California splitting electoral votes too?

August 1, 2007 – 7:57 am

This would be an earthquake. Huffington Post has the story:

A Republican-backed ballot proposal could split left-leaning California between the Democratic and GOP nominees, tilting the 2008 presidential election in favor of the Republicans.

California awards its cache of 55 electoral votes to the statewide winner in presidential elections _ the largest single prize in the nation. But a prominent Republican lawyer wants to put a proposal on the ballot that would award the statewide winner only two electoral votes.

Simply put, this would transfer 20 electors to the GOP candidate. (19 GOP congressmen, but Bush won 22 districts in 2004) What a clever idea. This is a brilliant rebuttal to the strategy that the Dems are using in North Carolina.  MyDD gives a rundown of the political consequences:

The difference here is that the California proposal is not going through the legislature as the North Carolina measure did, rather it has been filed for one of CA’s 2008 ballots (if it gets enough signatures) for approval by voters. Democrats control both houses of the legislature in California, so, as with so many issues, Republicans have no choice but to bypass the legislative process and go directly to the voters via a ballot measure system that is deeply flawed. The good news is that in recent years the public’s  default position on ballot measures has been "No;" the bad news is that if the measure does make the ballot, Democrats would be forced to spend millions of dollars to defeat it.

MyDD asserts that this is a Republican operation to "rig" the election, quoting from HuffPo:

Democratic consultant Chris Lehane called the plan "an effort to rig the system in order to fix the election."

"If this change is made, it will virtually guarantee that a Republican wins the White House in 2008," Lehane said in an e-mail.

Rules are rules. There is a reason that the state legislature is the most loathed institution in California.

Note that, depending on when it qualifies, this would be on either a Feburary or a June ballot, both closed primaries. If this qualifies, it might create a counter-incentive for the GOP to open up the primary, something that is opposed by the activist conservative base of the party, but strongly supported by its moderate donor base..

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North Carolina changes electoral college allocation

July 27, 2007 – 3:12 pm

This is a huge deal. North Carolina is changing the way that it allocates its electors in the electoral college.

So why does this matter? Because instead of the GOP almost certainly getting 15 electors, it will only get 9, with the other 6 going to the Dem, working off the congressional delegation allocation.

The Dems could probably do this in Arkansas and Louisiana too. Those are states that still have Southern Democrat majorities in the state legislatures and Democratic Governors.

Very, very clever.

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West Virginia moves up

June 13, 2007 – 9:13 am

I don’t know how I missed this last week, but I thought it interesting. West Virginia wants to move up. According to The Hill, they will be picking most of their delegates at a Feb. 5th convention. And the timing during the day matters:

The West Virginia GOP could announce its pick for president by 2:30 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 5, potentially giving that candidate a boost in states where polls close hours later.

I guess that they want to be in the cable shows as the votes are being cast in other states. Weird.

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Washinston State sets delegate selection rules

June 4, 2007 – 3:42 pm

Over the weekend, the Washington GOP set the process for delegate selection. This is interesting for its substance, but also because it is an example of how convoluted this process could get if we get to a contested convention. The summary of the rule is that the 37 delegates are allocated by:

  1. 10 Delegates Statewide based proportionally on statewide primary results, with a threshold of 20%
  2. 9 Delegates to the winner in each district.
  3. 18 Delegates (2 per CD) based on caucus only.

That is, there will be a caucus on some date that will allocate 18 of the delegates. Then there will be a separate primary that will allocate the remainder of the delegates in the way specified. Note that earlier, there was discussion of canceling the primary entirely.

Now process this. There will be two separate delegate selection processes.  How will they interact? Very complicated.

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Early voting impact on the calendar

May 22, 2007 – 10:38 am

The WSJ’s Chris Cooper makes a good point about early voting and its impact on the calendar:

But even before the official votes kick off in Iowa on Jan. 14, large numbers of voters around the country already will have cast their ballots, as major states encourage voting far in advance of election day.

Florida’s primary is now scheduled for Jan. 29, and about 20 states, including California, have moved theirs up to Feb. 5. Many of them also allow early voting weeks before their official balloting dates.

This early voting could dilute the traditional role played by Iowa and New Hampshire in providing early momentum for candidates — or dooming campaigns to failure.

However, if Iowa and New Hampshire are in December, which would not surprise me, the impact will be limited. In fact, it might provide a reason for South Carolina to move up, to increase its impact, which would further accelerate the movement by IA and NH.

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Rudy and winner-take-all primaries

May 11, 2007 – 10:47 am

Marc Ambinder has a great article on the New Jersey delegate selection process. The idea is pretty simple. There is a push to make New Jersey’s primary "winner-take-all," meaning that the candidate with the plurality gets all 52 delegates.

The point is that other states may go this route. Utah good assign its 19 delegetes overnight to Mitt Romney doing the same thing. Perhaps New York with its 70 or 80 could too?

One interesting leading indicator of performance might be states making decisions to go winner-take-all or proportional. If state party leadership doesn’t like their likely winner, they take away delegates by going to proportional. If they do like the likely winner, they give them delegates with winner-take-all.

This puts another spin on Rich Lowry’s recent statement on Rudy regarding Rudy’s strategy for handling abortion and social conservatives:

It seems to me—unless the changing primary schedules have utterly scrambled the typical dynamic of the Republican primaries—that this is a foolish strategic choice.

This is precisely the sort of change, and not just in the calendar, that could change dynamic. Especially with a large number of credible candidates, this is also how you get into a brokered convention.

Minneapolis could be a lot of fun, and I’m not referring to the parties.

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Will independents vote in California?

