Tag Archives: Electoral College

national news, political news

Constitution silent about the nominating game

DENVER - AUGUST 26: Ohio delegate Peggy Tanksley displays her Democratic Party pride during day two of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the Pepsi Center August 26, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) will be officially be nominated as the Democratic candidate for U.S. president on the last day of the four-day convention. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

All this yammering and yapping about the delegate selection process has given the 2016 presidential campaign its unique feel.

Interesting, to say the very least.

So-called Republican frontrunner Donald J. Trump is getting wiped out by Sen. Ted Cruz in these caucus states, resulting in Trump griping about the selection process. He calls it “rigged” against him.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is wiping Hillary Rodham Clinton out in those caucuses, but can’t seem to make a serious dent in her delegate lead. She owes her lead at the moment to the “super delegates” who pledged to support her; these are the political heavy hitters who are free to declare their support for whomever they wish.

The U.S. Constitution doesn’t say a single word about the nominating process. This belongs to the parties exclusively. They make their own rules and force the candidates to play by them.

For that matter, the Constitution doesn’t even mention political parties. The founders wrote only in terms of governance.

We need not amend the Constitution to create a political party presidential selection system that everyone must follow.

How about, though, if the party bosses were to huddle along with selected members of their respective brain trusts to hammer out a uniform system that both parties could follow?

Is that so hard?

My first priority would be a way to apportion the delegate selection process for primaries and for caucuses that make sense for every state. Why not dole out the delegates in direct proportion to the votes they get in a primary election? But what the heck, perhaps the parties could follow the framework used in electing a president: Give the winning candidate all the delegates up for grabs in the primary state. If a candidate wins a state in the general election, he or she gets all the Electoral College votes in virtually every instance.

The caucuses also could be made uniform in those states that choose to select delegates in that fashion.

This whining and griping about delegate selection — which seems heightened this year by Trump — need not cloud the issue of the nominating process.

This is the most serious purely partisan political activity that occurs; I must add that it’s serious in spite of the picture of a 2008 Democratic convention delegate that accompanies this blog post. We do this only once every four years.

It seems we ought to be able to make these choices without quibbling and quarreling over whether the system is rigged.

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Daunting task: explaining U.S. politics to Europeans

GTY_hillary_clinton_donald_trump_split_jt_150912_16x9_992

Later this year — in late summer — my wife and I are going to face a daunting task.

We’re going to fly to Germany, where we’ll spend time visiting friends and touring the beautiful region of Bavaria. We plan as well to visit other friends in The Netherlands while we’re across The Pond.

OK, that’s not the daunting part. The challenge will occur in explaining the American political system to sophisticated western Europeans.

It’s not that I haven’t had similar challenges before.

In November 2000, we traveled to Greece. Voting in the U.S. presidential election had just concluded — but we didn’t yet have a new president. Vice President Al Gore had collected more votes than Texas Gov. George W. Bush, but the outcome had been thrown into a tizzy over those “hanging chads” in Florida.

Our Greek hosts — who also are quite sophisticated — kept peppering me with questions that centered on this idea: How is that one candidate can get more votes than the other guy but still not win?

That’s when I sought to explain the Electoral College system and how electoral votes are allocated based on which candidate wins a particular state. The bigger the state, the more electors they get. I tried to explain that the system has worked generally pretty well.

The Bush-Gore election and its immediate aftermath shot that idea all to hell.

This year, the presidential election is heading into a climactic phase as my wife and I are vacationing in Western Europe. I’m expecting our friends to introduce us to their friends as “visitors from America.”

I can see the eyebrows raising as they ask us about  “you know who.”

I also can anticipate the question: How in the world can a major American political party nominate someone like Donald J. Trump?

To be honest, I haven’t yet formulated my answer. Neither has my wife. We’re throwing up our hands in dismay at the prospect of this know-nothing narcissist accepting the Republican Party presidential nomination — against the expressed wishes of the GOP’s wise men — and then taking his campaign of innuendo and insults against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Both of us mounted valiant efforts in 2000 to explain our political system to the inquisitive Greeks.

This year, according to my wife, it’s hopeless.

