Later start

One way of showing how much election campaigns have begun earlier over the years is the fact that it was just 98 years ago—on May 14, 1912—that Nevada held its first presidential primary election. This year, by contrast, the Nevada caucuses were held the first week back in February.

The Democratic Party of Nevada in 1912, acting under a little known state statute, held that first primary in which U.S. House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri defeated former U.S. attorney general and Ohio Gov. Judson Harmon and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson. In 1958, legislative researchers discovered that the statute under which the primary was conducted depended for its authority on a second statute that had been repealed before 1912, making that first primary technically illegal.