Republican Primary Sparks New Battleground States

All eyes might be on the early-voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, but the real battle for the Republican nomination for president could be occurring well out of sight.

As the candidates in a crowded GOP field battle for influence in the well-treaded battlegrounds of past presidential campaigns, Republican officials in all 50 states are racing to finalize the rules for how they will allocate their state's delegates to the candidates whose campaigns until next July's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

And some of those changes, party leaders in those states believe, could have a profound impact on who ultimately emerges to face President Joe Biden in 2024. For instance, freed-up delegates could help candidates like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or South Carolina Senator Tim Scott chip away at Donald Trump's commanding lead over the rest of the field.

On Friday morning, Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dave Williams sent out an email laying out proposed changes to the delegate nominating process to encourage presidential candidates to "place a premium" on his state before the multi-primary date known as Super Tuesday. Included is a proposal requiring that delegates be bound to their respective presidential candidates for two rounds at the national convention.

Doing so, Williams told Newsweek, gives the candidates an additional incentive to compete for Colorado's attention, with the winner of the state likely taking home most of the delegates. And in a long campaign cycle, it's likely every candidate seeking to eat into Trump's early leads in New Hampshire and Iowa will likely need to collect every delegate they can.

"We're not blind to the reality here that those early-nominating states are going to be favored," Williams said Friday. "That's been the practice for a long time in presidential politics. We're not looking to, you know, leapfrog over anyone else and have Colorado be more important early on.

"But we are taking the existing rules that are in place and trying to maximize our ability to command attention and focus. By putting in place these merit-based incentives, we're telling candidates the more you compete here, the more you'll win," he said.

Getting in the Game

Colorado and its 37 delegates likely won't make a significant difference in the final tally at the GOP convention. But prospective changes being weighed by Republicans in other states could make a difference in the final result and have already exposed them to criticism from various campaigns and their surrogates (who campaign on a candidate's behalf).

California—a largely blue state that also happens to have the most delegates, 169—has reportedly been weighing plans to move away from its traditional "winner-take-all" system to a more competitive one, allocating the number of delegates a candidate receives in accordance with the population of the congressional districts he or she carries. This effort, state party officials told Newsweek, was intended to force candidates to interact with the state's voters.

"I wanted to get California more in play, and I felt winner-take-all was a drag on that," Mike Schroeder, a state party leader who lobbied for the changes, told the Los Angeles Times in May. "I thought if we created a situation where even if you couldn't win the whole state you could get a reward for winning part of it, that would have the effect of putting California in play."

While the potential changes are seen as an effort to involve more of the state's Republicans in the process, critics say they could put more influence into the hands of Republican voters living in the liberal enclaves in the Bay Area and the south while diminishing the influence of more conservative voters in the state's Central Valley.

Early drafts of the proposed changes, which are scheduled for a vote on July 29, have already drawn the ire of Trump allies like Roger Stone and noted conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who said the effort represents an attempt by state party leaders to undermine Trump's candidacy.

However, it's not even guaranteed such a plan will come to fruition. According to Republican National Committee rules, any proposed changes to a state party's nominating process need to be ratified by the RNC ahead of its October 1 deadline. And if the changes are out of compliance with the party's rules, those states could be penalized, including the loss of their votes at the Republican convention.

California officials told Newsweek their plan was drafted in close compliance with the RNC rules. Some states, however, may choose to defy the RNC, setting up a direct challenge to party leadership ahead of the October deadline.

While some state party leaders have expressed frustration with RNC leadership after Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel's rocky reelection campaign last winter, the party still has significant power to keep the states in line, said Joshua Putnam, a political consultant who specializes in the delegate nomination process. After recently enacted bylaw changes designed to prevent a primary challenge to Trump in 2020, Putnam told Newsweek, it is unlikely the calculus behind the delegate count will change any time soon.

"There is certainly something to the fact that the rules that Team Trump established for 2020 are likely to help the former president next year," Putnam said. "But they are playing defense to maintain the groundwork that was laid. Broadly, that is an assumption that may prove wrong in the end if [as the DeSantis camp might contend] Trump's polling advantage is a 'sugar high.'"

"It still really is all about Iowa," Putnam went on. "Unless a non-Trump wins there, things are likely to cascade quickly and the delegate rules elsewhere will be far less likely to matter. But that does not mean that state parties will not try to finesse them to some degree as the October 1 RNC deadline approaches."

Playing the Long Game

Some are preparing for such a scenario. Scott, for example, has recently been surging in Iowa, while states like South Carolina have shown Trump polling well below the numbers he has demonstrated on a national scale.

Competing for the newly available delegates—assuming the RNC allows them—will still require significant investments by the campaigns to be competitive. This potential change is the likely culprit behind DeSantis' well-funded efforts to launch aggressive ground-level operations in more than a dozen early-voting states.

"We are building a team that is set to compete through the first 18 states and are excited about the early momentum we are seeing for Governor DeSantis on the ground not only in the first four but March states as well," Jess Szymanski, a spokesperson for DeSantis' Never Back Down PAC, told Newsweek.

They'll need it, particularly as moves by some state party leaders could actually work to consolidate the field around a single candidate.

In Grand Rapids last month, the Michigan Republican Party leadership, led by its Trump-supporting chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, enacted a change to its nominating process to award 16 of the party's 55 convention delegates to the winner of the state's proposed February 27 primary. The other 39 will be allocated based on each candidate's performance in caucuses carried out at the state level.

Some critics of the plan speculate the rule change was intended to bolster the candidacy of Trump, the clear front-runner among all the candidates now. As the likely leader in Michigan, he would have the locked in-support of more than one-fifth of the state's delegates at the convention at a time when the party is divided.

Notably, Michigan's proposed February 27 primary—which would come several weeks earlier than the date of its 2021 caucuses—notably interferes with RNC rules dictating the early- primary schedule and would place Michigan squarely before the early-voting state of Nevada.

"The Michigan Republican Party stands firmly against any attempts to diminish representation of Michigan Republicans," Karamo said in a news release after last month's vote on the nominating process.

Ultimately, Putnam said, any party infighting over delegate rule changes may not yield much heading into the RNC's October meeting. With so many competing interests vying for changes, he said, deciding to maintain the status quo will likely be seen as the simplest solution.

"That both Trump and DeSantis camps are lobbying state parties for changes suggests that there will be some changes, as in Michigan and Idaho. But it is my opinion at the time that the back-and-forth is perhaps more likely to maintain the status quo rules from 2020," he said.

"Any division over the rules in state parties that creates an impasse just leads back to the current rules carrying over. But again, we shall see," Putnam said.