Eric Pfieffer from the Washington Times says, basically, that the Save the Debate coalition has won: The majority of Republican presidential candidates are backing off their objections to participating in the unconventional YouTube debate. Candidates’ reservations about the seriousness of the format, which features videotaped questions from voters, and the Read more…
Just when you thought that the calendar was going to be stable, Ohio and Michigan start to screw it up. In Ohio, legislation has been introduced by a Democratic State Senator to move the date to Jan. 29th, the same day as Florida. Stealing Florida’s special location would probably have Read more…
Last week, after the seeming pause in the fight over the immigration bill, a number of people wrote that the delay in the immigration bill was either good or bad for John McCain. Now it seems likely that the immigration bill will pass the Senate, as Rep. Tom Cole indicated Read more…
I don’t know how I missed this last week, but I thought it interesting. West Virginia wants to move up. According to The Hill, they will be picking most of their delegates at a Feb. 5th convention. And the timing during the day matters: The West Virginia GOP could announce Read more…
You have to love this headline from the Concord Monitor: Frontloaded primary takes stuffing out of Iowa’s straw poll And the lede: So far, the New Hampshire primary doesn’t seem to be suffering from the front-loading of the presidential nominating calendar. For some candidates, the New Hampshire events may be Read more…
The Washington Times has a good story about why this calendar is still in flux. First Florida moves up. Now the South Carolina GOP is talking about moving up: "We have the latitude as a party of setting our own primary dates and we are going to move our primary Read more…
ABC just wrote about the damage that Mitt Romney’s pandering on immigration will do to him in Florida. It even quotes Jeb Bush as "disappointed" in Romney. I think that this raises an interesting process point. There has been much talk about adding Nevada to the Democratic schedule having the Read more…
The WSJ’s Chris Cooper makes a good point about early voting and its impact on the calendar: But even before the official votes kick off in Iowa on Jan. 14, large numbers of voters around the country already will have cast their ballots, as major states encourage voting far in Read more…
Marc Ambinder has a great article on the New Jersey delegate selection process. The idea is pretty simple. There is a push to make New Jersey’s primary "winner-take-all," meaning that the candidate with the plurality gets all 52 delegates. The point is that other states may go this route. Utah Read more…
Earlier, I argued that the flux in the calendar could really squeeze places like South Carolina, especially because of Florida. Yesterday HotlineTV had a segment on this: