Campaign strategies try to amass delegates

BY JOHN RILEY | john.riley@newsday.com

December 30, 2007

It's all about delegates.

When the presidential primary season kicks off Thursday in Iowa, only 57 of more than 4,000 Democratic delegates and 40 of 2,380 Republican delegates will be at stake, but the math of delegate accumulation is already shaping distinctly different strategies for New Yorkers Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

Sen. Clinton is following a traditional strategy of embedding herself in small early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire in an effort to grab early momentum and sweep to the nomination. If she falls short, she could face -- at best -- a long slog, in part because Democratic Party rules require dividing delegates proportionally to each candidate's vote in states and congressional districts.

Giuliani, on the other hand, seems wedded to a riskier strategy. Without much chance of a momentum-building win in the small, early states, he's hoping to secure the GOP nomination by grabbing big delegate chunks on Jan. 29 in Florida (which has a total of 57) and then in "Super Tuesday" prizes up for grabs on Feb. 5, relying in part on Republican rules that allow winner-take-all primaries in states such as New York (101), New Jersey (52), Connecticut (30) and Missouri (58).

On the Republican side, 1,190 delegates are needed to win the nomination. Giuliani aides say his chances are bolstered by compression of the nominating calendar, with many moderate big states -- also including Illinois (70) and California (173), which allocate delegates proportionally or by congressional district -- moving their primaries up to Feb. 5.

Altogether, 1,081 delegates are up for grabs on Feb. 5, and Giuliani's pollster said recently that he led in states with 40 percent of the delegates needed for the nomination. "There's never been an election like this before, where you have so many delegate-rich states coming on the heels of the early primary states, like California, like Illinois," Giuliani campaign manager Mike DuHaime argued when he laid out the strategy to reporters in November.

Experts, however, warn that no Republican has ever won the nomination without some success in the January contests. "We've got no history to rely on," said Doug Muzzio, who teaches political science at Baruch College. "We'll look back on this to see whether it works or not."

And Giuliani's recent slump in national and Florida polls make the strategy even dicier. He will be in a no man's land while the other candidates get publicity in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he could see support wilt further if someone else strings together enough success to build momentum, so will have to count on his foes to block each other.

"Winner-take-all certainly helps," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist. "If Giuliani can pull 35 percent in some of these states he can accumulate delegates out of all proportion to the percentage of the vote he gets. But it's a campaign strategy that leaves his fate in other people's hands in the early primaries. He's a wild-card team hoping to make the playoffs if a, b, c and d happen."

For Clinton, the situation is reversed. She is competing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and has long hoped to secure wins there that will develop such momentum going into Feb. 5 -- when 22 states with 2,075 delegates, more than half of the Democratic total, will vote -- that she will be able to end the race then. But if, instead, the results in the early primaries are mixed, and Barack Obama, John Edwards and Clinton all secure wins, all bets are off.

The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, require that all states allocate delegates proportionally among candidates based on their share of the vote. Under those rules, if three viable Democrats suddenly find themselves having to stretch staff and money across 22 states in the 10 days after South Carolina, Obama could try to poach delegates in New York, Clinton could counter in Illinois, and it would be hard for anyone to begin to approach a tipping point on delegates.

And if some second-tier candidates stayed in the race, the votes of any who fall short of the 15 percent threshold would be divided proportionally among the leaders, making a breakaway even harder.Rick Sloan -- spokesman of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the politically active union that endorses Clinton and Mike Huckabee -- wrote a paper this year about what he calls the "train wreck" scenario for the party, under which all three leaders would come out of Feb. 5 with more than 500 delegates, feeling they had a plausible shot at the nomination.

"The compression of the calendar, the proportional representation rule and the 15 percent threshold all combine to create sort of a witches brew that may make getting a clear decisive victor very, very difficult if Iowa and New Hampshire don't work as killing fields," Sloan wrote. "It's the law of unintended consequences."