The lesson from yesterday's elections

Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle in 2010. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012. And now, Ken Cuccinelli. All have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Every one of these lost to a Democrat, in an election that the Republicans could have won with a better candidate. And yet, I wonder whether the extremists of the Right have learned the lesson: A less-than-pure conservative can win (see Chris Christie) where a perfect, give-no-quarter conservative will not.

Virginia's gubernatorial election was an even sadder story than most. Ken Cuccinelli lost by only around 56,000 votes (Note: In my original post I said 30,000 votes, but later results call for a correction), out of about 2 million cast. It is almost certain that a more moderate candidate would have won. After all, even the outgoing Republican lieutenant governor, Bill Bolling, refused to endorse Cuccinelli — and some believe he actually supported Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat who will be Virginia's next governor. When your candidate for governor is opposed by one of your own top state officers, that is a sign you've done something wrong.

Meanwhile, Gov. Christie was re-elected with a fraction of the vote that appears to have topped 60%. Several Democratic office holders openly supported him. You can't implement your programs without being elected to office, and while Christie may not be as conservative as some Tea Party types might like, he will definitely be more conservative than anyone the Democrats might put up. Supporters of other GOP hopefuls ought to realize this.

New Jersey is a liberal state. In the same election, yesterday, they passed a liberal referendum question on the minimum wage. Yet Christie got more than 3 votes for every 2 that went to his Democratic opponent — a proportion of the vote that hasn't been reached by a Republican statewide candidate in New Jersey since the 1980s. It is clear that New Jersey's citizens appreciate his first term as governor. He probably will not get 60+% of the New Jersey vote in a presidential race in 2016, but he can carry some states that no other Republican is likely to. And carrying states means winning electoral votes. And electoral votes are what you need to win the Presidency.

Can we do something to advance the moderate cause? Yes!

Regular readers of this blog know that I generally take positions that can basically be described as right-of-center, and many of my posts have been in advocacy of moderate Republican candidates. But I think that the cause I am about to put forth in this post is one that moderates of both parties and independent centrists should embrace, however we might differ on individual candidates. The thing is: we need to change the way we elect people to office.


The system we use for nearly all elections is called plurality. You can vote for only one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins. If there are three acceptable candidates, you need to pick one, and if some of your allies pick a different one, the vote for the good candidates is split, so that a candidate that you really don’t want gets elected. Because of the results of such a split, we need primary elections to pick one candidate of each party, and it is in these primaries that moderates are getting crushed by extremists of both the left (in the Democratic party) and the right (in the Republican party).


We have seen this over and over. Arlen Specter, who had served with distinction in the Senate as a moderate Republican representing the state of Pennsylvania for many years, figured he could not win a Republican primary – the last time he had run, he came perilously close to defeat at the hands of Pat Toomey, who was going to run in the primary again. So he switched to the Democratic party, where he thought his chances might be better. That did not help; he was beaten by a left-wing Democrat, Joseph Sestak, in that party’s primary. Polls showed that Specter might have won an election in which all Pennsylvanians could vote, but at the primary level, Toomey would beat him among Republicans and Sestak among Democrats. So the Senate was deprived of a voice for moderation.


Last year, at least two Democrats, Chris Coons in Delaware and Harry Reid in Nevada, were elected although the polls showed that both could be defeated if the Republicans had put forth moderate candidates. And there were available candidates: Mike Castle in Delaware, a very popular member of the House of Representatives, who had had to run statewide since Delaware had only one Representative, and Sue Lowden in Nevada, a State Senator and former state Republican chairwoman. But Tea Party extremists in the Republican primaries forced the nomination of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, both of whom were guilty of such political gaffes as to make them objects of ridicule by the time of the November election.


Some have said that the solution to this is opening up primaries to voters who are not members of the party in question. But that would be a case where the cure might be worse than the disease. Democrats might vote in a Republican primary to pick the candidate who would most easily lose to a Democrat. So a better solution is needed. And that is to have a better voting system. There are two broad types of solution. One is to have proportional representation, where a party that gets 25% of the votes in an election gets 25% of the seats in the body being elected. This is, of course, not possible in an election for an office like a mayor, governor, or president, so for such offices it is necessary to have a system where vote splitting cannot hurt a candidate as it does in plurality voting.


