"The election of the President and Vice President of the United States is an indirect vote in which citizens cast ballots for a set of members of the U.S. Electoral College. These electors then cast direct votes for the President and Vice President. If both votes result in an absolute majority, the election is over. If a majority of electors do not vote for President, the House of Representatives chooses the President; if a majority of electors do not vote for Vice President, the Senate votes." wiki
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The 50 states run the popular elections that more or less guide the state governments in selecting members of the US Electoral College. This is a very indirect system of elections and IMO it reflects the distrust felt by the framers of the US Constitution for what they would have thought of as the "mob." Every four years there are arguments for amendment of the constitution to make the presidential and vice-presidential elections more direct. Such arguments never go anywhere.
If no candidate has a majority of electoral college votes the election goes to the congress to decide the outcome. In 1824 and 1876 the presidential election process arrived in the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams (1824) and Rutherford B Hayes. (1876) were then elected in a politically "bloody" process.
Could we end up with something like that again?
Consider a scenario in which Cruz wins the republication nomination, Trump then runs an independent campaign, HC gains the Democratic nomination and Bernie's Children's Crusade runs a massive country-wide write-in effort.
Could we be sure that one of these would be given enough electors by the states to have a majority in the real Electoral College election?
This could be a very, very interesting year. pl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election
Was just thinking of such a scenario! For Bernie’s “political revolution” to truly succeed, his ideals would have to be represented by a subsantial block of supporters being elected to congress. In a way, the scenario you just described could be the fastest path to the “PR” becoming a reality. My, my wouldn’t that be something!
Ave! True to Trump Caesar!
Very unlikely, especially for Sanders. I just don’t see him torpedoing Clinton like that (and he’d know exactly what it would mean). We heard the same thing in 2008, plenty of Clinton supporters said they wouldn’t vote for Obama – but they did.
I doubt Trump would do it either, very low chance of success for third parties. No third party candidate has received over 25% of the vote since Teddy Roosevelt. But if it does go to the House, say hello to President Cruz. Also say hello to Democrats using every trick the Republicans have used over the past 8 years to stymie any legislation or appointments.
Sir
If the polls in New York, California and the North East are accurate then Trump will likely get over the threshold of delegates. The question is will the Republican establishment try and steal the nomination in Cleveland?
I think the hurdle to get on all the state ballots as an independent is rather formidable and maybe time is already running out.
Sanders has to win NY to have any chance. Of course, swaying the super delegates who have all been bought by Hillary will be another challenge.
My personal nightmare is the Borg queen winning and then having to live with Bill & Hill back in the White House. The neocons and Wall St are going all in on her.
Which House of Representatives resolves the question. The current lame-duck one, or the just elected and not seated until January?
P.L.! Thanks for clarity of your post. And your question!
“Could we end up with something like that again?” IMO YES and almost foreordained by both the actions and numbers of Republican and Democratic candidates.
And also IMO the current House membership votes if it comes to that not the 115th Congress that takes office in January 2017!
And the Supreme Court might well have an even number of judges. It could get even more interesting.
Wow. Thank you for the article. That was peace of the election machine I wasn’t aware of. So in theory a Democrat could get 49% a Republican 1% and the Republican controlled House could make the Republican president. Of course if the House was asked to pick the next President they would choose to vote on repealing Obamacare instead so it isn’t that big of a worry. But wow what a messy system.
Out of curiosity do they have to pick from the candidates or could they put Jeb or Mitt in as president instead?
To my knowledge, if a name is “written in” on a ballot, it is perhaps noted but not counted as a casted vote. Am I wrong about that? Because if that is correct, then a massive write-in campaign for Sanders would merely have a passive default effect of those votes not being actually counted for anyone.
Whatever the Sanders people do, one hopes they vote downticket. Since Forced Free Trade Agreements are very important to me ( in terms of opposing and rejecting them), my downticket approach would be to for whichever downticket choices seemed most aggressively anti Forced Free Trade Agreements.
