We Had a Primary?

Well, it’s been a while, to be sure.  Now that I’m settled in to the new semester of college, I can finally get back to writing these posts that y’all love reading.  As the late, great, Billy Mays would say, “but wait, there’s MORE!”.  That’s right folks, I’m actually going to attempt to stick to a posting schedule this spring!  Unlike the last 4 times I’ve said that, I actually have a schedule that will definitely let me do just that.  Every Friday afternoon, I’ll be working on putting out a post just like this one, but with less meta-news at the top; I may do another post during the week if something extraordinary happens, but Friday afternoons will be post day for the foreseeable future.  I’ll let you get over your shock and surprise for a moment…

Okay, all better?  Onto today’s topic; after all, I’m not missing an internet spaceship battle of quite epic proportions late on a Friday just to write meta-news announcements and do site upgrades, after all.  I may have taken a break from blogging, but the Republican Party’s series of primaries to decide who will be their candidate to go up against President Obama continues.  Largely, Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, has held all the momentum in the race aside from a few setbacks here and there.  This past week, though, were the Missouri Primary, and the Minnesota and Colorado Caucuses.  Former Senator Rick Santorum (R- Pennsylvania) swept the lot of them on Tuesday night.  Considering momentum is key in the primary, this should be a big deal for the frontrunner, right?  Well, not exactly…

A Pointless Primary?

What has made me- and many of my friends -facepalm this week was the Missouri Primary itself.  In essence, Missouri wasted $8-9 million taxpayer dollars to hold a primary that doesn’t even count.  No, really.  In case you don’t want to open the link, in essence the GOP would have penalized the amount of delegates Missouri would have gotten if they had left the primary at the date it happened.  In short, they were going to be changing the date to be within party rules, which is supposed to be a simple matter for the state legislature.

Welp, they screwed it up so not only did we have the primary which is non-binding, but we’re going to have the for-real caucus next month.  Everyone in the state is scratching their heads about how the legislature screwed it up that badly.  As a result, despite his win on Tuesday, Santorum gets absolutely nothing out of the state yet.  Delegates, in the end, are what matters in this race up to the GOP Convention sometime in the summer, as whoever has the most will walk out as the Republican Presidential nominee.  Currently, Romney has 112 to Santorum’s 72; this could certainly change with the way the primaries will be playing out up until then.  Romney is most likely going to be the nominee at this rate, but there’s still a chance that Santorum will make up ground.

Momentum, after all, can be just as crucial as the actual results, as I explored around the Iowa Caucuses.  Though the Missouri Primary doesn’t count officially, it can be an important PR boost for the Pennsylvania Republican; Americans, after all, like a winner, and by winning three contests in the nation’s heartland in the same night can potentially make a statement about his electability in the rest of the country.  After all, if Santorum can keep up said momentum into races that, you know, actually matter, he can make a solid case for staying in the race as the conservative alternative potentially as late as the convention.

If it goes that far, this could be very fun to watch.  Honestly, I’ve gotten tired of how boring the primary season has been.  A nice, rousing floor fight at the GOP convention would be just the thing to liven it up.  Plus, you have to admit the Democrats would absolutely love for the GOP nomination fight to last all the way to summer.  Just think about that for a second:  if the GOP spend another 6 months fighting each other instead of President Obama, that’s a head start on messaging that you can’t ignore.

Either way, this’ll be good.

The We Had a Primary? by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: Barack Obama, GOP, Minnesota, Missouri, Mitt Romney, Republican, Rick Santorum, Santorum