The new primary rule

The GOP has introduced a rule change for its primaries, which is going to prolong the race for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. The rule change involves forcing the states which award delegates in a winner-take-all format to wait until later in the spring to hold their primaries. The rule change itself is written vaguely, so states are still figuring out whether they want to change or reschedule their primaries. And until the states do all that, the candidates can’t plan their strategies, hire staff or plan ad campaigns. It will be very difficult for a frontrunner to emerge and establish a prohibitive lead in the delegate race, and a lot of delegates will still be up for grabs well into the spring.

Other factors will make it hard to unite behind a nominee quickly. One is a large field of low-quality, high-baggage candidates from a wide range of ideological and geographical backgrounds. Another is the GOP primary voters, who are particularly pigheaded, and in no mood to compromise their “principles” by settling for a candidate that they find tolerable on “only” 90 percent of the issues. It will be hard for the national party to use the usual mechanisms to try to herd people together behind one candidate: pressure from donors, big-name endorsements, superdelegates. The GOP could march, without a nominee, all the way to a brokered convention, which would take place the last week in August, which is really much too late to select a presidential nominee.

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Obama potentially has another huge advantage for 2012: the GOP primary season.

Not long ago, the Republican party changed its rules, either because they are encouraging later primaries, or because they wanted to persuade its state parties to pick convention delegates proportionally, rather than in a winner-take-all format. Under the new rules, the primary/caucus schedule will look like this:

Phase 1: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina hold their events in February.

Phase 2: States with proportional delegate selection vote in March.

Phase 3: Winner-take-all states, and states with other systems, must wait until April.

In other words, proportional states get to go first; everyone else must wait, and hope their votes are still relevant by the time their turn comes.

Telling the difference between a winner-take-all state and a proportional state is a big deal. Astoundingly, Hillary Clinton lost in 2008 because her campaign “strategist”, Mark Penn, didn’t even understand this distinction between the two kinds of primaries. If this clown had done his homework, Hillary would be in the Oval Office right now.

Republican strategists are still trying to figure out what the new rules actually mean. There are a number of systems the states use, under a variety of names: winner take all, winner take all by district, caucus, convention, proportional, loophole, combined, district etc. No one is certain which systems entitle you to run your primary in March. They think that 45 percent of the delegates will be selected in April, Phase 3, but they’re not really sure. And that’s assuming states don’t change their rules so they can vote earlier. If they don’t change their dates, then about half of the delegates will still be up for grabs three months into the year, and no one is sure which states those delegates will be in.

So, if you’re a strategist for Romney or Gingrich, how do you craft a primary strategy, hire state-level staffers, spend ad money in the right markets?

Also, if a stampede of states still tries to jam all their primaries into Super Tuesday, early on, then how does a candidate spend his time and money that day, especially if there is little lead time between the first four primaries and Super Tuesday? Will Super Tuesday favor a deep-pocketed candidate like Romney who can run ads in a dozen states, will a tea-party candidate try to stop him that day, or will there still be a lot of candidates running all over the map on Super Tuesday, resulting in 3-4 candidates each winning a couple of states? The party's rule change may impel local politicians to jigger with the primary schedule to seek a particular outcome in the 2012 nomination race, as we discuss in our article on the primary season.

So when these state officials look at the calendar to schedule their primaries, will they be thinking about trying to get an early slot, or about the winner-take-all issue, or about when the Democrats do their primary, or about the expense of rescheduling the primary, or about something more practical like trying to steer the nomination toward a tea-party favorite or away from Romney? Or all of the above at once?


This kind of chaotic scenario is particularly dangerous for this year’s field of Republican candidates, because none of them stands out as the new Gipper, all of them have serious baggage, and they come from all over the map. And they have a lot of very rigid, extremist, no-compromise tea-party activists to persuade, many of them with very rigid litmus-test issues by which to measure the candidates. Also, there is no posse of super-delegates who can step in and pick a winner early on, and by the same token the big donors are unlikely to suddenly fall in love with one of these quite unlovable candidates and unite all their dollars behind one person, to speed up the nomination process.

This bunch could easily give us four different winners in the Phase 1, perhaps Pawlenty in Iowa, Romney in New Hampshire, Bachmann in South Carolina, Ron Paul in Nevada, and then even more chaos all the way through March, with tea-party candidates doing well down south, fiscal conservatives doing well in the north and west, etc. And maybe even a 2-3 candidate race all through April and beyond.

And that presupposes that none of the far-right candidates says “screw it” and forms a third-party candidacy which would doom the Republicans in November. I could see any one of a number of candidates doing this: Ron Paul, Donald Trump, or Palin.

Even in 2008, which had a lot of winner-take-all states and a pretty smooth nominating process, three Republican candidates got significant numbers of delegates and McCain didn’t secure the nomination until March. In 2012, with a large field of pygmy candidates and many proportional states, the race could easily drag on for months, or even go to the convention, the way Obama and Hillary almost had to do.

So the Republicans could easily spend months in time and money, tearing each other apart instead of directing their fire at Obama, while Obama sits in his corner reeling in hundreds of millions in donations for the general election. Republicans spend, Obama piles up cash, week after week.

The obvious caveat is that Obama and Hillary fought such a battle in 2008 and Obama still hung in there to win in November. But a lot of things went right for Obama in 2008, including the economic crash, McCain’s erratic performance, and Palin’s crash-and-burn, which a Republican shouldn’t expect to repeat in 2012.

Another caveat: even in proportional races, winning still matters. On Super Tuesday the media will surely be racking up a list of who won how many states, and whoever wins the most states will surely be trumpeting that fact for weeks, even if the difference in delegates in minimal.