Of all of the races yesterday, the most interesting for me was the Missouri Senate race. Senator Claire McCaskill was one of the least popular members of the Senate and a virtual guarantee for defeat until Rep. Todd Akin delivered victory from the jaws of defeat. Akin’s infamous rape remarks made him completely toxic to the entire nation and the GOP leadership quickly called for his withdrawal from the race. Akin treated the suggestion as absurd and allowed two deadlines to pass that would have allowed his party to repair the damage that he caused. At one time, politicians would put the interests of their party and their country before their own. However, we live in a different time and Akin is the face of the times: egotistical, selfish, and extremist. Linda MacMahon in Connecticut cut the same intensely egotistical image: spending $100 million of her own money in two unsuccessful efforts to make herself a Senator despite a fairly toxic personality and image associated with professional wrestling. Despite the sound defeat in the last election, MacMahon spent even more of her own money as the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment to secure a second defeat. The question for the GOP is whether the disaster this election will cause anyone in the party to consider the eradication of moderates in their party and the loss of what we once called “Rockefeller Republicans.”
In the end, Akin appears to have been unable to even break 40 percent of the vote.
Had Akin withdrawn, the GOP would have likely secured the seat in Missouri. Not only Akin but the entire Tea Party worked last night to the great benefit for the Democrats — alienating moderate voters and securing wins across the country.
Akin will be left to history as a sad clownish figure who refused to accept the obvious reality that his own comments and extremist views destroyed any chance for election. MacMahon will fill another footnote on the amount of money someone is willing to spend in pursuit of egotism. Notably, MacMahon never appeared to have any particular vision or idea or cause — she just wanted to be a Senator and thought she had the money to guarantee it like some choreographed WWF bout. They are not the only such figures in this election.
The question is how we end up with such caricatured candidates in national elections and the overall low quality of politicians in this country. I have long blamed the monopoly of the two major parties on our politics. I still hold that view. However, Akin also represents a sad cultural reality today. It is not just the loss of moderation in politics but a loss of a sense of personal integrity and responsibility. Akin immediately blamed others and refused to stand aside for the benefit of his state and party. He is for me the face of what is wrong with our politics: an anti-intellectual extremist who ultimately shows little sense of duty or calling beyond himself.
Source: USA Today
I’ve been following the IRV discussion here and I have to bend heavily toward the “there will be logistic and other problems on a national scale” side.
What about adopting part of the Parliamentary process use a vote of no confidence schema? There are many variations on this type of schema that could remedy some of what is being addressed by IRV, but like any solution it also would come with its own particular set of costs and technical issues in execution.
Tony,
IRV w/ current electoral college is still a winner-take-all and a waste except for making people feel better.
IRV w/ a proportional electoral college could work.
re: IRV w/o the ballots being retained. If my first choice pick is eliminated, how is it decided on the second choice pick on all ballots for that eliminated candidate? or is that not important? or are you assuming that all ballots come down to a Democrat or a Republican and you just add together all first choice and second choice ballots? I don’t see how the integrity of the choices is maintained with the spread sheet you describe.
TonyC,
Since you have defined “fiscal cliff” then my proposal: “Money to burn is the least of our problems. The FED and the internatiional markets dependence on us, assuming no Chinese revolt will keep us floating.”
Lousy sentence, but properly said means that the FED can continue print the money, lend it to us at a modest (?) percentage/discount, and if the chinese and the rest of
the world are either dependent or not revolting against the dollar, then we are still OK. Whew.
Some cannot discern the difference between last year’s “debt crisis” manufactured again to get Obama out of office and fiscal cliff, fiscal referring to the budgeting fiscal year. Who manufactured that buzzword, ie fiscal cliff? Republicans I presume. And how did it pop up so prominently in the news and fear cavalcade? Oh, it was pre-planned and lay in the post-election stockpile of the Repugs. Who launched it for the Repugs? Ryan? McConnel. Boehner who wants more Obama golf time. ?????
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new points
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I did not mention inflation, but reportedly the dollar has become cheaper, markedly—-must check that.
But also if there is notable inflation in the domestic economy. Can’t be that we have stagflation, or?
Times are tough, not exactly roaring with everybody buying new houses and cars.
You propose dialing back the military spending. Yes, nice.
