On Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 21 states held caucuses and primaries for the Republican presidential nomination, selecting 1,081 delegates, or 45 percent of the total, in one day.

The results were decisive. John McCain won 610 delegates, more than half of the 1,191 needed to win the nomination. Two days later, Mitt Romney dropped out of the race. Although Mike Huckabee soldiered on until March 4, when McCain officially secured the nod, he couldn’t put up a serious fight, as so many delegates had been assigned only one month into the process.

“We had as close to a national primary day as we’ve ever seen,” remembers Ron Nehring, former chairman of the California Republican party. “That system was blamed for giving us John McCain, whom many conservatives were dissatisfied with.”

Unlike the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee can change its rules only at the national convention. At the 2008 convention, dissatisfaction with the primary schedule was so widespread that the party voted to form the Temporary Delegate Selection Committee, which it charged with proposing electoral reforms. The RNC promised to give the committee’s recommendations an up-or-down vote before the 2012 cycle began.

On June 28, 2010, the committee approved the following recommendations: Hold the early contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) after February 1, allocate at least some of the delegates from each state that votes in March according to proportionality, hold all remaining winner-take-all primaries after April 1, and hike the penalties on states that jump ahead of the line. On August 6, 2010, the RNC approved the committee’s proposals by the necessary two-thirds margin.

The committee’s reforms had two goals, says John Ryder, national committeeman for Tennessee: to ensure the process didn’t start too early and to ensure it didn’t end too soon. First, “there is a strong feeling that having the [nominee] essentially [chosen] by the four early states is unfair to the voters in other states,” he says, and it was right to give more states a say in the process. Second, an extended schedule would give “other candidates an opportunity to emerge.”

Two months into the new schedule, it isn’t working as well as its advocates hoped. According to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, four in ten adults say the nominating contest has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican candidates, while only one in ten says it has given them a more favorable one. Nonetheless, members predict the process won’t wrap up until April.

“I’m not certain that we know enough yet to fully evaluate this extended process,” says Carol Mumford, national committeewoman for Rhode Island, “but at the moment it gives me concern.”

The reformers, however, don’t think proportionality is the problem. The primary season would have lasted for three months, from February to April, if all had gone according to plan. The problem is that Florida jumped the gun.

“This primary is longer because Florida broke the rules,” Nehring says. Because the Sunshine State decided to hold its primary in January, it forced the other early states to move one month ahead to preserve the order. “The primary season has been lengthened by one month because selfish politicians in Florida decided to jump the line and created a cascade effect.”

Ryder agrees: “If [the primaries] had started in February, I don’t think we would have had quite as much handwringing as we do now.”

“States like Florida went rogue and rescheduled their primaries, even at the cost of losing [delegates],” writes Gene Koprowski, a former aide to ex-chairman Michael Steele, in an e-mail to NRO. “This is not the RNC’s doing — but the states’ own willfulness.”

At the same time, Nehring and Ryder understand the challenges inherent to reforming the primary schedule. For his part, Nehring favors the National Association of Secretaries of State Plan, which calls for rotating regional primaries. “We should have a primary process that looks like it was designed by human beings on purpose,” he argues.

Unfortunately, such reform requires the cooperation of the RNC, DNC, and all 50 state legislatures — and the latter group is the most problematic. Nehring explains the dynamic: “If you are a state legislator who’s termed out, and you would really like a presidential appointment, then you have a powerful incentive to move your primary up.” If you endorse the candidate who wins your state, and he credits that victory with helping him claim the nomination, you’ll more than likely receive the desired rewards.

“Do you think John Sununu would have become George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff if he had been governor of Hawaii?” Nehring asks.

The other hurdle for reform is the candidate. Although some members would like to change the primary schedule at the convention, the presidential candidate usually puts the kibosh on any reform effort. “The national convention is no time to institute such a bold reform because no presidential candidate’s campaign will want to risk appearing to alienate voters in any state through a process that would by definition have winners and losers,” Nehring says.

That leaves us with the current system. To discourage line-jumping, the RNC penalizes wayward states by eliminating half their delegates. Ryder wonders whether the penalty is strong enough, but he also thinks a 100 percent penalty, as the DNC has, would be too “draconian.” Still, a greater penalty could be part of the solution, he maintains.

The challenge is that states often don’t worry about how many delegates they get. The attention they receive from the candidates and the media for going early more than compensates for the cost. Ryder believes, however, that if a state loses enough delegates, it will become so insignificant that no candidate or media outlet will pay it attention.

“Nobody really remembers in 2008 that the first delegate-selection event [for the GOP] was caucuses in Wyoming,” he says. “The reason nobody remembers is they lost half their delegates to only eight or nine because they went early. Because the delegate award was so small and the cost in getting there was so high, campaigns chose not to contest there, and the media didn’t cover it.”

Nonetheless, the candidates and media will pay attention to states that don’t wield many delegates, such as New Hampshire, merely because they vote early and can generate momentum for their preferred candidate. “What sanctions can we impose that will persuade states to stay within the schedule?” Ryder asks. “We’ve wrestled with this for 20-odd years, and we haven’t got exactly the right answer yet.”

Not all Republicans agree that the RNC should keep reorganizing the process from on high. Chris Healy, former chairman of the Connecticut Republican party, writes in an e-mail to NRO: “We are living with another legacy of Michael Steele. Changing the rules was counter to the Republican principle of leaving these matters up to the states. That is why I opposed the changes as did many RNC members who have actually run campaigns and saw the pitfalls of the extended, proportional system that rewards failure. Let us hope we have learned from this painful lesson and it doesn’t cost us the 2012 Election.”

“I think the rules change was a mistake,” says a member of the RNC. “Why would you want the other guy raising all this money and now spending it against us?”

The member doesn’t blame Florida for the party’s current troubles. “The process is longer because the RNC, in its wisdom, extended the process.” Every cycle begins with the Ames Straw Poll, and no tinkering with primary dates and delegate-allocation schemes would change that. Citing the Tenth Amendment, the member chafes at the suggestion that the national party should impose greater penalties on states. “The state party has the right to move if they want. . . . Give [states] incentives — [such as] bonus delegates if they go later — but to tell them what to do is mistaken.”

In April, the RNC rules committee will meet and discuss any further changes to the primary calendar. Although many members have expressed reservations about the current setup, they are also anxious to see how it ends before they propose additional changes.

“In January we decided not to consider any potential rule changes related to the primary season until the April meeting because we wanted to see how it worked out,” adds Jim Bopp, national committeeman for Indiana and a member of the rules committee. “We wanted to wait and see how it actually turned out. We’ll see.”

— Brian Bolduc is an editorial associate for National Review.