“I think this time,” she said, “I’m going to say, ‘Yep, you’re right. We’ve messed up.'”

I’m thinking of following her lead.

 

national news, political news

Run, Mitt, run!

Peggy Noonan is a brilliant writer and solid conservative thinker.

However, she’s misinformed if she can predict that Mitt Romney would repeat the mistakes that doomed his 2012 presidential campaign in the event he chooses to run for president once again in 2016.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-do-it-mr-romney-1421367202

She implores Mitt not to run for the White House next year.

C’mon, Ms. Noonan. Give the guy a shot. Let’s see if he can correct those mistakes.

She writes in the Wall Street Journal: “He is yesterday, we need tomorrow. He is an example of what didn’t work, we have to turn the page. He is and always has been philosophically murky—it’s almost part of his charm—but it’s not what’s needed now. He ran a poor campaign in 2012 and will run a poor one in 2016. He was a gaffe machine — ‘47%’; “I have some great friends that are Nascar team owners” — and those gaffes played into the party’s brand problems.”

I’ve been saying for a few weeks now that Mitt needs to seek to redeem himself. Yes, he ran a shoddy campaign. He could have avoided those missteps and perhaps made a serious horse race of it against President Obama. It was reasonably close in the popular vote, but the president’s Electoral College win was quite decisive.

I’m not planning to vote for Mitt if he chooses to run again.

I’m simply rooting for his redemption. He’s smarter than he demonstrated on the 2012 campaign trail. I mean, he did rescue a floundering Olympic bid in Salt Lake City. And, oh yes, he authored a health care reform bill in Massachusetts that became a model for the federal program pushed through Congress by the man he sought to defeat; it’s just too bad he all but disavowed the Massachusetts plan as he sought to condemn the Affordable Care Act.

I know Mitt will be a long shot, what with the TEA party wing of the GOP grooming candidates to make their pitch.

Go for it, Mitt. Don’t listen to Peggy Noonan.

 

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Presidential election change at hand?

The passage of time tends to make me reflect on some long-held positions, reconsider them and possibly look for avenues of change.

That seems to be happening with my long-standing support of the Electoral College system of electing presidents. Momentum for a change seems to be building, according to The Hill newspaper.

Will popular vote elect president in 2020?

The Hill reports that 11 states have enacted legislation ending the winner-take-all provision for doling out electoral votes.

Proponents of the change say that the 2020 presidential election might be the first to pick a president that relies on the popular vote rather than the current method.

This is a huge deal. I’m still officially undecided on whether I want it to change, but I am ready to keep an open mind on it.

The Hill reports: “Criticism of the current Electoral College system stems from its ‘winner-take-all’ approach, which awards all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that particular state. Winner-take-all systems generally mean presidential candidates ignore the states they know will go red or blue and focus their campaign efforts on battleground states instead.”

If a candidate wins a state, he or she wins all of that state’s electoral votes. Texas boasts 38 such votes. It’s a big prize. However, given that the state is so reliably Republican, candidates in recent years rarely have ventured here to compete for our state’s electoral votes. They concentrate instead — almost exclusively — on the “swing states,” such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. As The Hill reports: “In the 2012 presidential election, for example, two-thirds of campaign funding went to four states: Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Aside from other events in handful of states, the majority of the country was ignored.”

I can recall a trip my wife and I made to Greece in November 2000. I was attending a series of meetings sponsored by the Greek press ministry. That year’s U.S. presidential election was not yet decided. Vice President Al Gore won more votes than Texas Gov. George W. Bush and the candidates were fighting over a recount of ballots in Florida. The winner of that battle would win the presidency.

The question kept coming at me from my Greek hosts, who are quite sophisticated about these matters, given that their country gave birth to democratic government as we’ve come to know it: How is it that someone can get more votes than the other guy and still lose an election? I had difficulty explaining how the Electoral College system works. Frankly, the more I tried to explain it, the less I began to believe in it.

Well, Bush won the battle with a razor-thin Supreme Court decision over Florida’s ballots and became president despite losing the popular vote.

Now the tide to fundamentally reform the presidential election process may be turning in favor of those who want to change it.

Something tells me this discussion is just now picking up steam.