That means if an Economic Nationalist Democrat were running I would vote for that Democrat. If a Free Trade Borgocrat were running against a Free Trade Republican, I would vote some Third Party or other. If a Free Trade Borgocrat were running against a Tea Party anti-FreeTrade Economic Nationalist, I would vote for the Tea Partier.
If millions of Sanders supporters thought in terms of spending the next twenty years single-issue targetting their votes for the removal of Free Trade Borgocrats from office and then from the Democratic Party, they (we) might finally force the evolution of Congress in a direction where some kind of pale washed-out version of New Deal Revivalism becomes possible.
“This is a very indirect system of elections and IMO it reflects the distrust felt by the framers of the US Constitution for what they would have thought of as the “mob.””
Like the composition of the Senate, the Electoral College was devised to protect the institution of slavery. I believe that is the historical consensus.
Could the Congress settle on an outsider, not one of the candidates who had campaigned?
Bill Herschel
Whose historical consensus? People in the deep North? at the time in which the US Constitution was ratified very few whites cared anything about Black slavery including in the North where it was widely legal and practiced. Among Blacks the possibility of emancipation could then be hardly be imagined. the aristocrats who wrote the Constitution sought to avoid a democracy in which the masses might seize control and bring on something like the chaos of the French Revolution. As for the US Senate it is perfectly clear that the Great Compromise was necessary to the agreement of the smaller states to union with the larger. pl
cynic
I don’t know for sure but it seems to me that the House could elect any constitutionally qualified person. I do not want the job. pl
In response to W R Cummings, Brave New World and others:
Implicit in your comments is the assumptions that the House members vote individually, just as they do on legislation. This is not the case! Here is the pertinent text from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution:
“if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice.”
One state, one vote. Each state’s House delegation must negotiate among themselves for whom to their state’s vote. Thus citizens of small population states are over-represented in this process. California, with 3 million people it has this week as the same clout as Wyoming and its half million.
As I read a part of Article II, Section 1 that precedes the one I quoted in response to comments by W R Cummings and BraveNewWorld, the House can only choose one of the top five candidates who were contesting the office in the Electoral College.
The votes of the electors “appointed” in such Manner as the Legislature of Each State “may direct” were historically opened by joint session of Congress on the 2d Wed of Feb. After the passage of the XXth Amendment, which moved the start of congressional terms back to 3 Jan, Congress passed a law (48 Stat. 879) in 1934 which moved the date for opening the electoral votes to 6 Jan (after the new congress has convened). This was re-codified as Title 3 of the U.S.C. as Section 15 by an Act of 25 Jan 1948 (62 Stat. 672).
Note that in case of “no majority” the House, acting as states votes for Pres from the top 3 (26 state delegations needed to win) while the Senate votes for VP from just the top 2 (51 votes needed to win).
In 1876 the main battle was over the appointment of competing lists of electors (who gave different votes) and the question of the qualification of electors (no Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States). Due to a bargain that was made between the Republican Congress and Territorial Legislature of Colorado, the Congress agreed to admit Colorado as a state, provided that in the 1876 canvass, the legislature would appoint the electors which resulted in the 3 electors voting for Hayes. (It can also be noted that until Reconstruction, South Carolina’s legislature solely appointed its electors.) The wrangling in Congress over what the “correct” electoral college vote was would continue until 4 AM on 2 Mar. Hayes and Wheeler were certified elected by a majority vote of 185 to 184.
There have been claims of a bargain between congressional Republicans and southern Democrats that would allow the decision on electors to be made in favor of Hayes, in return for ending Reconstruction, but a careful examination of the decision timeline doesn’t support this theory. Certainly overtures were made on this basis though.
No. Top 3 for Pres, top 2 for VP.
