[svcw]

I don’t remember candidates having so much trouble qualifying for ballots as in this race.
The rules and regs to get on the ballot are pretty clear, what is their issue?
Really if they don’t have ground crews who get this done in a timely fashion then they wouldn’t win anyway.

[NonValueAdded]

There you go ... step 1) show the ability to lead a national campaign. In VA you had a last-minute rules change to contend with; what will the excuse be for TN?

[muawiyah]

What we have is a break down at the highest ranks of the Republican party. Ordinarily you'd have some effort from the RNC chairman to make sure that candidate's registered with the National Party ALSO achieve whatever registration is required in the states.

What we have instead is Reince Priebus, who is devoted totally to the Romney campaign.

Didn't I tell you folks about this last year? That if you put Priebus in you'd get Romney out!

Well, here it is ~ you get Romney.

[darrellmaurina]

4 posted on Friday, December 30, 2011 10:46:15 AM by svcw: “I don’t remember candidates having so much trouble qualifying for ballots as in this race.
The rules and regs to get on the ballot are pretty clear, what is their issue? Really if they don’t have ground crews who get this done in a timely fashion then they wouldn’t win anyway.”

I don't remember this level of problems with ballot qualifications, either, in prior years.

However, unlike some on Free Republic, I don't think the rules are the problem.

The problem seems to be that we have a higher number of candidates with lower levels of qualifications and experience. In prior years many of these people wouldn't have been taken seriously, but this year they have attracted support from the anti-incumbent Tea Party movement. That's certainly not all bad; the Republican Party's leadership is part of the problem today, just as it was in the late 1970s before the Reagan Revolution. What is bad is that people who do not have the level of organization we would typically expect in a presidential candidate, rather than being ignored, are getting “flavor of the week” treatment and dividing the conservative vote rather than leading to us uniting behind a single candidate.

That is doing serious damage because the conservative vote this year is fragmented. That's a problem because it helps Romney. Hopefully we'll be able to fix the problem before we have to deal with Romney as the Republican nominee.

I hope that Iowa, New Hampshire and other relatively early states like South Carolina do what they're supposed to do, namely, narrowing the field. If that doesn't happen, we have a much worse problem on our hands.

I don't want to think about the consequences of a race that leads to a brokered convention, or worse yet, that leads to Mitt Romney as the nominee because no “anti-Romney” ever gained traction.