But can we adjust and compensate. Don’t we need the national trillion dollar project with Mojave Desert photoelectrics power to keep us in jobs, provide ones to absorb those released from mil production and military jobs?
And let’s not start a useless one of putting man on Mars.
Meanwhile NSA, TSA, Homeland Security, the prison system plus much more alphabet soup are becoming employers of vast numbers of people. They are expanding enormously, I believe, and are sectors related to undesireable sections of our justice/civil rights which we would also like to see changes in, but again they are related to the jobs factor.
Getting us to force (as FDR asked for) the President and the Congress to make these changes. And we better start the 2014 Rep campaign now. Plus redouble all our other efforts. Very easyily done!
@Idealist: The reason there is no “fiscal cliff” is simple; the USA can borrow as much as it needs, ad infinitum, and print the money to pay it back. Next year’s budget isn’t that much different than this year’s budget.
Our tax rate on capital gains (income from stocks or investments) is 15% and could quadruple and solve not only the budget problem but many pathologies of the stock market, by providing incentive to stop flipping stocks and realizing gains.
There are a hundred ways to solve the budgetary problems, with judicious taxation. We could dial back the war spending.
We can easily afford what the super majority of citizens WANT, which includes a robust social safety net. The “fiscal cliff” is a fiction intended to alarm people into giving in to the private agenda of the top 0.1% of the wealthy in this country, and the corporations. Those people have bought both Democrats and Republicans, including Obama. They will pretend there is no choice but to cut big holes in the social safety net, because, they will say, we just cannot afford it.
That will be a lie perpetrated by BOTH Democrats and Republicans.
WE can afford it just fine, the politician’s “we” does not include US, it only includes those people that will never again NEED a social safety net, and the industrial rich for whom the social safety net hampers their ability to coerce the populace into compliant and submissive wage slaves, ever fearful of losing their job with nothing to catch them.
TonyC,
First thanks for the further lessons in your prognosis of reality.
That was my wish list. not Obama’s, not FEC, not his saving us from the fiscal cliff.
Fixcal cliff, must google it. Money to burn is the least of our problems. The FED and the internatiional markets dependence on us, assuming no Chinese revolt will keep us floating.
If we don’t have battleground states then what do we have as an alternative? And if we don’t have kids who know haw the world works then how can we have an informed electorate? And then what if not civics, civics is like a must to be granted citizenship. Both committment and knowledge.
As for touch-typing I learned at 14, but find the keys too far apart on std lapstops and lose contact with the home keys tod often due to the key spread.
@Bettykath: I understand Instant Runoff Voting, I have read analyses of it before. IRV could be useful within a State for the same reason it can be useful in a student election. By ranking the candidates you can vote for a third party or express your feeling for candidates as “anybody but this guy”, so third parties can get votes.
So it would still be useful in a state election that determines electoral votes; I could say “Libertarian, Green, Democrat, Republican” and if my Libertarian and Green candidates did not land, still vote Democratic. Right now I have to choose between my ideology and having my vote matter, IRV prevents that.
I still say the Electoral College is a hypocrisy in the equality of voting.
Second, IRV does not require the retention of all ballots. The algorithm can be run, with precisely the same outcome, by keeping track of a vector of vote totals for each candidate instead of a single vote total. The vector consists of the number of times voters ranked them first, second, third, fourth, etc, for however many slots their may be.
So you will see Obama got ranked first 40 million times, second 5 million, third 3 million, fourth 2 million, etc. If you have ten candidates, you need ten totals (or eleven; if the slot “no rank provided” is added; which is an IRV twist that accommodates voters that do not want their vote to count for a particular candidate no matter what).
The information be published on a single computer screen; and anybody that wanted to could run the IRV algorithm.
http://www.icivics.org/justice/sandra-day-oconnor-retired
http://www.icivics.org/news
Kids need both civics and typing.
@Idealist: None of that will happen. The Instant Runoff Vote is just another crack pipe dream, too; it takes a ninth grade reading comprehension level to understand the utility of it, and that is not something we can count on in America. It would demand a Constitutional Amendment, and the odds of that happening are zero.