I also note that the Progressive Movement, from the late 1880s wanted to reduce or eliminate the role or power of parties. States adopted the “Australian” ballot in the early 1890s, which give states control over who could appear on ballots, state control over the mechanics of distributing ballots, and “secret” voting. Then in the early 1900s they adopted popular “primaries” as a means of determining who party candidates would be, and the direct election of Senators.
All
OK. I stand corrected on the 3/2 thing but if it is thought necessary to change this arrangement of voting by state in the House for president or in the matter of the Great Compromise that gives each state two senators then IMO the states should be allowed to leave the Union if their agreed on rights are to be reduced. pl
No, the Colonel has it right. The framers distrusted the “common people” and devised both the electoral college and the senate to minimize their ability to directly affect government affairs (senators were originally selected by state legislatures, not direct vote of the citizens — that was changed in 1913 by ratification of the 17th Amendment to the US Constition).
The composition of the Senate itself was a result of the Great Compromise, which provided for a house granting equal representation to both small and large states. It had nothing to do with slavery.
The 3/5 Compromise allowed Southern states to count three of every five slaves as citizens in determining political representation in the House of Representatives. That was the main clause concerning slavery in the structure of the new federal government.
The issue of the importance of the Senate and slavery arose as the
northern population rapidly grew much larger than that of the South. Having lost power in the House of Representatives, the Southern states depended on maintaining a balance of free and slave states in the Senate and on vetoes by friendly Presidents to protect their interests in Washington DC.
In the Compromise of 1850 the Southern states foolishly gave up the Senate balance (by granting statehood to California) in return for an unenforcible Fugitive Slave Law. That’s why the election of 1860 precipitated the War for Southern Independence in 1861: Lincoln was a minority-elected president who was not friendly to the South and could not be relied up to protect Southern interests with a presidential veto. Southern states had no means left to protect their interests on national issues, of which slavery was the most important, but by no means the only one.
TreyN
Yup, and as I recall it was the northern states that wanted no representation based on the number of slaves. The southern states wanted them fully counted and the 3/5th was a compromise. Different subject – what happens if an election is held for president in the House and none of the three gets 26 state votes? pl
Not so, in the 1972 election Rodger MacBride, a Virginia electoral college elector cast his vote for John Hospers for President and Tony Nathan–a female–for Vice-President. Both of these were the Libertarian Party candidates for President and Vice-President.
You are correct about the compromise.
Good question, pl, and I don’t have a clue. My main interest in constitutional issues arises out their impact on the events leading up to “the late unpleasantness.” I’ll be interested to see how the constitutional scholars here answer that query.
As you know, I believe the Civil War was a mistake. At the end of the war, 50% of African-Americans in Richmond were emancipated. As the cities grew in importance slavery was dying. What was achieved with the Civil War, basically a history of institutionalized racism in the South (the Celtics refused to play in the South in the 50’s if their players were denied equal access to accommodation, etc.) was not worth 600,000 dead. Not close. This view is unbelievably controversial, but those who oppose it are entirely too cavalier with the lives of 100’s of thousands of young men. I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that the electoral college and the composition of the Senate are ridiculous from my point of view (institutionalized disenfranchisement in the “Greatest Democracy on Earth”), but I don’t really care what the historical precedent for it was.
One of the reasons why the Founders’ distrusted the ‘majority’ & that only white male property owners could vote is that before gov-funded public school education was established in the US circa mid-1800s,
marriage license records show that 50% of males & 60% of females in the US were so illiterate that they couldn’t even read nor write thier own name & just signed witn an ‘X’ –this legacy is why we still have an ‘X’ on the signature line of legal documents
Statistics also show in countries/regions that have no gov-funded public education such as some African nations & some rural regions of Afghan & Pakistan, the illiteracy rates are also about 60%-70% (this is also why Saudi-funded Wahhbism/madrasas can easily brainwash & indoctrinate jihadists because the illiterate population are taught revisionist history, false narratives
&
believes whatever the clerics/maddrasas say & can’t fact-check them from outside sources)
California has 37 Million plus people. I know that’s what I thought I wrote, but I must have inadvertently deleted it before I hit the “Post” icon.
