Romney Triumphs in Wyoming Caucus

If one looks only at the mainstream media, one no doubt missed the big political news of the week-end. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has won most of Wyoming’s national convention delegates selected in the caucuses held in the Equality State. He took 8 of the delegates with 50% of the vote. As of right now, Mr. Romney has more convention delegates than any other GOP candidate, yet the media speak as if he loses New Hampshire, he’s doomed.

Rounding out results, California’s Congressman Duncan Hunter received 21% of the vote and one delegate and Fred Thompson scored 17% of the vote to secure the other delegate. Wyoming will select more delegates at a state convention in May to fill out the delegation. By advancing its caucus into January, the state annoyed the national GOP apparatchiks who insisted that no national delegates could be selected before February 5. Iowa and Nevada get a pass here because their caucuses only choose county-level delegates and national delegate selection occurs later. So, Wyoming got penalized by having its 28-member delegation cut in half. The state isn’t alone in this; national party leaders penalized Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and South Carolina by halving their delegations for the same reason.

The executive director of the Wyoming Republican Party Amy Larimer said of the candidates, “I’m kind of surprised that they're working on New Hampshire. We have more delegates than New Hampshire does. Normally, we would have had 28 and they would have 24, so we have 14 and they have 12 — it’s two more delegates here.” Only Messrs. Romney, Hunter, Thompson and Ron Paul have campaigned there, and there wasn’t a single public poll taken in advance of the caucus. The fact that the Democrats are holding their caucus on March 8 no doubt detracted from the story.

Still, Tom Sansonetti, the county convention organizer, maintained that moving the date up was a good idea. He told the Associated Press, “The ultimate goal is not how many times we appear on Katie Couric. The ultimate goal was to have attention paid to rank-and-file Republicans by national candidates.” If so, the move must be considered a failure.

The reason, of course, is Wyoming’s lack of big media markets, and its relative distance from such. Denver, Colorado, is probably the closest, and Denver radio and TV broadcasts don’t reach very much, if any, of Wyoming. Cheyenne, Gillette and Casper are just too far from New York, Atlanta and LA to matter. Iowa and New Hampshire have the advantage of being traditional sites of news stories about politics. Wyoming has traditionally been ignored, and despite this election being one big long call for change, it still is.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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