FHQ:

Look, FHQ has followed Republican strategist, Mike Murphy, since before the time that there was an FHQ. And while he gave Sasha Issenberg a fantastic inside look at some of the thinking from within the super PAC that has aligned itself with Jeb Bush, the true nature of rules changes — with respect to the delegate allocation process in the Republican Party — really got lost in translation.

Murphy had this to say in response to Issenberg’s question about when the consolidation/winnowing of candidates might begin in earnest in this 2016 cycle:

Well, that’s what the primaries are for, but the calendar’s changed a little bit. We only have 10 pure winner-take-all states now. The Republican Party, we used to be the Social Darwinists: second place got you a Greyhound ticket to Palookaville. Now we’re proportional, mostly by congressional district. From Feb. 1 to March 15, we have a bunch of big states; Ohio, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina probably. [Looks at primary calendar/map on wall of office.] I think my map’s out of date now, I’m not sure we got North Carolina moved. So you’ve got this 45-day blitz of a tremendous amount of number of delegates being chosen, mostly—not all, as Florida’s winner-take-all—but mostly in a heavily proportional system.

First of all, there’s no need to print up an outdated primary calendar and map and put it on the wall. You can always find one right here. FHQ’s been updating that one since January 2012.

More importantly, let’s dive down into this winner-take-all and proportional stuff. Yes, the Republican National Committee has a set of rules that require states with primaries and caucuses in the March 1-14 window to allocate their delegates proportionally. But that is not a new thing. The proportionality requirement was added for the 2012 cycle and covered the entire month of March.¹ The RNC didtighten its definition of what constitutes proportionality for the 2016 cycle, but the amount of delegates available in the respective windows is still about the same.