I suggest the House would follow the 1876 precedent and negotiate some sort of deal before taking its formal vote. In that case there were 20 disputed electoral college seats and without taking them into consideration neither party had a majority. The Democrats acquiesced to the election of President Hayes in return for the Republican’s commitment to remove federal troops from the former confederate states. Among other things, this had the effect of enabling nearly a century of the Jim Crow regime in those states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
I think Bernie better channel Thomas Jackson…he has been winning small fights and kicking her saggy ass’d bottom in detail…why let up?! She has run to her favorite tree, a state called New York and on issues has been whupped hard…she is up in a tree hissing and spitting at The People and their voice…Get after Her Bernie!
Hank, Hillary Clinton is empty of soul and substance…Mr. Sanders is not…there sir is the difference in terms of ideas gaining traction
ex PFC Chuck
How long do you think military occupation should have continued? pl
jiujitsu
Yet another friend of the South heard from. pl
Bill Herschel
“At the end of the war, 50% of African-Americans in Richmond were emancipated.” I suppose you mean that a high percentage of Blacks in the cities were already free before the 13th Amendment. That is correct. IMO chattel slavery would have died out in the second half of the 19th Century as farm machinery made slaves a non-competitive source of labor for agri-business. you don’t have to feed, clothe, medicate and house machinery. pl
505th PIR –
I’ve never seen any evidence that “soul and substance” has anything to do with political success. The numbers are what they are.
A scenario having a third party spoil the electoral vote for the two major party candidates has been proposed. Paul Ryan could be President by winning a couple states and then getting elected by the House!
The VP would have to be chosen from the two major party VPs, however.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Mar04.html#item-6
Some old folkways linger a looong time. In 1980 I was in Monroe LA on a hot summer morning and saw a long line of blacks, including many women in sunbonnets, working their way across a field with hoes. If it wasn’t for the modern clothing, it looked like just like a gang chopping weeds in the cotton fields of the Old South. For a few moments I had the weird feeling of having passed thru some kind of time warp….
Primitive farming methods endured for a long time in the South because many farmers couldn’t afford to buy modern machinery. A large percentage of people working the land in the South for many decades after the war were sharecroppers. That system usually cruelly exploited poor farmers, both white and black, and kept them in perpetual debt. It was not much of a step above the conditions of actual slavery; the whippings and physical abuse were absent, but the owners of the land were no longer responsible to “feed, clothe, medicate and house” their field hands, who had to shift for themselves and get along as best they could on their own in hard times. It’s hard to even imagine today what those times were like, with no “government safety net” to fall back on.
@Bill Herschel
Totally agree. The totalitarian war machine of the North a progress for democracy and equal rights? Let us also not forget that the Appalachian hillbillies of the confederacy elected their own officers well into the civil war. Whereas the Northern forces where gang pressed from the very start.
The Republican nomination has been over for awhile, despite the best efforts of certain special interests and the media to create a drama. Even if Trump falls short of 1237 he can still do a deal with Kasich, good reason neither of those two attack each other and that Kasich refuses to drop out.
From what I understand, after Perot, the two political parties made it very hard for independents to get on the ballot. It is also too late now, Bloomberg had the start of March for his decision date.
The Hose could pick anyone IMO!
YES!
Thank you. What happens whilst the politicians are arguing; does the outgoing President continue as caretaker, or in the absence of the top two does the next in line of succession (Speaker of the House?) act as caretaker President?
Could a Vice President be chosen with deadlock over a President, so the VP assumes office as President and appoints his own Vice President?
Too bad but you are technically qualified! Is Bernie 75 already or just by the Election? Trump 70! HRC 70?
I knew someone whose distant relative had emigrated to the US during the Civil War. Like many, he joined the Union army in order to get a means of livelihood. Unusually, he deserted to the Confederates because he thought they were the better men.