Some people say that proportional representation leads to instability, because it leads the way to the representation of lots of third parties that cannot form majorities; it has in such cases as France and Italy shortly after World War II and Israel more recently. But there are ways of setting up proportional representation that do not lead to this instability; in Germany and, in recent years, New Zealand, a system has been adopted that works and allows third parties to exist without the unstable governments that were seen in those other countries.


But as stated before, there are offices like mayor, governor, or president, which cannot be divided proportionally. So single winner methods need to be devised where a voter can vote his conscience without worrying that splitting the vote would elect his worst choice. There are systems that will do this. A site, which I created, that compares voting systems is available at http://important-information.net78.net/vote/. There is an excellent book by William Poundstone called Gaming the Vote, which also discusses this problem. And Poundstone, as well as I, has concluded that the best system to use is one called “range” or “score” voting, in which you rate all the candidates, so you can (in one version) give a 10 to the candidate(s) you like best, a 1 to the one(s) you like least, and intermediate values to others. So conservatives might give 10s to the most conservative candidates, 1s to the most liberal, and 4s, 5s, or 6s to moderates. Liberals would do the reverse, and moderates might give 1s to the extremists and 9s and 10s to moderate candidates. You would not need primaries, because if there were five Republicans in an election, they would not split the Republican vote, but Republicans could give high ratings to all of them. And the winning candidates would be the ones who got the most support all along the spectrum, leading to many more moderate victories.


An alternative system, known as Instant Runoff Voting, has been proposed by a group known as FairVote. It is essentially the system that has been used in Australia for many years, and proponents of this system have actually gotten it adopted in places like San Francisco; Aspen, Colorado; and Burlington, Vermont. In a few of those places, it was adopted, and has since been rejected, because it can lead to such bizarre results as in the Burlington, Vt. mayoralty election of 2009, where the candidate who might have been a good compromise, receiving support from nearly all the voters, was actually eliminated in the course of the counting, because he was the first choice of comparatively few. In such an election, some candidates who might be the most acceptable to the voters at large get eliminated, and usually the result is as much polarization between extreme candidates as the worst cases we have seen in plurality voting, so moderates, particularly, should resist the propaganda for instant-runoff voting.


You can read more about range/score voting at http://rangevoting.org – a very useful site.

Don't kill the elephant!

A Rasmussen poll shows that Scott Brown is hugely popular in Massachusetts. But Olympia Snowe might lose a Republican primary, although she would win as an Independent next year in Maine. Of course, Lisa Murkowski had that very scenario in Alaska last year. The nomination of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada last year gave those two Senate seats to the Democrats; polls showed that in both cases, a moderate Republican could have won. It would seem that conservative ideological purists are willing to sacrifice the Republican Party rather than defeat Democrats. Somehow this needs to be stopped.

It is eminently obvious that the way for the Republicans to win elections is to run moderate candidates, not ideological purist extremists. So don't let them kill the elephant!

Scott Brown and the Tea Party

I recently saw a posting on another blog (The FrumForum, a very nice blog which often has posts with which I agree) entitled: "Scott Brown Frustrates Tea Party." (This post apparenmtly comes from another source, "The Boston Globe" blog.) And it points out that Senator Brown, in his moderation, is frustrating Tea Party extremists, who may put up a primary opponent in two years when he has to run for a full six-year term. Apparently the Tea Partiers haven't learned their lesson. Harry Reid and Chris Coons are going to be sitting in the Senate at next month's swearing-in because Tea Partiers defeated Sue Lowden and Mike Castle with Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell in the primaries. If only they would understand that "Half a loaf is better than none."

Postmortems - Part 1 (Florida/Alaska/Delaware/Nevada)

Last Tuesday's elections showed a lot of different things. But the most important is that every State is different.

