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This week, the 2012 presidential campaign gets its official start with the Iowa caucuses as a half-dozen Republicans battle for the first votes in the nominating contest.

By the time North Carolina's presidential primary rolls around in May, the nominee for each political party is usually a foregone conclusion. (The exception is the Democratic contest in 2008.)

Whether North Carolina voters will play a role in the ongoing GOP contest is debatable. Newt Gingrich's team modeled one path to the nomination that included the Tar Heel state. But other candidates are only using the state to raise money during campaign swings in South Carolina.

The Hawkeye state's traditional role as the frontrunner draws much criticism every four years because its voters are not representative of the nation as a whole. The same applies to New Hampshire and South Carolina, which host the next two primaries.

One political pundit at The Huffington Post is suggesting an interesting solution: put North Carolina second on the primary calendar. Will Bower, a critic of the traditional primary calendar, proposes making the states with the narrowest margins of victory in the previous presidential campaign vote first.

This would put North Carolina -- which gave Barack Obama a 14,177 vote victory in 2008 -- second to Missouri, where John McCain won by 0.1 percent. He writes:

"The purpose of selecting states according to narrowest margins-of-victory is to help the political parties determine which candidates can best appeal to the citizens of those states that have found themselves most recently on the Electoral Divide. A candidate who is able in 2012 to appeal to Indiana and Florida, for example, is more likely to appeal to a greater number of Americans on the whole."

So what would an New Hampshire-styled presidential primary look like in North Carolina?

A Davidson College political science professor tells the CharO's Tim Funk that Mitt Romney will be the GOP presidential nominee if he wins Iowa tomorrow.
Josh Putnam has become one of the country's most quoted experts on upcoming caucuses and primaries, Funk writes.
In a Q&A, Putnam says even if Ron Paul wins tomorrow, he won't be the GOP nominee.

Surging GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is airing a 60-second television ad in Iowa this week, "Rebuilding the America We Love," featuring a mountain range, the Statue of Liberty, a wheat field and Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, Watagua County.
Look for the store 17 seconds in.

A bipartisan proposal to change how the state draws legislative and congressional districts, which is based on Iowa's redistricting process, will be considered in the House this year.

The proposal would have nonpartisan legislative staff draw districts that legislators would accept or reject.

The aim is to take partisan politics out of redistricting, cut down on lawsuits, save money, and work efficiently.

Iowa is close to approving its new maps. North Carolina has barely gotten started. The proposal is supported by a N.C. Coalition for Lobbying & Government Reform, a group of individuals and organizations representing a wide range of ideologies.

"John Hood is right on this," said Chris Fitzsimon, director of the left-leaning N.C. Policy Watch.

"Chris is wrong, but not on this," said Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation. "Representative government is impossible if voters can't elect representatives of their choice," he said.

Legislators are deeply involve in drawing districts. Republicans this year say they are going to draw fair and legal districts, but redistricting is frequently an opportunity for the majority party to exercise its advantage.

Previous efforts to have a commission draw political lines have gone nowhere.

The Iowa way has legislative staff, who are not allowed to talk to legislators while they're drawing districts, do the plans.

Two Iowa House members appeared via Skype at a news conference today, saying the process has worked well.

Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett Republican and chairman of the House Elections Committee, said the committee would consider the bill.

"This is an excellent road map, an excellent first step," he said.

Gov. Beverly Perdue will lead one of the Obama administration's five regional discussions on health reform.

Perdue, who was a hospital administrator and health consultant before entering politics, will lead a discussion in Greensboro on March 31st. Other sites will be in California, Iowa, Michigan and Vermont, Rob Christensen reports.

The announcement came on the day that President Obama held a health summit in Washington.

Details of the event will be announced later.

If John Edwards' sex scandal had broken in January rather than in August, who would have Edwards’ absence helped?

Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's campaign director, claimed that with Edwards out of the race, she might have carried the Iowa caucuses, instead of finishing third, Rob Christensen reports.

Highly unlikely, said David Redlawsk, the director of the Hawkeye Poll.

When Iowa Edwards supporters were asked who their second choice might have been if Edwards was not viable, 51 percent Barack Obama and 32 percent said Clinton.

"Monday's claim from Howard Wolfson that two-thirds of Edwards supporters would have supported Clinton is just not supported in the data collected directly from those who actually participated in the caucuses," Redlawsk said. "Had Edwards not been running, and if nothing else had changed, my data suggest that Obama would have ended up even further ahead of Clinton than he was."

John Edwards will not endorse another candidate today.

At his concession speech in New Orleans today, the Democratic presidential candidate will not urge his supporters to back either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, Barb Barrett reports.

Instead, he will talk about his signature cause of fighting against poverty. His wife, Elizabeth, and his children plan to accompany him at the speech. He'll then go to work on houses being constructed by Habitat for Humanity. 

After his loss in Iowa, Edwards ran hard against Clinton, taking shots at her during a debate and siding with Obama as a candidate for change. At one point, his campaign sent out a press release declaring the era of the Clintons over.

He had also cricitized Obama for being too willing to negotiate with lobbyists, but not to the same extent.

Edwards has not ruled out endorsing another candidate in the future.

Richard Reeves thinks John Edwards' response to the Iowa results was out of touch.

The syndicated columnist writes that he doesn't understand Edwards' line after coming in second place: "The status quo lost and change won. We saw two candidates who thought their money made them inevitable."

Writing from Paris, Reeves says that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd were the "status quo," but he wonders how Barack Obama fits in the equation:

If Edwards thinks Obama, the half-Kenyan guy who just got to Washington three years ago and spoke out passionately against the toy soldier senators marching as to war, is part of the status quo, then the very rich former senator from North Carolina is totally out of touch with Iowa and North Carolina, too.

Reeves writes that Obama is "not your father’s America, unless your father came from Kenya."

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr is campaigning for John McCain in New Hampshire.

After speaking to about 750 people at two Iowa caucuses and working the phones, the North Carolina senator is now spreading his "firsthand knowledge" in the Granite State, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Burr says he hopes that his experience in the Senate with McCain gives his endorsement some weight:

"That's why I committed and committed very early," he said. "Most members of Congress look at it and see a down side (to endorsing.) That's a judgment call everyone has to make.

"I feel strongly enough that John McCain should be president that I'm willing to go out here and invest my time."

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole does not plan to endorse in the primary. 

On "Hardball" today, Elizabeth Edwards took aim at the media.

Host Chris Matthews began to talk about John Edwards' second-place in Iowa, comparing it to the results in 2004, when John Kerry took first place.

Edwards interrupted. Why was he beginning the discussion with that, she asked? "We lead with the winners," Matthews replied.

EDWARDS: But I—you know, but—and that happened to us, too, in terms of John Kerry getting a lot of press. The other thing, of course, we had the "Dean scream" in '04, which sort of made second place, which John had—not mean as much because you all covered that, as opposed to the second-place finish. Now, of course, you're covering Hillary's third-place finish instead of John's second-place finish. So we're still fighting against you guys.

Hat Tip: Andy Bechtel