You may be right in part. My understanding is many Constitutional schlars have concluded those receiving votes in the Electoral College are not the only elgibles because the House is free to ignore the Electoral College. Could be wrong as always!
But yes the vote is by State.
Perhaps wrong but IMO Bush v. Gore opened membership in the Electoral College to litigation. Whatever else that decision of SCOTUS accomplished it forever opened Presidential election issues to SCOTUS resolution.
The real test of the 19th Amendment could be this election IMO!
Industrial societies made much of the supposed moral and economic superiority of wage slavery over the chattel variety. Might the future see a new system combining both aspects spreading from the factories of China?
cynic
It has long been a point of contention between the partisans of North and South in the US that the actual living conditions of wage slaves in the North were sometimes worse than those of chattel slaves in the South. This is somewhat demonstrable in that the number of African-American slaves in the South rose steadily by natural increase in the period after the cessation of the importation of African slaves while continued importation of slaves into the West Indies was necessary to maintain numbers needed for forced labor. Nothing could of course compensate for the loss of liberty of action and forced submission to the whims of the owners of slaves, including Black owners. With regard to the desertion of an Englishman from the Union Army to the confederacy, this was not at all unusual. pl
By the way, MacBride was chosen as a Republican electoral college elector but, obviously, didn’t vote for Nixon. So yes, electoral college electors can vote for whom they please. They normally don’t, but as the MacBride example shows, it can happen
Hillary will win the Democratic nomination and Bernie will support her and so will many if not most of his followers. What choice do they have a wild haired verbally incoherent circus barker or a McCarthy look alike who thinks he is a prophet.
All
In Virginia write-in votes are counted. In the last mayoral election in Alexandria a councilwoman won the Democratic Party nomination, taking it away from a long serving mayor. He attempted to win the election by a write-in campaign and failed. pl
Am I right in thinking that, apart from a few fanatics like John Brown, no one thought that negro (or other) slaves should have political representation, but that counting them was a sort of proxy for measuring the relative power of the states and hence their due representation?
I think that Ted Cruz is being used as a spoiler by the Republican leadership to foil Trump’s nomination. After the first ballot Ted will find himself discarded and Ryan will ultimately end up being the nominee. Hillary will of course be the Democrat nominee which will alienate many of the young. They will probably spend election day home with their Nintendos.
What a mess this will be because both the fundamentalists and the angry middle class who support the Republican Party losers will be upset. Even if it’s too late to get on the ballots for a third party, will the anger of a majority of Americans produce a new party? The American Party? We can only hope.
cynic
Yes. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution the number of people believing in Black equality was quite small. As the decades subsequently passed that faction (the Abolitionists)grew very slowly. At the same time another faction arose, The Free Soilers, who sought to confine the institution of chattel slavery to the states in which it had existed at the time of ratification. Abraham Lincoln was of that faction, a Free Soil Whig. This is clearly to be seen in his pronouncements in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, most especially in the debate at Charleston, Illinois in which he gave a speech that can only be described as racist in his expressed view of Black inferiority in all things. The Southern states believed that the new territories in the West were the common patrimony of North and South and that the emerging institutions of law and government there should take that into account. pl
PL- this same is true for manufacturing labor in 20th century , machinery and robots have taken over.
Nancy K
” a wild haired verbally incoherent
circus barker”. As opposed to a
well coiffed leather suited hubristic
liar invade the world/ invite the
world self aggrandizer. Did I miss
anything?
kooshy
Yes, and that tends to confirm my belief that slavery would have died out as too expensive. And then, of course there would also have been the social pressure exerted upon the South from across the world to dump such an oppressive institution. pl
That’s a tough question, one which lends itself to speculations in the counter-factual history arena. Before responding, however, I must confess that I’ve not read much history specific to the reconstruction period and thus my knowledge of it may be misguided.
