Adiós al Supermartes

The Daily Beast explora el posible escenario de primarias que puede resultar de las nuevas reglas y la pérdida de valor del Supermartes (sólo con Texas como premio gordo) que supondría una regresión de tres décadas en el proceso.

Concluye que el gran perjudicado será el front-runner Romney, aunque todo es relativo ya que el mejor financiado es también el que más preparado está para enfrentar un proceso largo.

(...) Pundits have hyped it. Candidates have built entire campaigns around it. And it has long served as the climax of presidential primaries. But next year, “Super Tuesday”—that one day cluster of contests that has long served as the zenith of presidential primaries will shrink to near oblivion. And the result, experts say, will be a 2012 race unlike anything the country has seen in decades.

The calendar is still in flux, but assuming the current dates hold, next year’s Super Tuesday will include just nine primaries, down from 24 in 2008.

(...) The shift could fundamentally redefine the way the parties nominate their candidates and alter the course of next year’s presidential primary race.

“It doesn’t look like there will be a knockout punch,” says Josh Putnam, a political science professor at Davidson College who blogs at Frontloading HQ. “It’s not like it has been, where some candidate has kind of established some measure of dominance in the early states, and then that person does well coming out of Super Tuesday and essentially wraps up the nomination. We won’t see that this time around.”

It boils down to simple addition. In order to clinch the nomination, a candidate needs to secure more than half of the party’s delegates. In primaries past, a presidential hopeful who dominated Super Tuesday could come close enough to that 51 percent mark that he would be considered the presumptive nominee. (Think of John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008.) But this time around, the number of delegates available early on will significantly shrink, making it impossible for someone like Mitt Romney to take out his primary rivals in one fell swoop.

“If Super Tuesday is no longer the place where a frontrunner can run up massive numbers of delegates, it changes the calculus,” says Christopher C. Hull, who teaches politics at Georgetown University. The result? “You can expect a longer primary process and a larger likelihood that an insurgent candidate will win the nomination.”

That spells trouble for Romney, who currently is leading most national polls but stands to lose steam the longer the race is drawn out. At the same time, it could create an opportunity for late entries like Sarah Palin or Texas Gov. Rick Perry especially since this cycle’s scaled-back Super Tuesday will include several Southern states, where Romney’s moderate record and Mormon faith don’t play well.

If Romney fails to earn “presumptive nominee” status in March by losing Super Tuesday states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, he’s probably not going to call it quits then and there. More likely, he will rely on his well-stocked campaign war chest to hold on until later blue-state primaries where he’s expected to perform better, like New York (April 24) and California (June 5). In other words, get ready for one long, drawn-out horse race. (...)