Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

A reader comment posted to my previous post about a proposal in California to assign presidential electors to the winner of the popular vote in each of the state's congressional district raises some points worth discussing and I am going to address them here by reprinting the comment and responding to it.

The reader writes:

"Which means that Democrats fighting the proposal in California are fighting against a proposal to have Californians' votes more accurately represented in the election of the next president."

Um No.

It is called fighting changing the rules mid-game, something you seem to ignore (wink-wink) with willful ignorance: "Hey. Gotta start somewhere. If it just so happens that making this one change would swing an entire election to the Republicans, it's a small price to pay for democracy."

True, I don't mind that the proposed rules change in California would benefit the Republicans.

If you bother to go back and read what kos himself has posted on the issue, you will see a discussion about how this would be a good thing IF it were done everywhere across the board at once. If you care so much about the matter you should propose doing the same thing in say Ohio and Florida at the same time in order to avoid having the mid-game rule-change benefiting only one party.  But where is the benefit for Republicans in that.

Kos knows that it is cost-free to say he's for this change being made nationally while fighting it being done in states like California where it might hurt the Democrats' presidential chances. Here's why: You can't have a national solution - "done everyone across the board at once," as you put it - because decisions on electoral apportionment rules are, under the constitution, an authority reserved to the states.

We live in a federal system under a constitution that allows each state to decide the manner in which its electors are apportion. And in California their state laws allow for the method of apportioning electors to be determined by the people via a referendum.

While I actually prefer that all states would follow the by-district model - and, by the way, if electors had been assigned by congressional district nationwide in 2000, Bush's margin of victory in the electoral college would have been larger - I, unlike Kos, am in touch with reality: there's no way to make it happen everywhere all at once.

The commenter continues:

I can understand why you want to push this though.  It's really the only chance you have.  It's kinda sad really.

Question: Do you think the partisan Republicans trying to push this throuh are doing it to further some abstract sense of representative democracy?

If your ilk had any credibility on such an issue, that [the proposition] might have a chance. But as it stands most Americans see it for what it is: a desperate ploy for power by those who realize they have no chance at winning the election the old fashioned way. 

Most Americans probably aren't paying attention to what's happening in California, actually, and on the charge that I want to see California's proposed change become law because it will help my side, I plead guilty. Of course I'd be happy to see it pass. But the commenter, and Kos, want to see it not pass for precisely the same kind of partisan motivation.

 

As for the initial claim that the proposition seeks to change the rules "mid-game," that's an especially rich charge given that the Democratic Party sought to change the rules at the end of the game in Florida 2000, when they sought to have votes from two heavily Democratic districts counted under looser standards than votes from the rest of the state. And the standards they sought to use would have violated state law.

I would hardly call reforming California's elector apportionment law a year before the next presidential election changing the rules "mid-game." It only feels like mid-game because a bunch of Republican and Democratic candidates decided to start the 2008 campaign in late 2006, much, much earlier than presidential election campaigns have started, historically.

It's worth noting at this point, too, that Democrats in  North Carolina have also been trying to change to the by-congressional-district elector plan. There's partisanship on both sides. Republicans in California are pushing their proposal for partisan reasons; Kos is fighting it for partisan reasons, Democrats are fighting it for partisan reasons, Democrats will push similar proposals in Republican-leaning states for partisan reasons.

There's nothing wrong with that. We live in a multi-party democracy. "Partisanship" is part of the election process.

As for whether changing the rules in California is "really the only chance" that the GOP has to win the presidency in 2008, I would remind the commenter that the GOP won the presidency in 2000 and 2004 without winning a single electoral vote from California. And population growth in the Republican-leaning states in the South and Southwest has only strengthened the GOP's hand vis a vis the electoral college.

The Center for Voting and Democracy, which opposes the by-district plan, has a recent New York Times story on the issue, focusing on California.