Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Winner Take All Primaries are Destroying The Election Process The Winner Take All approach to primaries is destroying the Election Process. While the Electoral College was designed for National Elections, it sabotages the nominating processby EJ Moosa
(libertarian)
Thursday, March 13, 2008
What happens when a good idea is applied to the wrong process? Unintended consequences. The process in question is "Winner Take All"(WTA) voting in the nominating process for the candidates of the Republican and Democratic Party.
When applied on a national basis, WTA ensures that small states are not railroaded by larger states in the Presidential Election. Not all states use WTA today, and there is a move to allocate electoral votes by percentages in the future. I disagree with that move, but that a discussion for another day.
When the WTA approach is used at a state level, as it was not intended to be, some unintended consequences have become visible.
1. Less popular candidates are marginalized from the beginning. In a beneficial primary system, candidates would have to truly listen to what the platforms of their opponents were, and determine how they could get the vote of the supporters of the less popular candidates. (Do you remember Mitt Romney stating in one debate that he did not even no Ron Paul's stance on some of the issues?)
That does not have to happen today. John McCain did not have to appeal to the supporters of any candidate he was running against to secure the nomination. He merely had to get the most votes in each state he could. By winning merely 30-40% of the vote in the majority of the primaries, he could win the nomination. McCain has not had to incorporate the ideas of any of his opponents to secure the nomination.
2. WTA becomes even more detrimental the more candidates you have running in your primaries. Each additional candidate lowers the percentage of votes needed to win the primary. Look at the percentages required by Obama and Clinton to win their primaries versus what was needed to win in the Republican Primaries. The winner of the Democratic nomination will have something John McCain can only dream about: proven support within his party approaching the 50% mark.
With two candidates, you need 50% of the vote.
With three candidates, you can win with 34% of the vote.
With 5 candidates, you can win with 21 % of the vote. Woe be us if we ever have ten Republicans who commit to staying in the race until the end.
(For this illustration I rounded up)
If you can win the nomination with such low support, why look at or include any of the best ideas of your opponents?
3. The process is over before it's over. With barely 50% of the primaries completed, the Republicans had their nominee. Meanwhile, the Democrats are raising record funds, getting the majority of air time, and are still debating the important issues. John McCain seems to have gone on an early spring hiatus.
Ron Paul supporters (I was certainly one of them) have been left scratching their heads. Here was a candidate with fundraising clout, a message clearly different than his opponents, and the most vibrant group of supporters in recent Republican history. Yet none of his ideas, beliefs or platforms have shifted the direction of the Republican Party at all.
Why not? Because incorporating those ideas and beliefs are not needed to secure the nomination in the Winner Take All format. In fact, have you heard McCain modify his platform to include the ideas of Huckabee, Romney, Paul, or Thompson? No. He has not needed the support of any of those candidates' voters to win the nomination. Face it, McCain has not needed any of our support to this day.
Winner Take All works on a national level where there is only one contest. But it does not work with subsets of the population. The result is a Presidential Nominee that does not need the support of the voters of his opponents until the first Tuesday in November. And then it will be too late.
Winner Take all minimizes the majority in the end, and for the nominating process it is a destroyer of great ideas and debate.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of EJ Moosa only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. EJ Moosa is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
Unfortunately the primary dog and pony show is not a contest controlled by anything but what the respective parties want. In all but CA the primaries only include the two major parties. They are designed to grab media attention, contribute to the media machine through ads and pundit talking fodder, and alienate any and all candidates the two-parties want alienated. The entire process should not be handled with a primary but instead at the party conventions. However, the effectiveness of this dog and pony show is too great and people are too use to it for it to simply fade away.
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