Obama is going to pack the Supreme Court with moderate rightists; not leftists. Obama is going to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, it won’t be the Republicans. That is what all this BS about the “Fiscal Cliff” is leading us toward. There is no fiscal cliff to worry about, and we are going to veer away from that imaginary disaster and then Obama will claim credit for his Statesmanship in averting a fake crisis by doing what the greedy corporatists wanted all along: To stop paying for Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
The FEC is populated by politicians, it is essentially self-governance of psychopaths by psychopaths. Why would politicians pass laws that restrict their own sources of secret wealth?
If the Electoral College were eliminated, it would increase the difficulty of being elected. Look at this election: There were NINE battleground states to worry about. So all the contributions from 50 states were focused on those nine states; the calls were there, the ads were there, the candidates were THERE. They made token visits to other states early on, but the battle front was in those nine states, and Ohio. Brian Williams said at one point a few months ago his analytical staff thought the entire election hinged on just twelve counties in those states (but did not mention them).
It is good for the candidates if they do not have to campaign in 41 states, it lets them focus. Politicians do not want their party to have to campaign nationwide, which is what they would have to do if the Electoral College were abolished. The odds of that Constitutional Amendment happening are essentially zero.
Finally, I doubt civics will ever be a big deal in school again, just like Latin or Roman Numerals will not be. Parents that do not understand or care about politics enough to do more than toe their familial party line will not demand from the school board that their kids be taught civics.
I think parents dream of their kids growing up to be professionals of some stripe, be it sports, business, media, law, science, engineering, computer science, biology, medicine, whatever. They want them to have a job that takes a step up the ladder from their own step. I do not think civics is a step in that direction. Personally, I would rather my kid learn touch-typing in grade school (as I did in high school), it is increasingly one of the most critical life skills they can have, no matter what their profession.
Tony, First of all I understand the makeup of the electoral college and that, given the 2 extra votes for every state, there is an imbalance between the more populated states and the less populated. Right now we have a handful of swing states because it is winner take all in all states but two. If the electoral votes went proportionally according to the vote in each congressional district the differences between the popular vote and the electoral votes would be minimized but would not go away entirely.
The 50%+1 has to do with IRV and nothing to do with the electoral college. IRV allows each voter to vote for more than one person for office based on preference. Each vote initially goes to the first choice. If no candidate achieves 50%+1, the lowest vote getter is eliminated and that person’s votes are redistributed according to the second choice on the ballot.
Combining IRV and the electoral college proportionally distributed, the votes in each congressional district would follow the 50% +1 rule to determine which candidate got the electoral vote.
Eliminating the electoral college and using IRV it would require that all votes be retained until the final count. If the winner did not get 50%+1 then the lowest vote getter (that real nut from the boonies who managed to get on one ballot) would be eliminated and his/her votes redistributed to the second choice candidate. This process would be followed until one candidate had 50%+1 votes. I believe that this removes the responsibility of national elections from the state and moves it to the federal level but haven’t fully thought out the ramifications (which means I might change my mind). If so, some carefully thought out constitutional amendment is required.
I see no value at all in IRV with a winner take all electoral college.
Further, the electorate and those who administer the elections should get used to the idea of IRV by first using it, same rules for all users, in local then state elections. Currently, votes for senate and president are statewide elections, with the results of the presidential race being combined with the results of the rest of the states to determine a winner.
Missed all the fun this morning.
Let me say (to myself?) that it is a deep pleasure to see such bright minds as that of BettyKath’s and TonyC. holing the pencils and writing so grandly.
Having said the truth and greased them simultaneously, I will add an aber or two. (Aber=but in German, pop here)
The IRV abd the reform of the Electoral inequalities are indeed desireable. But closer lies other goals.
Like packing the Supreme Court so that they will take away the corporation citiczenship.
Like stopping the obvious violations of tax-free restrictions on campaign ads, and the creation of such tax-free orgs for ostensible purposes but in reality to finance campaign ads.
Like a stiffening of the FEC so as to force the Congress to stop being bought by campaign money. GeneH can explain, I can’t.
Like making civics AGAIN a major course in our schools.
If you are an civically ignorant citizen, then what good does algebra do you, and why learn American History?
Summary, one person=one vote + an informed electorate.
PS Thanks to Swarthmore Mom and Tex for doing what more should. Coutering the effect of attack ads by Republicans in Florida. Ther civil resoponsibility showed the way that Obama’s ground campaign beat the PAC and Koch ads.
http://i45.tinypic.com/4gpzkz.jpg (… will WP be fooled? :))
I meant February of 2009 on the public option; immediately after Obama took office the national support for the public option was 76%. It was propagandistic screaming fits in town halls that turned it into a partisan issue.
