Florida moving up primary into the window

March 22, 2007 – 2:10 pm

This is quite interesting… Apparently, the Florida state legislature is moving up the primary, again, to January 29th.

This would be the same day as South Carolina, I believe. I see several implications:

  1. I believe that the Democrats will penalize Florida for this by either stripping their delegates or stripping a large number of them. Perhaps one of my Dem readers can check on this?
  2. I cannot imagine that this is not at the wishes of Mitt Romney’s campaign. Do they think that this will help them? The idea here is, almost certainly, to get momentum out of Florida for Tsunami Tuesday on Feb 5th. Again, Zell Miller did something similar with Georgia to help Bill Clinton in 1992.

Update: More on party consequences:

But there are potential obstacles to Florida’s primary power play.

Aside from a few exceptions such as Iowa and New Hampshire, states that hold primaries to select delegates before Feb. 5 lose half their allotment of delegates to the national nominating convention. And Democratic Party rules say candidates can be penalized for campaigning in a state that picks its delegates before Feb. 5 — by being forced to forfeit the delegates won in that state.

"States can move wherever they want, but there are automatic sanctions," Democratic National Committee spokesman Luis Miranda said. "We will enforce the rules."

The GOP had a similar response.

"It’s up to the state of Florida to determine when it will hold its primary. However, all states will be penalized delegates if they decide to hold their primary outside of the window designated by the RNC," said Amber Wilkerson of the Republican National Committee.

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California open-primary, California politics, and John McCain

March 7, 2007 – 7:43 pm

Update: I have two additions, both from Jon Fleischman. First, Duf Sundheim denies in writing that he supports John McCain. Usually conservatives have trouble that anyone supports McCain. It is amusing that they insist on it here. Second, Fleischman, in his second post, gets a firm denial from the McCain campaign that they are pushing this. Ultimately, assuming that Fleischman is acting in good faith, this is merely the Romney guys pushing a story about McCain and conservatives swallowing it because they don’t like McCain. But what is really going on is just CA internal politics.

This morning, The Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow wrote about an effort, allegedly by John McCain, to open up the primary. I have some links to California, and I spent some time trying to sort this out.

One of Ralph’s two sources (the other was an unnamed Romney staffer), Jon Fleischman picked up on this story (in typical "plant a story, spread a story" mode, I suspect. Nothing wrong with that, I admire a professional). Jon had been thinking about this for a while, as he had written on it the week before. Jon is also the Southern Vice-Chair of the California GOP.

It is important to recognize that things in California politics are always more complicated than they seem. For starters, the California primary was moved up to help the legislators keep their jobs. They have put an initiative on the ballot remove term limits. The idea is that they end term limits and then file for the June primaries. There’s going to be another initiative on the ballot at the same time: non-partisan redistricting. Redistricting is very important to Governor Schwarzenegger. (at this point, I have to throw in a disclaimer. I worked on the 2005 redistricting initiative)

These are contradictory initiatives in the sense that one is about voting the legislators more power and the other is about reducing it. The entire California Democratic establishment will support removing term limits and oppose redistricting. And the Democrats have an open primary, so more people will be voting.

The thing is that we learned from the Times article is that Duf Sundheim, who, according to his own words, does not back McCain but is close to the Governor, is trying to open this up. Why? To get redistricting through for the governor and the donors, who are his source of power. I also suspect that the governor would like an open primary. I still contend that he could never have survived a primary and he knows that.

The upshot is that I don’t think that John McCain is behind this. He probably supports it. But this feels like the sort of thing that they do for California internal reasons. And I suspect that Fleischman (and the Romney campaign) is sticking this on McCain to make the fight easier where this fight must be won: the delegates to the September California Republican Party convention.

And, unless something changes dramatically, there just won’t be the votes at the CRP convention.

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Calendar stuff and new goofy GOP delegate selection processes

February 8, 2007 – 8:05 am

First, Bill Gardner, the NH’s Secretary of State is set to move up the New Hampshire primary to January 14th, 2008. Iowa would then have to move up too, as David Yepsen notes. There’s an important undercurrent here. Both of these are swing states, and the DNC rules would strip both of these states of their delegates if they move up. In both of these states, protecting their special status in the Presidential nominating process is important enough to be something that people actually vote on. If the Democrats are on record opposed to the New Hampshire primary’s status, it could make it easier to win back a lot of those seats that the GOP lost in 2006.