In Florida, the "Tea Party" candidate, Marco Rubio, succeeded in gaining the support of the entire Republican electorate. While I might have liked to see a better showing by Charlie Crist, he made a serious mistake. He let himself be painted "blue" (i. e. a secret Democrat). First, when some people were saying he might join the Democratic caucus if he were elected to the Senate, he refused to come out and say he was a Republican who would never support the Democratic leadership (i. e. Harry Reid et al), which lost him voters who wanted to express their hatred for the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda. Second, when such as Bill Clinton worked to get Kendrick Meek to withdraw so that the Democrats could unite to defeat Rubio, Crist accepted this role without saying anything that might have inspired Republicans to stay with him. This made Crist seem to be a Democrat while Rubio managed to unite all the Republicans, even those who had originally supported Crist. So Crist and Meek split the Democratic vote, instead of Crist taking both the moderates among the Republicans and those among the Democrats, which would have been the way to win. Too bad. But at least the winner in this scenario was a Republican, though further to the right than I'd like. Better this result than what happened in Delaware and Nevada, about which I will say more later in this post.

Alaska was a bit like Florida, but here the "Tea Party" candidate, Joe Miller, did not reach out to mainstream Republicans, who rallied behind Lisa Murkowski. So even though Alaskans had a harder job — Murkowski's name had to be written in — they seem to have done so. The write-in votes have to be examined to see how many of them are for Murkowski, but most people think she will become the second person in United States history to win a Senate seat on a write-in vote. If she does so, I congratulate her. It was a hard job, but it looks as though she did it!

The other two States I'm discussing in this post had much more unfortunate results. In both Delaware and Nevada, the "Tea Party" candidates were relatively unqualified people who made outrageous statements that drove even anti-Obama voters into the camps of their Democratic opponents. As disliked as Harry Reid was in Nevada, people voted for him over Sharron Angle, and in Delaware, Christine O'Donnell was so ridiculous in some of her statements that even Chris Coons' admission of having been a "bearded Marxist" did not prevent his beating O'Donnell. (And more to the point, Mike Castle, who was the loser in the GOP primary to O'Donnell, probably could have beaten Coons, according to all polls.) Obviously, if a "Tea Party" candidate like Marco Rubio (or Pat Toomey, to be discussed in another post) could run a sufficiently mainstream campaign to win, it is pretty clear that one cannot paint all the "Tea Party" candidates the same color. Some were plausible candidates, but others, like Angle and O'Donnell, were not. Too bad. Imagine if Sue Lowden had won in Nevada and Mike Castle in Delaware. The GOP would have been closer to tying the Senate. I just wish...

Mixed emotions

The results of Tuesday's elections leave me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, Nancy Pelosi gets to hand her gavel over to John Boehner, which is absolutely great, and the Republicans gained a significant number of seats in the Senate (though not a majority, but nobody really expected that) and a bunch of Governorships as well. These are the positives. But it seems that none of the specific elections I really cared about went right, except perhaps in Alaska where the results are not too clear yet.

In the State I live in, Maryland, it seems that Martin O'Malley won by a rather big margin over Bob Ehrlich. Certainly this was not a big surprise, but Ehrlich seemed to have a real chance, and so this result was a major disappointment. In California, there was an even bigger disappointment: both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina seemed to have good chances to win, but neither one could pull it off. And in my original home state of New York, only one of the third party candidates got the 50,000 votes needed to keep his party on the ballot, and that was the Green Party candidate, the one I liked least. (The Libertarian, Warren Redlich, came very close: nearly 45,000, but close is not enough to do it. And the other third party candidates got no more that 20,000-30,000 each.)

Florida is another state I was looking at. That one was not too bad — I was very pleased to see the Democrat, Kendrick Meek, finish third! And while I would have preferred Charlie Crist to the actual winner, Marco Rubio, I think Rubio would be a reasonably good choice from what I've seen.

The worst of the results this Tuesday was in Nevada. I really thought that Harry Reid could be defeated. But this was not to be. Apparently, by nominating Sharron Angle, just like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, The Tea Partiers threw away a good chance to help throw the Democratic rascals out!

How to Vote in 2010

It's four weeks until Election Day, but because some states have early voting, it may be useful to mention these recommendations this early.

