Pure Horserace: More Calendar Confusion

If you've been keeping track of the 2008 primaries and caucuses, we hope you've been using a pencil. It seems that not a week goes by without at least one state moving up its nominating contest in order to exert more influence on next year's election.

Even the previously sacrosanct "first in the nation" spots held by the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are now up in the air. The Granite State has taken umbrage at the Democratic National Committee's scheduling of the Nevada caucuses between Iowa and its own contest. Evidence of a growing rift on was display Sunday in Bedford, N.H., where DNC chairman Howard Dean spoke to Democratic activists.

"If you don't think New Hampshire still has an enormous influence, why are all these people up here doing all this stuff?" Dean said, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader. He defended adding Nevada and South Carolina to the January primary calendar, saying it allowed a more diverse group of voters to have an early say in the process.

But by putting two caucuses before the New Hampshire primary, the DNC has violated the Iowa-New Hampshire dynamic that has helped decide party nominees for decades, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner said.

"I want to honor the tradition of the New Hampshire primary," he said. "Our primary will be on a day that honors that tradition. What the DNC did was dishonor the tradition."

Though the DNC has named January 22 as the date of the New Hampshire primary, Gardner has the ultimate authority under state law, leading to speculation that New Hampshire will vote soon after the new year, or possibly even in late 2007.

And yet for all that effort, New Hampshire's voters might not even be the first to cast their ballots. That's because California, which has moved its primary to Feb. 5, allows for early voting by mail as early as Jan. 7. The early voting means that at least some portion of the primary electorate will have already made up their minds when polling places open on Feb. 5 — and that means the candidates will have to court Californians while at the same time worrying about Iowa and New Hampshire.

Perhaps that played a role in Rudy Giuliani's decision to abandon this August's Iowa straw poll — why bother with conservative Iowans when you could spend that time, and money, on California's more moderate GOP base? "We want to win Iowa, we want to win New Hampshire, we want to win South Carolina, but we also have a realization that there are a number of other states now that are also going to be part of the process," one Giuliani adviser told The Boston Globe.

Does the new, still-evolving calendar mean Iowa and New Hampshire are irrelevant? Or does it mean that one, or both, will become even more important? That is a question all the campaigns are trying to answer as they plan their fall strategies. We may not know the answer, however, until the winners are crowned. — David Miller

Resurrecting The Straw Poll? Is Fred Thompson's participation in the teetering Iowa straw poll just what the state Republican Party needs right now? After Rudy Giuliani and John McCain announced last week that they were taking a pass on the event, the straw poll's value plummeted. But now, according to The Associated Press, those close to Thompson are asking party officials about the logistics for the event, a sign that they may put the poll back on the radar.

As a later entrant, it would seem an easy call for Thompson to skip out and save the money he would otherwise spend on organizing for the straw poll. Then again, playing in what is essentially a fund-raiser for the state party would likely win some good will for January's caucuses. At the very least, it doesn't hurt to be seen as interested. — Vaughn Ververs

Least Surprising Poll Result Ever: Assuming Thompson stays out of the Iowa straw poll, the August event will be an all-but-certain victory for Republican Mitt Romney. But he still might be hard-pressed to win by the kind of margin seen in another poll taken this weekend in the state that might favor Romney more than any other — heavily Mormon Utah.

In Saturday's vote at the Utah Republican Party's 2007 organizing convention, Romney won 81 percent of the vote. His closest competitor wasn't close at all: Ron Paul had less than 6 percent. Rudy Giuliani? Just over 4 percent.

At least now, Paul can claim a second-place finish in a GOP stronghold. He had just hope no one reads the fine print. — David Miller

Make Room: Thompson may not be an "official" presidential candidate quite yet, but he is shaking up the polls — or at least one. An Associated Press/Ipsos poll shows Thompson is solidly in third place, behind Giuliani and McCain and ahead of Romney.

In the poll, Thompson snagged 17 percent of Republicans nationally, compared to 27 percent for Giuliani, 19 percent for McCain and 10 percent for Romney. Thompson has called his fledgling effort a "testing the waters" affair — and it appears the temperature is just fine. But his camp will be more interested in seeing how his inclusion in the race plays in key early states like Iowa and New Hampshire as the weeks progress. — Vaughn Ververs

Door To Door: According to Barack Obama's campaign, more than 10,000 volunteers across the nation fanned out last weekend to spread the campaign's message the old-fashioned way — by going door-to-door. In Iowa alone, reports the Des Moines Register, 1,500 volunteers participated in the event, billed by the campaign as a "walk for change." Obama himself went door-to-door in Dubuque, Iowa, displaying the personal touch voters in that early state are accustomed to seeing.

But did this walk change anything? One-on-one campaigning can be so much more effective than the generic TV ads voters are used to in modern campaigns — but in the end, it's all about getting them to the caucuses and polling places in January and February. Howard Dean flooded the state with orange-hatted volunteers prior to the 2004 Iowa caucuses but still came in a disappointing third. — Vaughn Ververs

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By David Miller and Vaughn Ververs