You didn’t know?
That’s because nobody seems to give a shit.

Because the Iowa caucuses are a straw poll — no delegates actually are chosen until later — Wyoming’s Republicans will choose the first 12 national convention delegates on Saturday. But none of the candidates has been to Wyoming for at least a month.

Hey! Anybody seen a caucus around here?

Rich Noyes said this yesterday:

Imagine two small states, both holding caucuses to pick their delegates to the presidential nominating convention this summer. Because they are so small, neither state delegation will be especially meaningful to the actual outcome, but the caucuses in State A are given saturation attention by the world’s media, while the caucuses in State B are ignored by the media.

Well, no need to imagine. Yesterday, the Iowa caucuses chose a relatively inconsequential 40 delegates to the GOP convention, but the tremendous media attention given to those results has already scrambled the Republican presidential race. Tomorrow, Wyoming Republicans will pick 12 delegates — but the media won’t be there. So it’s essentially a non-event.

The national media aren’t interested in Wyoming because the candidates are spending so little time there. The candidates aren’t going to Wyoming because there’s no big media presence there. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum that shows how the Big Media have taken center stage in our political process.

Republican hopefuls Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter all stopped by the state.

By the way, you might think the Iowa caucus results mean that Obama and Huckabee have been chosen by Iowa. Um, not really.

The Iowa caucuses are an electoral event in which residents of the U.S. state of Iowa meet in precinct caucuses in all of Iowa’s 1784 precincts and elect delegates to the corresponding county conventions. There are 99 counties in Iowa and thus 99 conventions. These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa’s Congressional District Convention and the State Convention, which eventually choose the delegates for the presidential nominating conventions (the national conventions).

As CNN says:

Iowa uses caucuses to determine who will be a political party’s delegates to the national convention and which presidential candidates will get their votes. A caucus is a political meeting in which voters publicly discuss their preference for a party nominee. They differ from primaries, which are state-level elections in which voters select a preference by secret ballot at the polls.

And check this out:

The Republican National Committee, with the concurrence of chairman Mike Duncan on November 8, voted 121-9 to strip one-half of delegates from five States that violated the rules of having no primary before February 5th. The States and their losses were: Florida (57), Michigan (30), South Carolina (23), Wyoming (14), and New Hampshire (12). The Democratic party has also voted to remove all of Florida and Michigan’s delegates.

Say WHAT?
Hands up if you think this whole bullshit process is one of the most confusing things you’ve ever heard.