Super Tuesday" 2012 to be March 6th
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. After New Hampshires Secretary of State announced this morning that his states 1st-in-the-Nation Primary will take place on January 10th 2012
every GOP Presidential Primary date has now been set. The New Hampshire announcement means ...
- Iowas January 3rd Caucuses come one week before ...
- New Hampshires January 10th vote which will be followed by ...
- South Carolinas January 21st Primary 11 days later.
Every GOP presidential nominating contest is now set. Rather than a heavily front-loaded calendar as was the case in 2008 the 2012 schedule of primaries and caucuses will be spread out across the late winter and spring.
As of March 5 2008 roughly 40 states had voted. As of March 5 2012 the number of primaries and caucuses that have been held could be as low as 10 according to the tentative calendar prepared by the website Frontloading HQ.
That means that on March 5 about 40 states will have yet to vote.
The new calendar is designed to produce a long-running nominating campaign that will keep Republicans and their criticism of the president in the news for months on end just what the Democrats achieved in 2008 with the enduring battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In a real sense the Republican calendar has been flipped. Why the rush to the rear?
Republican rules changes since 2008 have had a major impact. In concert with the Democrats the GOP moved back the 2012 starting date for all but the
four carved out" early states from the first Tuesday in February to the first Tuesday in March.
In the process Super Tuesday" has been bumped back a month from Feb. 5 in 2008 to March 6 in 2012 with next years event a scaled-down version of the national primary" that was held last time.
In 2008 Republicans in 21 states held primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5. In 2012 the number of states voting March 6 could be down to a dozen.
Many states have moved to even later dates on the 2012 calendar to accommodate a new GOP rule that prohibits states voting before April 1 from awarding their delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
In 2008 any state early or late could turn their event into an attention-grabbing high-stakes contest by giving all their delegates to the winner.
Not so this time. Statewide winner-take-all is out for the pre-April states. Proportional representation must be used to divvy up a hefty share of each states delegates. And for those that hold primaries before the official March 6 opening date there will be a loss of 50 of their delegates.
That not only goes for Florida Arizona and Michigan (the latter two scheduled on Feb. 28) but also New Hampshire and South Carolina. They won seats in the penalty box by moving their delegate-selection primaries into January in response to Florida.
Their actions were understandable but were made unilaterally without authorization from the Republican National Committee.
On the other hand early-voting caucus states such as Iowa and Nevada would lose 50 of their delegates only if they selected national convention delegates before March 6. That should be no
problem for Iowa whose famed opening round features precinct caucuses accompanied by a non-binding straw vote.
It is the latter that draws the attention of the candidates and the media but has nothing to do with delegate selection. Iowas national convention delegates are traditionally not chosen until months later at the state and congressional district conventions.
It is an open question right now how significant the early-voting states will be in 2012 beyond culling the field of candidates and providing some positioning for whoever is left.
Part of the clout enjoyed by early states in the past has been due to the momentum they provided victorious candidates enhanced by their proximity to delegate-rich Super Tuesday.
