They'll either vote for a candidate, or they won't. The date should be irrelevant.
This could help....
After seeing the long fight between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Republicans decided longer contests could pay dividends — that ‘08 campaign left behind a lot of activated and newly registered voters.
So the GOP changed the way some of its primaries work - states that hold events prior to April 1 were asked to award their delegates more proportionally, instead of winner-take-all. In theory, that opens more chances for second- and third- place candidates to get delegates, and perhaps hang in the race.
But how much might the new rules impact things? There’s a difference between a nomination that’s really contested for a while, and one that just takes longer for the leader to clinch. The latter is more a political question. In terms of the allocation math for 2012, the Vince Lombardi rule still holds: winning matters. Here’s why:
First: Even though a state may allocate its delegates “proportionally,” that doesn’t guarantee its delegate count will be close
Many of the “proportional” states still give better opportunities to the overall winner.
For example: In Georgia on Super Tuesday, some of the delegates are awarded based on the vote within the congressional districts (This is the case in many states). The winner in each district gets a minimum of two out of three of the district’s delegates just for winning it, and captures all three if he or she crosses 50 percent of that district’s vote.