Nevadans got hosed by the GOP leadership
The Nevada GOP central committee recently met in Las Vegas, and now my head is spinning. After years of being irrelevant on the presidential scene, Nevada managed to secure a third-in-the-nation spot in the race to nominate candidates for president of the United States. This makes sense because with this calendar all major regions of the country would be represented in the nominating process. Iowa in the Midwest, New Hampshire in the North, South Carolina in the South and Nevada in the West. The American West has grown faster than any other region in the country, and it is fair and important that Westerners have an early voice in the nominating process.
Unfortunately, Florida didn’t agree and decided they had to be important, too, so in defiance of the RNC rules, they leapfrogged everyone and scheduled their caucuses for Jan. 31, losing half of their delegates to the national convention as a penalty.
This triggered a chain reaction, with all four early nominating states shifting their primaries into January to preserve our spots on the calendar. All is hunky dory, right? Wrong. The New Hampshire secretary of state Bill Gardner threw a fit and cited a New Hampshire law that prohibits them from holding their nominating contest near in time to any other state, and threatened to move their contest into December.
The RNC brass stepped in and instead of telling New Hampshire to pound sand, they told Nevada something along the lines of “yeah, we know New Hampshire’s law is crazy, and Florida is the state that caused this whole mess, but if you move to fifth, we promise you won’t sink back into irrelevance, and we promise to wag our fingers at the other states in the future so they don’t screw you over again.”
When the dust settled, our delegates have been restored, but this isn’t about the number of votes we have at the Republican national convention. Florida, with only half their delegates, still has more than any of the four early states, plus they are hosting the national convention. This is about momentum and media exposure. Typically, one candidate wins Iowa, another wins New Hampshire, and one of the two captures South Carolina—and becomes the nominee, with no input from the West.
2012 will probably be no different. Nevada is now fifth in the nation coming along after the Florida, the state hosting the national convention and the same weekend as the Super Bowl. Add to this the fact that the moonbats on the central committee killed same-day voter registration at the caucuses, and we have a recipe for continued irrelevance.
All we can do as a state now is hold the presidential candidates to their promises to bring their campaigns to Nevada. We fell for the RNC’s tricks and bent over for New Hampshire, but with the promise that the candidates would still court us here in the West. Now is the time to implore these people to make good on their promises. Send an email to these candidates. Call their national headquarters and invite them to speak at your events. They owe it to us. The nonexistent leadership in the Nevada Republican party may have given away our influence for a bag of magic beans, but we must try and overcome this.
The American West deserves a voice in the nominating process, and now it’s time for the presidential candidates to rise above the fray and realize this. They had no problems boycotting our caucuses when it was politically expedient. Well, now they must do the opposite. We don’t sell foot-long corndogs here, but we do have an economy in shambles, a housing market that has imploded and a distressed populace that needs and deserves the attention of the people who may one day lead the country.