It was opportune that Stuart Rothenberg opted to pen an item in Roll Call today about the Republican National Committee rules changes for the 2012 presidential nomination process. FHQ had a revised look at the rules changes in the queue and Rothenberg's piece just adds fuel to the fire. It is another example of the media and commentators getting this wrong. And I couldn't disagree more with Rothenberg's interpretation. He essentially calls the new winner-take-all "restrictions" built into the RNC delegate selection rules a small change with a potential big impact. FHQ has just the opposite reaction:The rules change is big and the impact potentially small. That the RNC created a panel -- the Temporary Delegate Selection Committee -- to look at and possibly tweak the presidential selection rules was huge in and of itself. But the fact that the TDSC actually altered the rules and curbed the freedom it has in the past allowed states in terms of setting their own delegate selection plans is, in FHQ's view, fairly monumental.
The back end of this is the impact the rules changes will have on the 2012 Republican presidential nomination process. As FHQ has stated previously, the rules across the two national parties have been wrongly interpreted in black and white terms: the Democrats have proportionality rules and the Republicans have winner-take-all rules. If any gradience has been added to the RNC rules, it has been to allow for the fact that Republican state parties could have in the past used proportional allocation methods if they so chose. But that misses -- and perhaps rightly so because you can get down in the weeds of this pretty quickly -- the true nature of the Republican rules both past and present. Those interpretations fail to closely examine the differences in allocation across the so-called winner-take-all states.
Frontloading HQ: The Myth of Republican Presidential Primary Proportionality Revisited
