Invisible Primary: Visible -- Thoughts on the invisible primary and links to the goings on of the moment as 2024 approaches...
First, over at FHQ Plus...
- Alabama Republicans are set to vote on and adopt delegate allocation rules for the Super Tuesday presidential primary. But where is the state party taking them? Making it easier to win delegates? Harder? Maintaining the status quo. One thing is clear: the party does not have much room to make them harder. All the details at FHQ Plus.
If you haven't checked out FHQ Plus yet, then what are you waiting for? Subscribe below for free and consider a paid subscription to support FHQ's work and unlock the full site.
In Invisible Primary: Visible today...
...
Politico makes a contribution to the Trump and the 2024 delegate rules storyline that has periodically been touched on by most major national news outlets in 2023. And there is some nice color to Rachael Bade's story, but FHQ does not know how much it is actually adding to what is already known. Generally, candidates seek to influence the state level delegate selection rules, and Trump, in particular, is making some attempt at creating even more frontrunner-friendly rules in the Republican process this cycle. That was established at least as early as February.
And in some respects the Trump campaign has been very active in the process to craft rules at the state level that play to the former president's advantage. But the scope of that activity has been less rewriting -- the headline writer's word, not Bade's -- than it has been playing defense. Because as Bade describes in the piece...
The wonky-yet-important effort underscores just how politically savvy the Trump operation — once caught flat-footed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s attempted delegate mutiny at the 2016 Republican National Convention — has become. And it exposes how Trump’s aides have been running circles around his rivals, with only one of them — Ron DeSantis and his allies at the Never Back Down super PAC — even putting up a fight.
Again, that is consistent with what has been reported thus far in 2023. Yet, in context, this maneuvering is an extension of what the equally savvy, yet, far less opposed Team Trump did in 2019. Like this cycle, the RNC rules for the 2020 cycle carried over, largely unchanged. That confined any effort at massaging the rules -- within those national party guidelines -- to those on the state level. And the Trump campaign set out to do just that, pushing the bar so high for also-ran candidates in the 2020 cycle that it was nearly impossible for them to win any delegates.
That was the baseline that Team Trump established for 2024. And honestly, the campaign then gave the campaign now very little additional room to maneuver. It is not that they cannot make any further changes to make delegate allocation harder for other candidates, but that there just are not that many places where they can lobby to turn the knob up even higher (within RNC rules).
Consequently, most of what the Trump campaign has done in 2023 is play defense. They did so in California, warding off an alternate plan that would have eroded the gains there from four years ago. The same seems true of Alabama. At the end of June, there was talk of DeSantis World having some potential success in nudging the qualifying threshold for delegates there lower. But again, Trump has been playing defense in the Yellowhammer state. The Massachusetts Republican Party chair recently suggested that the party was considering dropping its winner-take-all threshold altogether. Bade seems to indicate that Trump is playing defense there as well.
And then there are Colorado and Louisiana, sites of Cruz success in the behind-the-scenes delegate battle against Trump in 2016. Both are pretty much maxxed out in terms of delegate allocation barriers allowed under RNC rules, but Team Trump has been fixated on completely ending any thought of a possibility of unbound delegates in either. Proposals in each would have delegates bound through two ballots at the national convention. That might be overkill, but it also fits the pattern of the former president's campaign playing defense with the rules established for 2020, not allowing them to ebb much if at all.
This will continue. It will continue all the way up to October 1, the deadline by which state Republican parties are to submit their delegate selection plans to the Republican National Committee. And as October 1 approaches, it is important to consider these efforts in this context. Trump is mostly defending the high water mark created in 2019 and smoothing over any other rough edges that they missed then for this cycle. That is the story here.
...
From around the invisible primary...
- NYT/Siena finds Trump ahead in Iowa, but lagging behind the pace he has established in national surveys. In a Mondale versus Hart sort of way -- wins relative to expectations -- maybe that matters, but a Trump win in the caucuses in January is one less opportunity for someone else to break through (if no one has by that point).
- Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin received another big contribution to his political action committee, the one geared toward success in the off-year state legislative races in the Old Dominion, from Thomas Peterffy, who had previously given to Ron DeSantis.
- Former Vice President Mike Pence is slowly but surely gaining on debate qualification, pulling in donors after his strong comments about Trump following the former president's third indictment.
- In the endorsement primary, Ron DeSantis was endorsed by another 35 state lawmakers and local officials in South Carolina. The inclination of some may be to shrug endorsements like this off, but with all the big endorsements in the Palmetto state already behind Trump or running themselves, these sorts of endorsements matter. The Florida governor recently also rolled out a wave of sheriff endorsements in Iowa.
- In Ohio, Trump won the endorsements of Reps. Bill Johnson and Troy Balderson as well as state Treasurer Robert Sprague. And ahead of his address to Alabama Republicans, the former president received the endorsements of the six member Republican US House delegation from the state.
- In the travel primary, Trump will trek to Alabama tonight, South Carolina tomorrow and New Hampshire early next week. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was in the Granite state earlier this week.
- The Quad City Times had a local look at Iowans kicking the tires on South Carolina Senator Tim Scott's campaign.
- Stand for Freedom PAC, the super PAC aligned with former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, has placed a $6.2 million ad buy for Iowa and New Hampshire over the next nine weeks.
- In more from the money primary, Florida donors continue to be a financial lifeline for DeSantis.
--
No comments:
Post a Comment