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By America Forward on Wednesday, January 16, 2008

If the past two weeks has not caused us to reconsider what the election landscape may look like this spring and summer, Ruth Marcus’ piece in today’s Washington Post, "Parsing Tsunami Tuesday," has certainly caused us to pause! Marcus’ column provides the reader with a primer on “super delegates” and “proportional representation rules” and leaves open the possibility that the Democrats, at least, could come to their national convention in this summer with nothing decided. According to Marcus, the Republicans (as distinguished from the Democrats):

…. crave an orderly process and like to coalesce around a front-runner. Moreover, the GOP does not have the same proportional representation rules. It has far fewer superdelegates. And GOP candidates—except Romney, with his capacity for self-funding—don't have the stay-the-course financial footing of Clinton and Obama. If one candidate took both South Carolina and Florida, that would propel him into Feb. 5 with significant momentum.

But it's easy to imagine the race remaining as scrambled as it seems right now, and the array of states voting on Feb. 5 producing a fractured outcome that would “deliciously extend what once looked like an unalterably front-loaded campaign.”

Posted in Election Insight