It’s my understanding that had Lincoln lived to serve out his second term the reconstruction policies put in place and implemented would very likely have been kinder and gentler than what in fact took place. His assassination less than a week after the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and the resultant succession to the office of a border state politician who was suspected of Southern sympathies, enabled the radical Republicans who controlled Congress to inflict their draconian and vindictive agenda on the states of the former Confederacy. This, exacerbated in considerable measure by the corruption the agenda and the specifics of its implementation enabled, led to the alienation of those states’ people instead of the reconciliation that Lincoln is believed to have envisioned.
Whether things would have turned out differently under Lincoln we’ll never know. In thinking this over in the process of writing this it’s apparent that by 1876 the military occupation was well past its sell-by date and that nothing positive would be accomplished if it remained in place. It’s also apparent that it was the reconstruction policies that killed any chance of reconciliation of southern whites to the fact that people of African descent were human and thus entitled to equality before the law. It was those policies that enabled the Jim Crow era, not their abrupt termination.
Today, Sunday, 10 April, on the Fox “News” Sunday program, there is to be a taped interview of president Obama by Chris Wallace. The preview says that Obama claims that Hillary Clinton has not jeopardized America’s national security but that there was some “carelessness” in the way she managed the e-mails. And, she did an “outstanding job” as secretary of state–
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/10/obama_clinton_didnt_intentionally_put_america_in_jeopardy_i_guarantee_no_political_influence_in_server_probe.html
When asked if there was going to be any political consideration in the criminal investigation about Hillary’s e-mails, he said, of course, that there was not going to be: “I guarantee it. I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case but in any case. Period,” Obama made clear.
Oh, really? Look at what happened to William Binney, Thomas Drake, and others, after they “did the right thing” and “went through channels” to report massive fraud at the National Security Agency. The FBI raided homes and Drake was falsely prosecuted. The patriot Binney knew enough details to prove malicious prosecution so they did not try to file a criminal charge against him. And CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was prosecuted. And whistleblowers. And the most obvious of all, zero prosecutions of any Wall Street person for any crime, not even a misdemeanor.
It is indeed pathetic to see a president say such a false thing with a straight face.
OT: “chuse” interesting. I could go back and check Holofernes and Costard’s argument in Love’s Labors Lost and/or the diverse spellings of choose in the Quarto and Folio edition. On the other hand I never seriously wanted to look into the more intrinsic debates around the Great Vowel Shift. 😉
The slave status issue was very complex, going beyond just the numbers in the House of Representatives; it also involved the issue of taxation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
As for the treatment of blacks in the antebellum north, they were generally treated like shit. This site gives a detailed, state-by-state breakdown of the laws and policies in each northern state:
http://slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm
There’s a saying I ran across many years ago that I still find a lot of truth in: the South despises blacks as a class but likes them as individuals, while the North likes them as a class but despises them as individuals.
I still remember how, during the 1960s, the good ladies of Boston were loudly agitating for forced busing to integrate the schools of the South. When the proposal was then made to have them set the example by busing to integrate their own defacto segregated schools, they were horrified, appalled and scandalized — and in firm opposition to the very idea. As far as the boundless hypocrisy of the do-gooder damnyankees, nothing has changed in 200+ years….
For the Radical Republicans and their ilk, it was to continue “until the South had been completely made over in the image of the North.” I can’t recall at the moment where I saw that quote, but the author of the book was spot on target with his analysis as far as the ambitious aims of the Reconstructionists (just take a minute and really think about what that term itself implies…).
Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer and The Cousins’ Wars by Kevin Phillips illustrate the very real, deep differences that existed between the people who settled the New England colonies and those who settled in the Southern. It goes far beyond the usual trope of Celtic vs Puritan, though that was indeed a factor.
And in spite of the best efforts of all the PC do-gooders the last few decades, thank God those differences still exist today.
Colonel, I’ve noticed lately that my replies to a particular comment are often ending up further down the queue (seemingly at random), where they lose their context and break the chain of conversation. Is this just a problem with the typepad format? Can anything be done to keep the replies in their proper place??
