State caucus a lolla-Paul-ooza?

When the Republican national convention is held Sept. 1-4 in Minneapolis, there will be 2,488 delegates attending from all the 50 states and a variety of territories and the District of Columbia.

Montana will have 24 of those delegates.

With such a minuscule proportion of delegates, you would think Montana's Republicans would not expect to have much of a role in the process of nominating a president.

But in August, the party's state convention decided to opt for an early February caucus rather than the traditional June primary in order to increase the state's influence.

But to do so, they had to limit participation in the caucus to party officials and cut out the party faithful - on the grounds that party registration is not required in Montana and therefore it would be impossible to keep Democrats out of the caucuses.

So now, on Feb. 5, in the heart of the most competitive GOP primary race in years, about 3,000 Republican office holders across the state will gather to determine who will get the support of Montana's 24 delegates at the national convention.

Some of those office holders are legislators or county commissioners, but a great many of them are what is known as precinct men and women.

Since precinct positions are notoriously hard to fill, the state's GOP leaders had touted the restricted caucus system as a means of encouraging participation at the precinct level.

Now, in an interesting turn of events, supporters of Texas Rep. Ron Paul are showing a sudden interest in precinct positions in order to gain a vote at the caucuses.

Paul is a libertarian-leaning, Constitution-touting Republican who appeals to voters who are fed up with the powers-that-be and the promises they make but rarely keep. He has been a fund-raising dynamo despite getting very little media attention, and as anyone who follows politics can tell you, he has never lost an Internet straw poll all year. His supporters are adamant, determined and giddily optimistic that they can make a difference.

So in Montana, Paul's supporters like Terry Frisch of Helena are jockeying to become precinct workers in order to gain one of those coveted 3,000 votes. Others are doing the same, and no one should count them out.

"Some people are concerned there is going to be a change in the power base, and they should be," said Paul's state coordinator David Hart.

It would certainly be ironic if the party insiders who set the system up suddenly found themselves at odds with the very people they recruited into the party system, but it could happen.

A University of New Hampshire political scientist, Dante Scala, likened the Montana GOP caucus rules to "a throwback to the old ways that parties worked, … pre-1972, when really it was all about delegates being decided by party insiders."

The only question now is whether, come Feb. 5, the party insiders will still outnumber the party outsiders. Even if Montana's impact on the overall presidential race is typically small, it's possible the state GOP caucuses will be worth paying attention to, after all.