Second, Wyoming is fighting to tie for second with New Hampshire. Really. The Wyoming GOP passed a resolution at their last executive committee meaning to have half of their delegate selection on the same day as New Hampshire. The AP says:

That’s what the Wyoming Republican Central Committee had in mind when they voted Saturday to hold their county conventions — used to select half of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention — on the same day as the New Hampshire primary.

The rest will be selected in a regular primary. There are several interesting things going on here. First, this gives the party apparatus more power in the selection process. It is not clear who that favors because the Wyoming GOP is notoriously more libertarian/socially moderate than the rest of the country. In recent years, they actually stripped the abortion plank out of the platform.

Third, and perhaps more interesting, there is a similar movement afoot in California at the California Republican Convention this weekend. Last week, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, a leader of the Conservative California Republican Assembly, sent out a letter saying:

There is a 50-50 chance that the Legislature will vote to move up the June 2008 primary to February 5, 2008. This move will cost the taxpayers $90 million, more than double the November 2005 special election’s costs, because there are no regularly scheduled elections in which to consolidate that election.

…

If this early election doesn’t happen, you may hear of a proposed by-laws change on the floor of the convention that will allow us, the Party’s members, to select 53 of California’s presidential delegates out of the 165 at our convention a year from now. That would be one delegate for each Congressional district.

This will fail. However, it will put a taste in people’s mouths and a thought in their minds. In September, the RNC has a rules cutoff. Until that point, any state party may change its delegate selection process. Given how tight the contests may be, with strongly differing perspectives between insiders and the primary electorate at-large, there may be more attempts to change the rules to help or hurt various candidates.

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California moving up

January 21, 2007 – 6:41 am

This is big and complicated. California is strongly considering moving up to February 5th. This will have an enormous impact on the race. First, the money barrier to entry just got a lot bigger. A lot. California is really really big.

Second, the rules, on the Republican side, in California are quite strange and still in flux. California has a winner-take-all by-congressional-district system. Therefore, the guy that gets 20k votes in a hard Democratic district gets as many delegates as someone who gets 100k in a hard GOP one. So gaming out how to play in California will be quite complicated.

Third, the rules for the primary may be changed. There has been speculation in several directions. We really just won’t know until the California Republican Party convention in February.

And fourth, some background. What the LAT story does not tell you is that this is getting pushed by the legislature because there may be an attempt to repeal term limits. By making an early primary, like this, there will be an opportunity to put that question on the Feb 2008 ballot in time for legislators to file for their regular June primary if term limits are repealed.

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Romney losing his California fundraising consultant?

December 22, 2006 – 1:23 pm

The FlashReport has a mumble of trouble with Mitt Romney’s California fundraising operation:

There are some changes taking place in the California operations of Mitt Romney’s fledgling campaign for President.  FR is still tracking down the details, but we’ve heard from very reliable sources that California uber-fundraising Anne Dunsmore and her California Capital Campaigns (see the ad to the right), who have been doing fundraising for Romney’s Commonwealth PAC, are not doing the general, federally limited Presidential campaign fundraising for the retiring Massachusetts Governor.  We’ll see how this shakes out.

I’ve heard similar whispers too. This is Anne Dunsmore’s firm. Anne worked with Romney at the RGA. One of the issues is his PR disaster over the last several weeks over abortion, gay rights, etc. People feel like Romney simply hasn’t been honest with him. At the same time, his handling of it just doesn’t look prime-time, even though the staff is first-tier.

Note a similar tone in an article in today’s Boston Globe about events yesterday in New Hampshire:

"When I first heard his answer about his journey of becoming prolife, I began to feel better about the questions being asked of him lately," said Shannon McGinley of Bedford, N.H. "After talking with him in person, though, it is hard to figure out what he does believe."

And:

"People in the prolife community are still looking for that strong, Reagan-like conservative, and we have a lot of questions about Romney," said Karen Testerman, a social conservative activist from Concord, N.H. "What he said today were good answers, but I think you will be hearing us asking him these questions a lot."

Another blog has coverage of the meeting, including how he (mis)handled some questions

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