Agreed. I do believe they will vote more based on reason/self-interest than as a gender statement.
Yes, but PFC Chuck was talking about the House of Representative, not the Electoral College. The House can only choose from the top three vote-getters in the Electoral College. This is from the Twelfth Ammendment:
“The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
Bill,
If that had been true it would have been done away with along with slavery with the Northern victory in 1865.
Trey N,
“the boundless hypocrisy of the do-gooder damnyankees…” This is still in evident in Michigan politics to this day.
For some reason the comments ordering switched to reverse chronological order, is this is not intentional I would suggest Col Lang to switch it back.
LondonBob,
In this scenario, is the vision President Trump and Vice President Kasich for two terms and then President Kasich and Vice President whomever for two terms more after that?
Nancy K,
The wild haired verbally incoherent circus barker does not scare me in the same way that the Thousand-Year-Reign-Of-Biblical-Law Dominionist from HAAAH-vuhd scares me.
If the Rs nominate Wild Haired Circus Barker and the Ds nominate Corporate Global Plantationist Free Trade Conspirator, then I will feel free to at least look at the respective packs of thinking-brain dogs that the respective Candidates would bring to the office. If Mr. Barker’s thinking-brain dogs were no worse than Mrs. FreeTrade Conspirator’s thinking brain dogs, then I would feel entirely free to vote Third Party at the very least.
Whereas if the Rs nominate Mr. Thousand Years of Biblical Law Dominion and the Ds nominate Mrs. FreeTrade Conspirator, I will vote for Mrs. FreeTrade Conspirator.
Trey N,
I remember reading once how social activist comedian Dick Gregory phrased that. “Down South, they don’t care how close you get, so long as you don’t get too big. Up North, they don’t care how big you get, so long as you don’t get too close.”
jld,
Perhaps they only appear that way to us on our side of the system.
And the fact that comments now “show up” with a “waiting for moderation” advisory should cut down on the number of double posting attempts.
Agree!
Are we all in the que now?
Time on target?
In order to prevent “faithless electors” 29 states and the District of Columbia have statutes requiring their electors to vote for the winners of the primaries or caucuses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
To an outsider it looks like Trump would be at a high risk to be impeached given that the establishments of both parties detest him and he seems clueless about the limits of presidential power. If he were to pick someone like Kasich as a running mate and win then the likelihood of impeachment is even higher.
On the Republican ticket I’d estimate likelihood is 50% Trump, 30% Cruz and 20% on a splinter party.
On the Democratic ticket I’d estimate 70% Hillary and 30% Trump.
If you cross the six general election possibilities that result, I’d estimate there is an overall likelihood of Hillary final victory 70%, 15% Bernie and 15% Trump. This in my mind factors in even the FBI wildcard.
Pat Lang,
Don’t forget the boll weevil and the effect on cotton production.
WPFIII
I agree that this is the most likely scenario.
Kasich does fail the Nixon test, makes him open to assassination or impeachment. I expect Trump to get enough delegates and to pick his own man for VP.
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/04/09/current-polls-favor-a-trump-delegate-majority/
Nope
Jack,
If the Republican candidate was anyone not named Trump, the contest would already be over. The “best” hope the GOP establishment has now is to find a way to nominate Cruz, assuming Cruz can keep winning states. If they try to take the nomination away from both Trump and Cruz, they’re going to be in very big trouble.
The superdelegates will not go against the candidate who appears to be the choice of the primary voters and the better candidate for the general election. The gap between Obama and Clinton in 2008 was much closer than it is this year between Clinton and Sanders, but the superdelegates in the end put Obama over the top. Barring some catastrophe for Clinton, she is going to win. Sanders is considerably behind in both delegates and the popular vote, he has won mostly smaller caucus states, and after a series of gaffes he hasn’t demonstrated much superiority as a candidate.