blood people. The story of the 2004 campaign thus far has been Dean's outsider assault on the Democrats' Beltway establishment, which--from Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe on down--is stacked with Clinton loyalists. (It was stacked with Gore loyalists, but the Clintons' faithful mounted a purge after the 2000 election debacle.)

Clintonites are both more conservative and DC-savvy than Dean's crowd--but they haven't united around a single alternative candidate. The pressure is on for them to do so, and for the party itself to settle on a challenger to Bush, both to avoid a destructive intra-party battle and to start raising money to try to compete with Dubya's $200 million campaign war chest. Bush's record-breaking fundraising prowess is also why Dean and Kerry have now announced that they, like Bush, have opted out of the federal matching funds system. They've officially raised enough money--or want us to believe they've raised enough money--that the limits imposed by the match system crimp their style. The race among Democratic hopefuls now is literally for which can get financial backing from more big corporations and donors, and that, even more than the positioning in key primary states, is all about managing perceptions: who's hot? Who's seizing the public's imagination? Who can beat Bush? So far, Dean's momentum comes from the simple fact that none of his rivals have excited a lot of people--but in our media-saturated times, that can be changed.

The whole process has little to do with who would make a good president--and even less to do with who we voters think might make a good one. High-level fundraising, Beltway deal-making, and media management is where the contest is being waged--deadly serious, for enormous stakes, and far above the heads of ordinary voters. If our opinions in the November election don't conform to the choices we're offered, it's our opinions, not the choices, that will be changed.

Such is already the reality in most states. This is why, among those desperate to get Bush out next year, an organized movement is now afoot to move money, volunteers, and even voters to states on the Red/Blue frontier, states whose Electoral College votes could conceivably go to either major party's candidate in a close election.

What could help bring more, um, democracy into this process? A less convoluted nomination process, for starters--there's no reason at all why states like Iowa and New Hampshire should be a focus group for the country when the country as a whole can be polled, all at once, easily enough. For the November election, abolishing the Electoral College would also help, of course--for an office as important as the president of the United States, each person's vote should count the same. But that won't happen in our lifetimes, because too many smaller states that now enjoy disproportionate influence would need to ratify the needed constitutional amendment.

George Will, among others, has suggested a fix that wouldn't require such an amendment: have each state apportion its electoral votes by congressional district, with the overall winner receiving the two electoral votes that come with each Senate seat. There's nothing now that requires states to award all their electoral votes to the winner, although most do. Will's is an appealing idea, but it would need to be adopted state by state, and if what happened after Gore's solid popular victory in 2000 wasn't enough of an impetus for such a reform movement, it's hard to imagine what would stir states to action.

Viable third--and fourth, fifth, and sixth--parties could also help, in bringing needed choices and greater debate to the ballot. The appeal of Kucinich has been his willingness to offer serious ideas and positions nobody else in the race will discuss--but since he has no real shot at his party's nomination, most media outlets won't discuss them, either. Laws are currently designed to reinforce the two-party duopoly, but nothing in our constitution demands it.

In each case, these sorts of reforms are a long-term project. Ultimately, it's up to us--now, and in 2007, 2011, and so forth--to realize that our best opportunities to help pick our nation's president come over a full year before the actual election.

As it stands, by the actual election year, our choices are likely to be minimal, and depending on where we live our votes are often an afterthought. In 2004--as in 2000--the race for both the Democratic nomination and for victory in November will be to see which of two people can game that system best.