May 3, 2007 – 1:45 pm

Rules fights are fun, obscure, and usually well behind the scenes. Not the fight over whether independents (normal speak for California’s "Decline to State" or DTS) can vote in the GOP primary. They can in the Democrat’s primary.

For the most part, this fight is breaking down along ideological lines. Moderates want DTSers to vote. Conservatives do not. There was a forum earlier in the week in California about this issue. The Flash Report has details:

I will mercifully spare you the host of arguments made in support and opposition to such a suggestion, if only because it really boiled down to two fundamental considerations:  The practical reality that allowing DTS voters to participate would likely increase the number of votes cast in support of Republicans and, in contrast, the belief held by Fleischman, me and many others in the party that electoral gains are not a sufficient justification for diluting and, in limited exceptions, rejecting fundamental Republican principles.

The interesting question is going to be whether Presidential politics really enters into it.

The room for possible conflict is Rudy Giuliani. Rudy is a moderate who probably does better with DTSers voting. But a good chunk of his in-state infrastructure is from the conservative wing of the party which strongly opposes this change. If the campaign decides that they need DTSers, then will they try to put pressure on their delegates at the CRP convention?

There’s another way that this could play. There is jockeying among the moderates between Rudy and John McCain. Will this become a test of "moderateness" among the moderates?

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More on primary dates

March 27, 2007 – 1:44 pm

Regular readers will know that one of my favorite topics is the primary calendar. Fascinating things are afoot.

First, on Straight Talk Express, an experienced party hack told me that smart New Hampshire money is now on a December primary. As I have discussed before, New Hampshire and Bill Gardner are committed to preserving New Hampshire’s first in the nation primary. And they are fully prepared to interpret a Nevada caucus as in contradiction with that.

Second, in today’s Politico, the South Carolina state chair used similar language to protect their position:

“We will change our date as often as we have to to remain the first-in-the-South primary,” vowed state Republican Party chairman Katon Dawson.

“We have a proud eight-year history when it comes to selecting our nominee,” Dawson said. “We’re determined to protect it,” even if that means pushing the primary up to October.

Note that in South Carolina, scheduling and running the primary is a party perogative.

And third, in today’s Hill, there’s an article about the RNC’s credentials rules. The meat of the issue is:

The rules, which are supposed to be automatic, require that states lose either half or 90 percent of their delegates, including their three RNC representatives, if they do not hew to the RNC primary schedule. If a state waits especially long before declaring its primary date, a small state like New Hampshire could be left with fewer than five delegates.

The article goes on to note that the politics of this are such that delegations will likely be seated anyways because states moving up gives them power to demand promises from candidates:

“Every candidate will be asked: New Hampshire runs to the risk of a penalty because of when its primary is — will you pledge that if you’re the nominee, you will work to see that the entire New Hampshire delegation is seated?” said a New Hampshire Republican source. “My guess is they’re all going to say yes to that.”

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More crazy calendar stuff: WA and NV

March 22, 2007 – 5:16 pm

Hotline points out that the GOP Nevada caucus might move into the window.

At the same time, both parties in Washington are turning their primaries into beauty contests and selecting delegates in caucuses.

Expect more states to follow this pattern. If Feb 5th does not determine the nominations, then caucuses could determine the nominee. On the other hand, if the nominee is determined, these caucuses could turn into a fight over rules, platform, or something else. This is especially likely if the base does not trust the nominee.

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California open-primary, California politics, and John McCain

March 7, 2007 – 7:43 pm

Update: I have two additions, both from Jon Fleischman. First, Duf Sundheim denies in writing that he supports John McCain. Usually conservatives have trouble that anyone supports McCain. It is amusing that they insist on it here. Second, Fleischman, in his second post, gets a firm denial from the McCain campaign that they are pushing this. Ultimately, assuming that Fleischman is acting in good faith, this is merely the Romney guys pushing a story about McCain and conservatives swallowing it because they don’t like McCain. But what is really going on is just CA internal politics.

This morning, The Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow wrote about an effort, allegedly by John McCain, to open up the primary. I have some links to California, and I spent some time trying to sort this out.

One of Ralph’s two sources (the other was an unnamed Romney staffer), Jon Fleischman picked up on this story (in typical "plant a story, spread a story" mode, I suspect. Nothing wrong with that, I admire a professional). Jon had been thinking about this for a while, as he had written on it the week before. Jon is also the Southern Vice-Chair of the California GOP.

It is important to recognize that things in California politics are always more complicated than they seem. For starters, the California primary was moved up to help the legislators keep their jobs. They have put an initiative on the ballot remove term limits. The idea is that they end term limits and then file for the June primaries. There’s going to be another initiative on the ballot at the same time: non-partisan redistricting. Redistricting is very important to Governor Schwarzenegger. (at this point, I have to throw in a disclaimer. I worked on the 2005 redistricting initiative)

These are contradictory initiatives in the sense that one is about voting the legislators more power and the other is about reducing it. The entire California Democratic establishment will support removing term limits and oppose redistricting. And the Democrats have an open primary, so more people will be voting.

The thing is that we learned from the Times article is that Duf Sundheim, who, according to his own words, does not back McCain but is close to the Governor, is trying to open this up. Why? To get redistricting through for the governor and the donors, who are his source of power. I also suspect that the governor would like an open primary. I still contend that he could never have survived a primary and he knows that.

The upshot is that I don’t think that John McCain is behind this. He probably supports it. But this feels like the sort of thing that they do for California internal reasons. And I suspect that Fleischman (and the Romney campaign) is sticking this on McCain to make the fight easier where this fight must be won: the delegates to the September California Republican Party convention.

And, unless something changes dramatically, there just won’t be the votes at the CRP convention.

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