In 1999 the legislature, in an effort to make California more relevant to nationwide politics, moved up its primary from June to March. These attempts only made other early states push their deadlines up, which eventually lead to 9 other states sharing the same date as California, negating any benefit to the State.

In addition, many felt that such an early primary and a traditional November general ballot made it impossible to build traction and keep voters engaged. Because of these reasons, California’s primary was moved back to its traditional June date in 2004 (SB 1730 Ross Johnson).

Recently, however, Senate Bill 113 by Ron Calderon was introduced to again place California early on the Presidential cycle, by putting this question before the voters on the first Tuesday in February 2008. The key difference with this proposal is that Congressional, State elected members, and locally elected members would still be before the voters in June 2008 , but any qualified initiatives could be place on the February 2008 ballot with the Presidential question.

This measure has been fast tracked to enactment having been already passed by the Senate and now in the possession of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, a process that would normally take 7 to 9 months to complete.

In concert with this proposal is what has been billed as a bipartisan legislative reform measure, the "Term Limits and Legislative Reform Act (.pdf)," which has been submitted to the California Attorney General and will then apparently go the route of a signature gathered initiative.

This initiative proposes to reduce the total time a member can serve in the California Legislature from 14 to 12 years, but allowing these members to serve them consecutively in one body of the Legislature as opposed to 6 in the Assembly and 8 in the Senate. The timing of this proposal, if passed in February, would allow members who would have otherwise faced being termed-out of office to continue to run for office in June.

The California Chamber of Commerce and The California Teachers Association have both indicated their support of the proposal as has CSU Board of Trustee member Bill Hauck, in his capacity as President of the California Business Roundtable. This proposal will not only help member of the Assembly to stay in office, like Speaker Fabian Nunez, but apparently is also intended to allow President Pro Tem, Don Perata continue to serve for another term because one of his terms in office was as partial term when replaced Senator Barbara Lee in a special election a partially served term.

Finally, Assembly Speaker Nunez recently announced that his office and the Governor’s office had reached an agreement on redistricting. Please refer to the press release for information.

It is believed that this proposal, while not directly linked to the change in term limits, would appease all parties interested, making the pushed up election cycle and term limit proposal more likely.