What they (and others) should be doing is looking at nationwide same day primaries to remove the bias, not just shift it around.
Weaker candidates are identified early and fall out of the race - leaving the eventual winner with a larger donor base.
Not really true. They are only the weaker candidates in those states. You have plenty of attractive candidates in other states drop out before those primaries.
The staggered system of primaries does just that.
It actually causes the devaluation of the votes of later primaries. Due to the difference in concerns of different geographic areas, you would have a shitty sample based on the current line-up.
"Your optimization challenge is to identify the winner with high confidence while conducting the fewest number of tests."
If that were the case, you wouldn't even do primaries and you'd just rely on the surveys, which arguably have better sampling (primaries are biases toward the vocal minority due to the low turn outs and not necessarily the overall voter pool).
Does it really though? California votes blue. Doesn't matter which Dem candidate - they will win California. Because California votes blue regardless of candidate, California has self-selected itself out of the primary system.
> If that were the case, you wouldn't even do primaries and you'd just rely on the surveys
You certainly could do that. But voting is necessary to receive the consent of the populace.
Yeah and Pennsylvania is one of the later primaries but has the potential to go either way.
"But voting is necessary to receive the consent of the populace."
Only for the general election. Parties can set their own rules about selection.
This isn’t like the 2020 election conspiracies. DNC primary rules are demonstrably unfair with no benefit other than to allow party elites to override voter choices.
One could argue that the GOP primary process would be better off with superdelegates in order to avoid the tendency to nominate fringe weirdos with absurd populist policies.