There are thirty-something states with elections for the United States Senate this year. With various degrees of enthusiasm, in all but two I hope that readers of this blog will vote for the Republican candidate, as a rebuff to the Harry Reid leadership if for nothing else. (Hopefully, Reid will himself be retired by this year's vote, but I hardly expect Chuck Schumer's leadership to be any different.) In some cases, such as Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, and even Eric Wargotz in my own state of Maryland, there is not much enthusiasm on my part, because the Republicans are rather badly flawed, and there could have been better candidates chosen in the primaries, but defeating the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda is first on the priorities. In other states, there are candidates about whom I am truly enthusiastic, such as Carly Fiorina in California. But in every case (except two, as I said), the Republican candidate is to be preferred.

The two exceptions are at opposite corners of the country: Florida and Alaska. In both cases there are Republicans who lost their party's nomination, but chose to run as independents, who are better than the official nominees, and who actually stand a chance to win. Unlike the usual situation, where voting for an independent would simply help elect the major-party candidate further from the preferred one, in both states the Democrat is probably going to finish third, behind both the official Republican candidate and the independent. And both Charlie Crist and Lisa Murkowski deserve support. I hope people in those states who like this blog will vote for them.

In the House of Representatives, the situation is somewhat similar. Obviously, in 434 of the 435 districts the name of Nancy Pelosi will not be on the ballot. But in a sense a vote for any Democrat is a vote for her, and helps the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda. So, in 434 districts (the one exception will be mentioned in a moment!) I hope the vote of anyone who reads and likes this blog will be cast, when possible, for the Republican. (In some of them, I'm sure, this will not be possible because the Republicans will not have a candidate, but I'm not sure which, or even how many, districts they are.)

Now that one exception: If you happen to live in the Sixth District of Virginia and read this post, I hope you will consider voting for Jeff Vanke, the Modern Whig Party's candidate. Though he is running against a Republican, the more votes Vanke gets, even if he does not win, the more there will be a sign of popular desire for some moderation in the two parties' combative attitudes. I do not expect Vanke to win (though I would not be unhappy if he did!) but I hope he gets a respectable vote total.

There are gubernatorial elections in a lot of states. I don't know much about most of the candidates, but I do heartily endorse Bob Ehrlich in Maryland, who was an excellent Governor when he was in office from 2003 to 2007, and I certainly hope that Californians will elect Meg Whitman. (The difference in terminology is simply because I only "endorse" candidates in elections where I myself can vote.)

I hope that readers of this blog will vote for the candidates I have mentioned favorably in this post.

My take on the Tea Party movement

The Tea Party movement started out, it seems, as the sort of economic conservative movement that this blog would support: "TEA = Taxed Enough Already." But it has morphed into a monster. When it leads to disasters like Christine O'Donnell's defeat of Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary for the Senate (giving the seat away to the Democrats) and the somewhat less disastrous (because she still could win!) defeat of Sue Lowden by Sharron Angle in Nevada, the Tea Party movement has gone beyond the bounds of common sense.

In Maryland, we have been more fortunate. Despite Sarah Palin's endorsing Brian Murphy for Governor, common sense (and Bob Ehrlich) have prevailed. But when I look at the candidacies of Angle and O'Donnell, I wonder what is in store. We could have taken over both houses of the Congress and really set the Obama administration back. The House probably still will go GOP in November. But I'm afraid that the Tea Partiers may have given Barack Obama a gift: the Senate.

Arkansas and Nevada

Continuing the comments on Tuesday's primaries.

I usually do not comment on Democratic primaries, because I do not usually support Democrats and so I feel I should keep my nose out of their business, but I really have to remark on the result in Arkansas, where Senator Blanche Lincoln, though a Democrat, has defied the big leaders of Big Labor, and opposed the "card check" bill (which, in an irony of terminology worthy of George Orwell's "1984," they choose to call the "Employee Free Choice Act." In fact, it denies workers a free choice, opening them up to bullying by labor goons!)

But Arkansans rewarded Sen. Lincoln Tuesday with a renomination, though the Big Labor-endorsed candidate had forced her into a run-off. That is certainly good news.

In Nevada, the news was not so good. The candidate considered to have the best chance to beat Sen. Harry Reid in November, Sue Lowden, was unfortunately beaten by an extremist candidate named Sharron Angle. While Reid is so unpopular that Angle might yet beat him in November, his chances to remain in the Senate are a lot better than they would have been if Lowden had won. Here, it seems that ideological purity has unfortunately triumphed.