The process that determines who will run for US President as a Republican this fall is a whole lot more interesting than those covering it are letting on.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not talking about the daily campaign trail travails of the four remaining major GOP candidates fighting for the nomination.<\/p>\n
My beef is the same one raised four years ago.\u00a0 There\u2019s serious failure across the spectrum of those responsible for recording this ritual of democracy to include even basic context on delegate math as the primary calendar is advanced.\u00a0 Factual framework is left out of the media\u2019s discussion of results in early primary states with small populations and misshaped demographics.<\/p>\n
The widely recited takeaway following South Carolina\u2019s primary was that the first three contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) had been \u201cwon\u201c by three different candidates.\u00a0 This is misleading.\u00a0 On the first Tuesday of the new year, Iowans scribbled their preferred candidate on slips of paper and had their votes counted quickly in hallways off the caucus rooms.\u00a0 Piles of handwritten votes were tabulated imprecisely.\u00a0 Even the now-certified outcome in Iowa lacks a binding obligation when delegates are chosen some six months from now.\u00a0 The media initially insisted on proclaiming Romney the narrow victor in Iowa, then backtracked when a revised total showed that Santorum had the most caucus votes state-wide.\u00a0 In reality, there was no \u201cwinner.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The night was more a preliminary state-wide Republican discussion of what the future holds.\u00a0 The candidates lavished Iowa undue attention because of a thirst for a positive first impression.\u00a0 A media obsessed with simplifying wanted a winner rather than telling the real story.<\/p>\n
A week later, Romney picked up a pretty good percentage of the total votes (39%) cast in New Hampshire but added only seven delegates to his total.\u00a0 He and the others need 1144 to win the nomination.<\/p>\n
Eleven days after that, Newt Gingrich racked up 40-percent of the 601-thousand votes cast in South Carolina\u2019s open GOP primary.\u00a0 An exit poll using a huge sample size found that six out of ten voters said they were either born again or Evangelical Christians.\u00a0 The formula used for divvying up delegates in South Carolina is a winner-take-all\/congressional district hybrid and Newt walked away with 23 of the 25 total.<\/p>\n
None of the papers or major web sites covering politics devoted even a single paragraph in their recaps to delegate scoring following Gingrich\u2019s finish in South Carolina.\u00a0 The story instead was that Romney\u2019s aura of invincibility had been pierced and Gingrich had become an immediate threat to the front-runner.\u00a0 Remember, at that point the allegiance of only 37 delegates from a total of 2286 had been settled.<\/p>\n
The other ignored twist that must be mentioned is that New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan and Arizona all have been docked half their allocated delegate totals for staging primaries earlier than allowed by the national party.\u00a0 All five states have decided it\u2019s more important be among the first states to have vote counts than to give their people a representative delegation at the national convention.<\/p>\n
The disproportional and misleading coverage of outcomes in the early primary states ignores the long haul math and only encourages more states to position votes at ridiculously early dates on the calendar.<\/p>\n
Florida\u2019s GOP primary is a week away and four million registered republicans in that state should produce a whopping 100 convention delegates.\u00a0\u00a0 But by moving up its primary six weeks starting in 2008, Florida will now just send 50 delegates to Tampa to pick a nominee this summer.\u00a0 It\u2019ll get the bright glare of candidate attention and media coverage the next few days but will have done so at a significant cost to the voice of its people.<\/p>\n
For both the candidates and the states that vote on them, attention and perception have almost become more important than the tangible thresholds needed to become the national party nominee.<\/p>\n
Omission of delegates won, delegates needed to gain the nomination and delegates at stake in a given state (with an explanation of how they\u2019re distributed vis-\u00e0-vis the vote tally) has turned media summations of the campaign to date into often baseless interpretations, speculation and blather.<\/p>\n
Sportswriters cover a seven-game playoff series by leading their game stories with the score at the end of each contest.\u00a0 Political writers are leaving out such information.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s ok to talk about who has the money, organization and staff to win this thing.\u00a0 The debates have been great.\u00a0 But when some of these early states count the votes, the results should be put in proper context.\u00a0 Nobody right now has more than .02 of the total delegates needed for nomination.\u00a0 Whoever wins Florida will certainly gain a boost given that state\u2019s size and influence.\u00a0 The 50 delegates may or may not all go to the winner.\u00a0 A national party edict bans winner-take-all primaries before April 1 but Florida says it will try to wiggle out of that and allocate all fifty to the top vote-getter.<\/p>\n
Whatever happens in Florida, though, remember the math.\u00a0 If you\u2019re a Republican, hopefully you can ignore tired media-advanced themes that so-and-so did such-and-such when he should have done this-and-that.\u00a0 Realize the math of this process is such that it\u2019s not over \u2019til it\u2019s over, especially when just a few states want us to think it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The process that determines who will run for US President as a Republican this fall is a whole lot more interesting than those covering it are letting on. I\u2019m not talking about the daily campaign trail travails of the four … Continue reading