Early voting
Early voting in Tennessee continues through Tuesday, Feb. 23, at the Hamilton County Election Commission, Brainerd Recreation Center, Eastwood Church and North River Civic Center.
In the Tennessee Republican presidential primary on March 1, your vote will matter even more than you think.
If you're a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz supporter, your vote will help cement the relative strength polls say they already have following the Super Tuesday, or SEC, primary on that day.
If you're a fan of any other guy - which now can be said since Carly Fiorina has left the race - your vote won't count for much unless he gets 20 percent of the vote. That's the way Tennessee and several other states which will hold primaries on that day have structured their delegate process.
So, let's say Trump and Cruz get 30 and 22 percent of the vote in the Volunteer State, respectively. Then it breaks down to 19 percent for Marco Rubio, 12 percent for Jeb Bush, 10 percent for Ben Carson, 3 percent for John Kasich and 4 percent for the rest of the candidates put together. After all, 14 names still appear on the presidential preference primary ballot, though Chris Christie, Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum all have ended their campaigns.
Since only Trump and Cruz reached the 20 percent threshold, they'll get almost all of the delegates, not a number that equates the percentage of votes they collect. Rubio, Bush and the rest are effectively shut out.
The exception is if one of the other candidates reaches 20 percent in a specific congressional district and is one of the top two vote-getters there. Although he is not one of the top two finishers in the state, he would earn a delegate or two for his top-two district finish.
The 20-percent threshold is the same for Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Vermont, all of which hold primaries on Super Tuesday and together with Tennessee award 57 percent of the delegates to be earned that day.
Arkansas and Oklahoma, also balloting on March 1, have a 15-percent threshold, making it a little easier for the non-Trump and Cruz candidates to pick up delegates.
However, if Rubio, currently the leading candidate behind Trump and Cruz, is shut out in the high-threshold states, he would have to win about 70 percent of the delegates the rest of the way to secure the nomination, a New York Times article suggests.
It's doable due to the party's delegate rules and because the road gets less friendly for the far right candidates, the article suggests, but it's difficult nonetheless.
Rubio and the other candidates will have better shots in Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Virginia, which also vote on Super Tuesday but have thresholds of 13 percent or less, or have no threshold at all.
That offers a dilemma especially to the non-Trump or Cruz candidates, who must choose how to best allocate their resources for the March 1 vote.
Do they, for instance, go all out and try to place first in states less conservative than ones in the South or do they work the Southern states in an effort to reach the 20 percent threshold?
At this stage of the game, political donors want to see results or their money dries up, which makes it difficult to soldier on.
In the meantime, the South Carolina primary is Saturday. Unlike in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, where at least five candidates earned delegates, the Palmetto State is a modified winner-take-all primary. The winner is likely to come out of it with 38 to 50 of the 50 delegates available. And the 50 delegates available are about what Iowa and New Hampshire combined offered the candidates.
Trump is well ahead there, as he is in polls ahead of the Nevada caucus on Tuesday (where delegates with at least 3.3 percent of the vote are awarded proportionally) and in polls of most Southern states which hold primaries. But the further into primary season the candidates who aren't Trump or Cruz go without coalescing around one of them, the less chance there is of any of those candidates being around at the end.
Even after Super Tuesday, it will be mathematically possible for a contender other than Trump and Cruz to win the nomination outright. But then the clock begins to tick. Four caucuses or primaries are March 5, four more on March 8 and six more on March 15.
If there is no third alternative by then, even a brokered convention, where no one has a majority of delegates to win the nomination, looks far-fetched.
So, the choice is in voters' hands. If Tennesseans want Trump or Cruz, they have little to think about other than casting their ballot. If they want someone else, they need to consider carefully who the best alternative would be - and if he could win in November - because a widely divided electorate on March 1 is the same as another vote for Trump or Cruz.