POLITICO.com:
In the final days before states submit their primary and caucus plans to the Republican National Committee, the GOP is sweating bullets over the possibility that a gang of rogue states could still wreak havoc on the 2012 presidential nominating process.
One state, Arizona, has already announced that it will violate RNC rules and hold its primary on February 28 - a full week before joint RNC-Democratic National Committee rules permit states to do so. Michigan's legislature is also moving toward scheduling its vote for the same date.
Then there's Florida, a repeat offender when it comes to calendar mischief, which has empaneled a committee to choose an election date that's expected to fall before the RNC-sanctioned date of March 6.
The RNC cutoff for states to schedule their elections is October 1--and some states may even blow that deadline.
(...) Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who has the power to select a date for his state's primary, said Georgia may also decide to join the small throng crowding the early end of the 2012 calendar.
(...) The order of states in the 2012 calendar is more than an arcane procedural issue. Every time a state leapfrogs the calendar, it scrambles the strategic calculus for presidential candidates who have largely focused on a small band of officially sanctioned early primaries.
According to RNC and DNC rules, only four states are permitted to vote before the "Super Tuesday" date of March 6: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
States that schedule elections before that point risk having their delegations to the Republican National Convention cut in half, raising the prospect of a summer fight over whose delegates get seated and whose don't.
Another response is that traditional early states such as South Carolina may move their primaries even earlier to avoid sharing election dates with brazen newcomers like Arizona.
Presidential candidates then have to decide whether to compete in potentially messy, unsanctioned contests.
The candidates' response to Arizona was telling: Even though the state is openly defying the RNC, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann both visited within days of Gov. Jan Brewer's decision to hold a primary in late February.
That could effectively send a signal to the other undecided states that, whatever the RNC says, candidates are prepared to reward their bad behavior.
(...) In addition to the states that are all but explicitly daring the party to penalize them, several others are likely to hold early, non-binding caucuses that would start the process of choosing delegates near the beginning of February.
States such as Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota and Maine wouldn't draw an automatic penalty from the RNC for starting the caucus process early, since they conduct multi-stage contests that wouldn't actually allocate delegates until later.
(...) It's not clear whether any individual presidential candidate would benefit most from late changes to the calendar, though it's likely that Romney and Rick Perry - the best-known, best-funded candidates - would be the most prepared to compete on an expanded early primary map.
Among the states that are moving up, several look friendly to Romney, including Michigan, which voted for Romney in the 2008 primaries, in part thanks to fond memories of his father's tenure as governor there.
Other newcomers to the early-state circuit could cut either way. In Arizona and Colorado, Romney would likely benefit from the sizable Mormon population, but Perry might do well thanks to his status as a Western governor.
As the most culturally Southern candidate in the race, Perry might be expected to do well in Georgia, but that's also a state Romney came close to winning in 2008.
The only sure outcome of the late-shifting calendar is to throw even more uncertainty into an already fluid Republican nomination fight.
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