@Bron: I doubt that. I think a lot of Republicans are moderates that figured out Romney was lying. I know several middle class Republicans that believe in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The reason they ARE Republicans is because they were brought up Republican with a respect for religion, and still think the “conservatives” are the party of religion and fiscal responsibility. That is a delusion sustained by propaganda and lies.
But they were with the 76% that approved of a public option in February of 2008, the majority that approved of universal health care, and the 60%+ majority that still believe Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should not be touched in any way.
I think Romney’s assumption (and possibly yours) that Republicans want to end these programs is deeply flawed. Republicans are NOT the Aynish, they believe in social programs and community action supported by taxation.
For the middle class Republicans I know (some in my extended family) their problem is with religious issues like gay marriage and preventing government from promoting religious values (prayer in school, creationism, religious displays and celebrations in courts and public spaces) with tax dollars, their problem is with government supporting research they disagree with, their problem is a perceived massive waste of tax dollars and outright corruption by the government on projects they disagree with, and so on.
Less than 25% of the population, and probably half that, would actually vote for Paul Ryan’s plan if they understood what he really wants behind all the subterfuge and pretenses: The complete end of Social Security and Medicare.
Tony C, hear hear. We have the ability, the capacity, and the technology to go to plan popular vote for all federal elected officials. The fact that we have not done so is a disgrace.
@BettyKath: The electoral college is no longer necessary. The number of electoral votes a state gets is equal to the sum count of its House representatives and its two senators. That is why it is 538; 438 House representatives and 100 senators.
If you believe in the 50%+1 concept, then the “+1” part means you think every vote can be equally decisive; 50%+1 is an inherently egalitarian rule. The electoral college is NOT: At the extremes lie California and Wyoming.
California has a population of 37,691,912 and 55 electoral votes; or 1 per
685,307 people. Wyoming has a population of 568,158 (not even 1 electoral vote in CA) and 3 electoral votes, or 1 per 189,386 people. Which means a vote in Wyoming is weighted 3.61 times as much as a vote in California: Because every state gets two Senators and at least 1 Congressman, minimum.
If you are going to go to majority vote, you need to discard the inherently contradictory idea of an electoral college, which counts some “+1” more than others. In Wyoming, it doesn’t make a difference how you split them up, those votes should be counted equally to Californians, not 3.61 times as much.
apparently 3,000,000 republicans didnt vote because they thought Mitt was too liberal.
bettykath,
I am in favor of ending the electoral college and instant runoff voting. I think we need both.
raff,
I’m not sure where the IRV discussion is. Can we continue here?
There is more than the electoral college that has to go. The idea that the states “do” the election would also have to go. It would have to move to a national responsibility. Coincidentally, Rachel Maddow (or one of her guests) just made that suggestion.
IRV requires that the candidate that gets 50%+1 is the winner (of a single seat race). All ballots need to be tallied and if 50% +1 isn’t achieved, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and those ballots (and only those ballots) have their second choice candidate receive the vote. There are options on how to include or not various choices, e.g. someone’s second choice has already been eliminated; does the ballot get eliminated or does the third choice get the vote.
Considering that IRV isn’t well known, it might be a good idea to have more municipal, county, and, eventually state, elections move to IRV first. And for them all to use the same method for counting the votes. This will cause less confusion for everyone when IRV is used for all elections.
As one who has been the vote counter for various elections, it’s important to have the tallying rules known up front if one doesn’t want the tar and feather brigade to come after her. Best practice is for more than one person to count and to allow anyone who’s interested to watch. The counting options increase for multi-seat elections.
Another candidate instead of IRV is Condorcet. I’m not as well versed on Condorcet but when it last discussed I could see that it might be a fairer way to go. I think the balloting is the same but the counting is different. It’s been awhile so I’m not sure of this.
The first thing I’d like to see is the electoral college be proportional in all states, not just Maine and Nebraska (?). Electoral college votes go according to the vote in the congressional district with the last two going to the state-wide popular vote winner.
raff, oh, you want something from the entitled. lol (lots of luck)
bettykath,
They can have the titles as longas they pay their share of taxes.