GOP Primaries

I've been mostly bored with the GOP primaries lately but Up With Chris Hayes had a good segment on it this morning with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele. It seems that after the 2008 election, they looked at the two primaries and wanted to emulate the Democrat one a little more. They saw McCain locking it up early and the Democrats had a heated contest between Clinton and Obama. For six months the Democrats got all the press and the Republicans hardly any.

So they made primary rule changes to draw out the primaries. They talked about two in particular. Rule 16 is that if you violate the rules you lose half your delegates. This has happened to Florida. The other was Rule 15 which said any primary before April 1st had to proportionally allocate delegates. This means that it's harder for someone to lock up the delegates early and end the contest.

I'm not sure what the deal is with Arizona, I thought they were winner take all, but maybe I'm wrong or maybe they lost half their delegates (and I'm too lazy to look it up). The other thing I vaguely knew from the Ron Paul camp but didn't really understand is that all the caucus states haven't actually assigned delegates. They do that later at state conventions, the caucus's are just guidelines. The Ron Paul camp has been tracking this closely and hope to win over the delegates at the state conventions.

Oh and there are also super-delegates which someone (probably Romney) will need to get enough delegates to get the nomination.

So the reality is, it's really unclear who's winning the GOP primaries and it's impossible to know by how much. Certainly the process is winning in that the GOP is getting all the news coverage. I've been tweeting to @ThisWeekABC that so far in 2012 they've only had one elected Democrat on the show (MA Governor Deval Patrick last week). Of course the other thing (as was also mentioned on Up With Chris Hayes today) the Republican primaries seem to be about picking an ideologue as opposed to someone who could win the election. I'm okay with that. Even George Will suggests that conservatives should give up the hope of winning the White House and should concentrate on Congress.