It isn’t illegal to change how Electoral College delegates are allocated. If the Republicans want to change how Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin allocate their votes from winner-take-all to by congressional district, they are within their legal rights to do so. And it appears that they have plans afoot to do exactly that in at least some of those states. The Democrats cannot retaliate in kind, but I imagine that we will go ballistic. It’s a very desperate move that acknowledges openly that the GOP no longer believes that they can remain a conservative party and win the White House unless they change the rules. And they would rather stay conservative than adapt or evolve to meet changing circumstances. I predicted that the GOP would make this move back on December 4th.
It still is not certain that they will succeed in their plans. The Pennsylvania GOP wanted to change the rules for the 2012 election but discovered massive resistance in their own ranks. From my understanding, safe members didn’t want Obama campaigning in their districts. If you remember the competition between Obama and Hillary Clinton, you know that Team Obama is very good at competing on a district level. But changing the rules will benefit future Republican candidates in a massive way.
There will be a huge backlash if the GOP attempts this, but they must think they no longer have any choice. They don’t want to change, so they will change the rules instead.
Their gerrymandering has already given them the House of Representatives, probably for the rest of the decade, at almost no political cost despite getting a minority of the overall vote for US House candidates in 2012.
Now that they’ve seen they can play this game successfully with only temporary pushback (e.g., the mid-decade Texas debacle, whose results still stand), why not play a similar game at the presidential level? It’s not like the SCOTUS is going to stop any of this. It’s a no-brainer.
Can anyone tell me when the Democrats have ever done anything so blatant.
One could argue that the 1960 presidential election had some “irregularities” in the Illinois vote, and FDR had some interesting ideas about what he could do with the Supreme Court, but as a matter of scale I believe this GOP endeavor tops either of those.
The Chicago thing never happened with regards to JFK. I read a study somewhere, I think someone here linked to it. If I can find it I’ll let you know but it basically said there were no abnormalities outside of the expected range nationwide.
It’s a good thing they’re as inept as they are nefarious. I can’t get over the number of Senate seats they’ve thrown away in the last two elections, myself. What is it, five or six races now that they could have won if they hadn’t nominated drooling lunatics?
At any rate, it’s clear that Republican magical thinking no longer has any room for the concept of unintended consequences. Certainly these Electoral College schemes could serve to energize the Democrats in states that really aren’t all that red. Giving the changing demographics, too, they may be hurrying their states along to a tipping point that already isn’t that far off.
I’ve been thinking about unintended consequences in the House, too. It’s not inconceivable that the Republicans will force Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment, for example, since I don’t think there’s any guarantee that they will agree to raise the debt ceiling under any conditions that are acceptable to anyone else. They’ll have put the President in a place where he has no choice but to act autocratically, and of course they’ll be screaming about fascism and socialism and tyranny. But continuing to operate the government despite the Republicans’ dereliction of duty really isn’t the sort of thing that is going to enrage anybody who doesn’t already hate Obama.
I’m not too worried about this actually happening, because I think cooler/smarter heads will prevail. It seems to me that making these sorts of changes would threaten the division of money, power and status between states, so I am not at all sure that these changes will be made.
Making a change like this would be the domino that sets off a huge chain of events that would threaten various states. I really think it would engender what I call “52-card pickup”, which means game over, the rules as you know them are gone, everything’s up for grabs.
That would challenge the status of the first primary states, so Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, etc would not be happy. If you’re not one of the winner-take-all-swing-states anymore, then you don’t get as much attention, you get less ad revenue in your state, you lose status.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but couldn’t this start the slippery slope of questioning the current representation of states in the senate, with each state getting 2 votes, regardless of size or population?
The democrats need to resurrect the 50 state strategy. Tim Kaine and crew were disasters by tearing up all the infrastructure that Howard Dean built. That was the 2010 election lesson. They have to fight everywhere, nothing conceded for free. The current strategy of concentrating only on swing states has got to go. Most of them are controlled by the Rethugs and this along with other nefarious electioneering strategies is the obvious outcome.
Bingo. One of Obama’s greatest mistakes was getting rid of Dean. But he’s never been comfortable with anything that wasn’t 100% in his control.