You may not have heard about it, but there’s another state caucus in the presidential election season tomorrow. No, it’s not in New Hampshire. It’s in Wyoming. They call them the County Conventions.
These conventions are only being run tomorrow by the Republican Party of Wyoming. The Democrats are having their say in their party’s presidential nomination much later in the process, in March. I guess the Wyoming Republicans thought they would get more attention if they went early in the process.
It didn’t work out that way. The national media has paid little attention to the Wyoming Republican presidential caucuses, giving just a fraction of the coverage that’s given to Iowa and New Hampshire.
Even the Republican presidential candidates don’t seem to care much what the Wyoming Republicans do. None of them are bothering to go out to Wyoming this week, except for, perhaps, Duncan Hunter, the Republican presidential candidate who got essentially zero percent of the vote in Iowa. There are rumors that Duncan Hunter might stop by Wyoming, but that’s kind of like hoping for Lollapalooza and getting an librarian playing an autoharp instead.
The Associated Press is reporting that the leadership of the Wyoming Republican Party is expressing disappointment at not having gotten the fawning attention of the Republican presidential candidates. Really though, I don’t see why they should be disappointed, given the half-hearted effort that the Wyoming Republicans have made this year to get themselves organized.
If you take a look at the web site of the Wyoming Republican Party, you’ll see that the last news that they have of their state activities is from September. That piece of news was to say that, although bottom-tier candidates Sam Brownback, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, and Duncan Hunter had confirmed that they would attend, none of the Republican frontrunners had indicated that they would bother to come.
Since then, no news, no campaigning, no information for Wyoming Republican voters on how to get ready for tomorrow’s event. Even the notice the Wyoming Republicans have put up about the County Conventions doesn’t have a link to anywhere. It’s just a map of the counties of Wyoming.
With that kind of lazy, Fred-Thompson-style campaigning on the part of the Wyoming Republican Party, why should they expect to get any notice from the top Republican presidential candidates?
Well, never mind all that. The Wyoming Republicans should get your attention, in spite of their sluggish ways. The reason is that Mike Huckabee trounced supposed frontrunners Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and John McCain.
(Oh, McCain, McCain, McCain. Whatever happened to the supposed John McCain resurgence that the mainstream news media went on and on about earlier this week? It turned out to be a merely mythical beast. John McCain only barely fought off fifth-place Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses.)
Wyoming has a small population, and whatever delegates it can contribute to the national Republican presidential convention won’t count for much. However, the ranking of the Republican presidential candidates in tomorrow’s votes across Wyoming may well signal the degree to which Mike Huckabee’s performance in Iowa can translate on to other states.
That make Wyoming a foreshadowing of New Hampshire, and that makes tomorrow’s Wyoming County Conventions worth paying attention to. Besides that, what’s the alternative? Watching Saturday sports in January? Yawn.
A winner will be announced some time around 3:00 in the afternoon, Wyoming time.
The Wyoming Republican delegates are not bound, so any results announced later today are basically just another straw poll. The Wyoming delegates can vote for whomever they please when they get to the national convention.
RIght, but it’s still an assessment of whether there is any kind of momentum for Huckabee coming out of Iowa and into New Hampshire. The Wyoming Republican Party really seem to have set themselves up to be ignored.