The Republican National Committee decision to require all primaries to be in May or an earlier month does not apply to California, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Those states have June presidential primaries and all three states have Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature. The Republican Party apparently feels it is too difficult to persuade those three states to move their presidential primaries to an earlier date. See this story.
On January 24, the Republican National Committee approved the changes in the presidential nominating process that the party’s Rules Committees had adopted the day before. See this story. The date of the 2016 national convention isn’t set yet, but the article suggests it is most likely to be in June 2016. The date will be set in April 2014.
Former Congressman Mickey Edwards has this op-ed in the New York Times, condemning “sore loser” laws. “Sore loser” is actually a term that has come to represent any election law that keeps an otherwise qualified candidate off the general election ballot because he or she was too closely associated with a qualified political party. The term includes not only candidates who run in a partisan primary and lose; it also includes candidates who want to be independent candidates in November but can’t be because they were registered as a member of a qualified party in the recent past; and it also includes laws that force all candidates for a particular office to file on the same deadline, and forces them to choose whether to run in a partisan primary or to file as an independent for the November election.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a Michigan Libertarian Party appeal against Michigan’s “sore loser” law as applied to presidential primaries. If the Edwards op-ed had run in the New York Times a few months earlier, conceivably that might have helped persuade the Court to hear the case.
On January 23, the Republican National Committee’s Rules Committee passed some changes to the party’s presidential nomination process. The rules require that all delegates must have been chosen by 45 days before the start of the convention. Because it is expected that the next Republican national convention will be in June or July, this change means that presidential primaries in June cannot be used to choose delegates.
The date of the convention itself won’t be set for several more months.
It will be interesting to see what the Republican Party does about states that hold presidential primaries in June, especially the populous states of New Jersey and California. Republican legislators may try to move the primary dates, although both of those two states have Democratic majorities in the legislature. Otherwise Republicans in those two states will choose delegates via caucuses, and the presidential primaries will just be beauty contests. See this story. The full Republican National Committee will decide on January 24 whether to accept the recommendations of the Rules Committee.
On January 23, the Tenth Circuit overturned a Colorado campaign finance law that lets contributors give $400 to a candidate for the legislature who is nominated in a primary, but only $200 to a candidate who is nominated in a minor party convention, or with the independent candidate petition procedure, or who is a write-in candidate. The decision is Riddle v Hickenlooper, 13-1108, and is written by Judge Robert Bacharach, an Obama appointee, and co-signed by Judge Neil Gorsuch, a Bush Jr. appointee, and Bobby Baldock, a Reagan appointee. UPDATE: here is a newspaper story about the decision.
The decision overturns the U.S. District Court decision, which had upheld the law. Although all three Tenth Circuit judges agree, Judge Gorsuch wrote separately to discuss the appropriate level of scrutiny. The basis for the decision is equal protection. It is very rare for minor parties, independent candidates, and their supporters, to win a constitutional election law case on equal protection grounds; most laws striking down ballot access restrictions and other laws that injure minor parties and independents are won on First Amendment grounds.
The decision equivocates on whether the law is subject to strict scrutiny, or intermediate scrutiny, but concludes that the law is unconstitutional under either standard. The panel’s decision says, “Here the state of Colorado has created different contribution limits for candidates running against each other, and these differences have little to do with fighting corruption.” The concurrence says, “The only reason I can imagine for Colorado’s challenged contributory scheme is a bald desire to help major party candidates at the expense of minor party candidates…A state cannot adopt contribution limits that so clearly discriminate against minority voices in the political process without some ‘compelling’ or ‘closely drawn’ purpose – and Colorado has articulated none.”
