Meet The Candidates: 2012 GOP Thread

[12thMan]

Originally Posted by mlmpetert

^exactly. Its always beena waste of time to vote in primaries in this state. But the GOP adopted the Democrat rules this year for its primaries, which wouldnt make much of a difference if there was a clear front runner... kind of like opposite of right now.

Wacky Rules Complicate Race for GOP Delegates

So Santorum did a repeat of what Huckabee did last election, spend all his time (apparently a year) and money in Iowa with the hopes that a big start will snowball into later primaries. It didn’t work last time and no one thinks it will work this go around. Before Romney was just sharing votes with Newt and Rick, now he also has to split them with Santorum for the next few primaries until the appeal wears off.

Because of the new “wacky rules” this go around most states’ delegates are award proportional (depending on how you define proportional). Iowa defined it in a way that awarded equal delegates to Romney, Santorum and Paul (7 each). So theyre all even, right? Apparently Paul’s people stayed after “stole” a bunch of delegates from the actual winners:

Ron Paul Iowa Caucus Delegates | TheBlaze.com

Basically Ron Paul isn’t going away anytime soon. Im not a Paul SuperFan or anything and i know he isn’t gonna get the nomination but hes playing this thing to make the next biggest impact.

This is turning into an absolutely fascinating election way ahead of schedule.

I don't think Paul's going away, but he's not going up either. Likely downhill as far as polling numbers go. Iowa was tailor made for a Ron Paul victory, yet Rick Santorum overtook him by a pretty sizable margin with a fraction of Paul's money and ground organization.

The golden rule, though, if your guy can't beat Mitt Romney, chances are he can't beat President Obama either.