How will winner-take-all primaries affect the race for the GOP Presidential Nomination Race (2011-12) between Rick Perry (politician) and Mitt Romney (politician)?

There must be twenty people who are doing this analysis on pretty much a fifty hour week, so a hundred arcane details that aren't publicly known may have a very big effect on this discussion.  If you know that the Chairman of the RNC is going on a hunting trip with the Chair of the Arizona party, you have useful information.  I don't.  The two articles cited have been written after quite a bit of research, obviously.  So I'll back up and mention some of the basic facts as I understand them.  Then I'll present thoughts not based on detailed facts, but on conjecture. The RNC rules match DNC rules, and are the result of a monumental amount of work done by members of each committee to reach a consensus.  Each state wants to be as early as possible on the calendar.  Absent some rules, there would be primaries before Christmas.  Seriously.  I watched states arguing against the adopted rule precisely because they wanted to hold primaries at their own pleasure, without rules.  The RNC rule did not pass unanimously, though I forget the vote count. As far as I know now, Minnesota, Missouri and New Jersey are planning to violate the RNC rules and hold a primary (or caucus in MN) before the New Hampshire primary.  Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are also flirting with pre-Super Tuesday dates.  The schedule can change, and is subject to some RNC smackdown-style persuasion.  Threats to take convention votes away from those states breaking the rules has been tried by the Democrats, and in the end they gave them back.  And any state may consider (probably correctly) that making a splash in the media gives their state much more impact and influence than the delegates they're entitled to send to the convention in Tampa. Then, as discussed, a flurry of primaries happens in March.  On and after April first, if any state decides it wants to wait and see if one of the candidates cures cancer or throws a kitten at a protester, they can still, if they choose, put a proportional system in place.  Winner take all is beginning to lose favor with the voters.  It isn't even required in the Electoral College, and Nebraska and Maine already allocate electoral votes by Congressional District. (A provision in the RNC rules gives the Democrats an opportunity for mischief, though this is my own observation and may be a false impression.  I think if the Democrats fail to adhere to the agreed schedule, the GOP reverts back to its 2008 plans.  Would this mean that the White House and DNC could purposely do that if they calculate some impact that would favor them in some way?  Political calculations of this level of complexity and cleverness usually backfire, as nobody is capable of gaming out all the possibilities and getting the result they originally thought they wanted.) My view of all this is that it is much more easily analyzed without resort to attorneys and bylaws.  We know as an axiom that if two or more candidates are fighting for the same voters and splitting them, they will give away an advantage to the candidate who presents the only palatable choice for any particularly bloc.  As of this date, there is consensus on a few things about which there should not yet be consensus.  But let's roll with it anyway since wisdom gets labeled as conventional for the same reasons that quotes and songs become cliches: they are very often the best.  So let's say that Ron Paul is irrelevant.  That makes his supporters bleed at the ears, but it's an assumption most insiders make.  I mention him because he polls high and may get significant votes.  Huntsman is approaching the same level of relevance as Thad McCotter: really good guys who can't get arrested.  Newt Gingrich has likely reached Emeritus status, where everyone respects him and wants him to spend less time at the office and more time at the golf course.  So this leaves Bachmann and Perry fighting for the rightmost bloc and Romney more attractive to moderates.  In theory, this gives Romney an edge, unless you calculate that GOP moderates represent 3.5% of primary voters. Despite what you read, and what the Democrats and media desperately want to be true, Republicans are rational beings.  Unlike the Democrats and the media, GOP voters do not seek out the most outrageous misstatement or position that they have ever heard and decide that it represents their view, much less a majority view.  Should Bachmann or Perry make significant errors, you can be sure they will be reported.  From what I see, interest in whether Bachmann is well informed about the Concords and Elvis' lifespan is high.  From what I suspect, voters are more interested in her policies.  We will be arguing about jobs in Texas until Perry is laid to rest.  If you want to know about jobs in Texas, decide first whether you support Perry.  Your position on jobs in Texas will be completely determined by your desire to prove your support or opposition to his candidacy.  Thus far, Romney has had a lot of good will from the media, though they are motivated by visceral fear of all Central Time Zonebies who they can't seem to kill.  Romney is at least an establishment guy, or at least they want to think so.  But he will be waiting under a streetlight all night in the rain if he thinks that they will still respect him and want to be seen with him when it comes down to Mitt v Obama. I believe that the vast, vast majority of primary voters don't know their own state's rules.  They will vote for a candidate based on two measures: their level of agreement on the issues, and their assessment of that candidate's electability.  They will get reliable reporting on the second measure via polls at the very least.  Predicting the polling numbers as of March 1 is a fool's errand, if you are sent on an errand to find a prediction.  But again, Republicans are rational beings, and even those in Nevada and Delaware have grown attached to winning elections.  If there is a large bloc of voters completely disgusted with what Obama has done, and those voters are ripe for picking, primary voters will choose a centrist candidate, even if he is not Caesar's wife.  After 2:00 a.m. EDT I am selling metaphors by the bushel, and getting Mitt=Pompeia into the discussion is worth triple points.