We're only three short months from the beginning of the primary season (have we really been in full-bore campaign mode for almost a year already?). The calendar is still unclear, mostly because different states keep trying to move to the front of the line in order to gain the perceived advantage of holding their primaries first.

The result looks like it's going to be a highly compressed series of primaries, with most of the delegates being chosen within the space of less than a month. Supposedly this will reduce the problem where states with late primaries voted after one candidate had already locked up the nomination. It's also supposed to extend the time the nominee has to campaign for president ahead of the convention.

I see a different situation possibly evolving, however.

Part of the reason the early primary states have such influence over the nominating process is that they help weed out the weaker candidates. Think Howard Dean in 2004: even though he seemed to have a lot of momentum and fund raising ability going into the Iowa caucus, that didn't translate into strength among the voters, and he dropped out of the race not too long after his poor showing.

Even candidates who don't formally withdraw after losing badly in Iowa or New Hampshire will find their fundraising drying up, and are effectively forced to stop campaigning.

The net effect is to narrow the field to just a couple of frontrunners in each party for the next round of primaries, and this smaller field makes it possible for one candidate to win the necessary delegates before the convention.

This year, though, with the compressed schedule and wide open races in both parties (though I think the Republicans are having more trouble than the Democrats finding a suitable candidate), there may not be enough time for this weeding-out process to take place before the bulk of the delegates are selected. With only a few weeks of primaries, the weaker candidates may be tempted to tough it out, hoping for some good fortune (or a more friendly state) to turn their campaign around.

It's much harder to win a majority of the delegates in a four-way race than when there's only two viable candidates, and this could lead to the first contested nominating convention in decades, where no candidate has enough delegates to lock up the nomination.

The eventual nominee would then be chosen based on deals and politicking at the convention itself. We might not know the lineup of major candidates until September 2008--only two months before the national election.

That's because of a quirk in the federal election financing rules which encourage the parties to wait as long as possible to formally name their nominees, since spending before the nomination is counted separately from spending after the nomination. Of course, when the parties scheduled their conventions they assumed that there would be a de-facto nominee long before the convention itself, giving the candidate more time to campaign on the "pre-nomination" budget.

Instead, we could have a long confusing summer with multiple viable candidates and no clear nominee from one party or the other, followed by a short, hot campaign once the final candidates are chosen.

It could be a very interesting year.