You have to understand the rules!

As I mentioned yesterday, the centrist blogger Solomon Kleinsmith is starting a new website called “Uniters.org,”. One of the things that I saw when I looked at that site Tuesday is a plug for the hopeless organization called Americans Elect, a group of centrists who are following in the footsteps of the Unity '08 group who tried to produce a centrist ticket for the last Presidential election. And the fact is, people who want to advance the centrist cause and try to do it in that way do not understand how our system works.

Over two hundred years ago, in 1800, Anthony Lispenard was a Presidential elector from New York State. In those days, the electors did not, as they do today, cast a differentiated vote for President and Vice-President. Instead they simply cast two votes, ostensibly for the Presidency; the candidate with the largest number, if it was at least a majority of the number of electors, got the Presidency, while the candidate with the second-largest number got the Vice-Presidency. So supporters of the Democratic-Republican ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr simply voted for both. In previous elections, and among the rival Federalist Party even in 1800, a small number of electors (even just one!) would vote for the party's Presidential candidate, but vote for someone else, who was not a real candidate, with their second vote, so as to assure that their Presidential candidate got more electoral votes than their Vice-Presidential candidate. (In 1796, however, too many Federalist electors did this, so that Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Presidency, outpolled the Federalists' Vice-Presidential candidate and became the Vice-President!)

Lispenard, in fact, preferred Aaron Burr, the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Vice-Presidency, to Thomas Jefferson, who was again the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Presidency, and tried to accomplish this by voting for Burr but not for Jefferson. But he didn't understand the system! He cast two votes for Burr. Now if he had voted for Burr and someone else as long as that someone else was not a New York State resident (the rules stated that an elector's two votes had to include one who was not a resident of his own State), Lispenard could have elected Burr President, with 73 votes to Jefferson's 72. Anthony Lispenard was one of the few people in history who could have, by one act, changed the course of history! But he didn't understand what he needed to do, and voted twice for Burr. Now this would not work. An elector could not vote for one person twice. And certainly if he was a resident of your own State, as Burr was in Lispenard's case, even if an elector could vote for one person twice, he could not vote for that person twice because one of the votes had to be for a candidate from a different State! So Lispenard's vote was changed to a vote for Jefferson and Burr, and he did not get his wish simply because he didn't realize how simply he could have assured Burr the Presidency!

What does this have to do with Americans Elect? Simply, in the system we have, which is Plurality Voting, any candidate other than the top two simply hurts the candidate who is closer to him. If a “centrist” candidate appeals to more Republicans than Democrats, he is likely to cause the Democrat to be elected. And if he appeals to more Democrats than Republicans, he is likely to cause the Republican to be elected. So unless he is truly dead center, which is pretty unlikely, he's going to have the effect that the people who voted for him will feel they've shot themselves in the foot. (Probably the reason that Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 was that more Republicans were impressed with Ross Perot than Democrats were.)

As I have previously said, the way to get centrists and moderates elected, which is what Uniters.org ostensibly wishes to accomplish, is to change the voting system, not start a quixotic third candidacy.

Unity '08: How *N*O*T* to build a center party!

In the posting on "Big Tent Revue" which I was talking about in my previous post, there was a reference by Rev. Sanders to the movement entitled "Unity '08." I remember that movement: they were going to try to build a ticket for the 2008 election which would take a Presidential candidate from one of the two major parties, and a Vice-Presidential candidate from the other of the two. This would in fact have been a blueprint for disaster. And in fact, we are seeing this happen this year in Massachusetts, where an independent ticket with a Democrat running for Governor and a Republican for Lieutenant Governor just broke up, with the Lieutenant Governorship candidate withdrawing and endorsing the Republican ticket.

The fact is that there is too big a separation between the Democrats and the Republicans who are currently in politics. Just about any Republican, no matter how moderate, is still closer to his fellow Republicans than to the most moderate Democrat. And just about any Democrat, no matter how moderate, is still closer to his fellow Democrats than to the most moderate Republican. (For the Republicans, perhaps I should have said "her" rather than "his": the most moderate Republicans in, say, the United States Senate would be the two Senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, now that Arlen Specter has crossed over to the Democrats.) In fact, this was demonstrated by the fact that Arlen Specter, who had been the most moderate Republican in the Senate, was not accepted by Pennsylvania Democrats as one of their own and went down to defeat in their primary. On the other side, do you think that Ben Nelson, who is probably the most moderate of the Democrats, will ever join the Republicans? I'm very sure not.

Perhaps the only pair of a Republican and a Democrat who might have been able to work together would have been John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, who are such close friends that their differences would have been able to be overcome. (In fact, there are stories that McCain wanted to put Lieberman on his ticket, but the idea was shot down by other Republicans.) But since the Republicans co-opted McCain in 2008, Unity '08 could not put up a McCain-Lieberman ticket.

No, the only way a group like Unity '08 could have put together the type of ticket they wanted to would be to nominate obscure people that nobody would have heard of, and this would not have drawn any votes. The only way that a centrist party could be created in a top-down manner would be for someone akin to Ross Perot, without close ties to either party but with enough money to advertise himself to the people, to be the nominee. And Perot was not interested in party building in his first campaign, while by the second, the bloom was off the rose; people didn't see Perot as presidential material any more. The other alternative, building from the bottom up, is one that the Libertarian Party has had some success with, electing a few state legislators and other local officers. If a centrist party were to go that route, they might have a chance, but I think our electoral system still makes it very difficult for any new party to succeed.

NOTE: Back in 2008, I'd thought that the post I made just after the election would be the last ever with a "2008 election" label. I guess I was wrong!