GOP’s new rules set up long slog to nomination

December 15, 2011|By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff

Mitt Romney, who once hoped to land a knockout blow in January, is now bracing for a protracted months-long battle against Newt Gingrich, pointing to new election rules that make it mathematically impossible for any candidate to clinch the nomination before April 24.

Under the rules, which Romney has cited in several recent interviews, most states that vote before April 1 will award their delegates in proportion to the tally, rather than give them all to the candidate who wins a simple majority. A candidate who captures 30 percent of the vote but still loses the state, for example, will still get 30 percent of the delegates.

The Republican National Committee adopted the rules last year to make it harder for a candidate to wrap up the nomination early. The committee said the rules, combined with an election calendar that pushes more states to vote later, would force the candidates to campaign across the country, energizing more voters by giving them a greater say in selecting the nominee.

The rules, known as proportional representation, are patterned after the system long used by Democrats to award delegates in their primaries. Republicans looked at the prolonged 2008 Democratic primary between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and believed that, despite its occasional divisiveness, the battle helped excite Democrats and starve the Republican candidate, John McCain, of attention.

“McCain sat on the sidelines and couldn’t get a headline and was ignored,’’ said Paul Senft, a Republican National Committee member from Florida who helped draft the new rules.

The new system was also designed to discourage states from moving their primaries earlier in the year to garner more attention from the candidates and the media. Because early primary states will divide their delegates under the new rules, they will be less important to the overall race than they were under the old, largely winner-take-all system.

“It will make it longer, it will make it a cumulative process, and it will be spread out among the leaders,’’ Senft said. “And it’s debatable whether it will be over and decided by convention time.’’

Barbara Norrander, a political scientist at the University of Arizona, said an analysis she conducted showed that if the 2008 Republican primary had used a proportional system, McCain and Romney would have had the same number of delegates after Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5.

In that case, Romney would certainly have continued to campaign for weeks more, escalating his fight against McCain. Instead, most of the 21 states that voted that day awarded all of their delegates to McCain, forcing Romney from the race two days later and enabling McCain to secure the nomination on March 4.