With South Carolina’s Republican party’s decision (to be announced in NH later this week) to move up their primary to January 19th in 2008, South Carolina has effectively helped encourage a stampede of other states to consider (or defacto move) moving their primaries farther up in the process.

This is a bad idea in my opinion.  While at first glance one might feel compelled to think that ‘hey, we need to secure our right position as the first southern state to nominate the President!”, it is clear that this kind of move may well seal South Carolina’s status to obscurity.

Why?  Because more than one other state (with more electoral votes like Florida) are moving up their primaries as well.  So what is looking what could happen is that candidates will have to mobilize their forces (and money) into those states that will supposedly lock in their status as a front runner and perhaps as the de facto nominee.

I mean, if you could spend your time trying to wrangle 1x votes in SC or 4x votes in Florida as a candidate, where would you ensure you invested all of your precious time and money?  Yep.  I thought so.

Now keep in mind that the RNC actually have rules in place stating that no state should hold their primaries before Feb. 2nd and yet two states to date have ignored those rules (South Carolina and Florida).

So now, instead of Super Tuesday, you will have Super Humongous Tuesday with 20 states putting their tallies up for grabs.  Let the person with the best money win.