voting

How I’ll Vote

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I hope no one cares enough about how I vote to be influenced by it, but I want to explain why after a lifetime of voting for Republicans for President, I have abandoned the party of Lincoln, Coolidge, and Reagan, at least in terms of my vote for President.

I’ve given my thoughts on Trump before, about how he’s a caricature of conservatism, not the genuine article, and how he appeals to the baser parts of people’s nature. Back in March, before he was the nominee, I said:

If we nominate Donald Trump, we become everything they said we were. And so, if he is nominated, for the first time, I will vote for a third party candidate for president. It’s not in my nature to boycott the polls altogether, but neither will I close my eyes and pull the GOP lever. The party has meant a lot to me, but it is a means, not an end. If fulfilling conservative principles means destroying the party that once stood for them, so be it. It is better than the alternative of accepting Trump, and seeing the party poisoned to death from within.

That’s still true. Mrs. Clinton is also unacceptable, though in a more conventionally awful way. I reviewed the campaign book that she and Tim Kaine “wrote,” if you need a longer version of my thought on their plan for a more progressive America. It’s all bad, both the means and the end, and that doesn’t even get into her corruption, let alone her abortion advocacy, which is a dealbreaker for me. As much as I admire her pro-war foreign policy, I can’t vote for Clinton in good conscience.

Of the minor-party candidates, the Green and Constitution Parties are both too extreme on their respective corners of the political spectrum. My only real choices are Gary Johnson, who is on the ballot in Pennsylvania, and Evan McMullin, who is not. Based on experience, Johnson is the easy winner, even over Clinton, with his two terms as governor of New Mexico. His running mate, Bill Weld, is if anything more qualified. In a normal year, I’d never give McMullin a second look on this basis. On policy positions, though, McMullin is more of a small-government conservative than Johnson, who at times seems caught up in the intra-party Republican fights of the ’90s than the policy disputes of today. I’m confident Johnson is up to the job, even if I have policy disagreements with his brand of libertarianism. McMullin might be more capable than the average guy who’s never held office or high military rank, but he’s still a novice, even if his ideas sound good in my ear.

Long story short: it comes down to mundane practicalities. I know my vote is a protest vote, but I want it to be for someone I could be happy with as President, even though that will never happen. Moreover, I want it to be counted along with other like-minded votes in a tally that says to the Republican Party, “these could’ve been your voters if you had nominated anyone within hailing distance of normalcy.” If McMullin were on Pennsylvania’s ballot, he would have my vote. Since he isn’t, and since I want my vote to be counted as more than one of the generic “others/write-in” at the bottom of the page, I will cast my ballot for Gary Johnson and William Weld.

I’ll vote Republican for the other offices and if Trump loses, I’ll remain with the party and help rebuild from this disaster. If he wins, well, that’s a blog post for another day.

Nine percent

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I’ve seen this article from the New York Times going around on Facebook and Twitter. The premise, that the two major party nominees were selected by just 9% of the American population, is true. And in a year where people are shaking their heads at the deeply unpleasant candidates we’re left to choose from, it answers a common question: how did we get here?

But when you think about it, this is basically true every year. Admittedly, Trump won with a smaller percent of the Republican primary vote than previous nominees, and Clinton had a vigorous challenger as well, but even in a more settled year, that would increase the percentage of primary voters who selected the nominees only slightly. Ten, maybe eleven percent. Would that make you feel that much better?

Even if both candidates got 100% of their respective primaries’ votes, that would mean that 14% of the populace would have selected them. In practice, it would have been even fewer people, since uncontested primaries have low turnout. This year, Clinton got 16 million votes out of 30 million cast in the Democratic primaries. In 2012, President Obama had no serious primary opposition, so he got nearly 89% of the vote, but in a low-turnout election that only added up to a little over 6 million votes.

Add that to Romney’s vote total in the Republican primaries (10 million out of 19 million cast) and we get 16 million people selecting the nominees. That’s 4.9% of the American population. Even if Obama had fought a contested primary and received as many votes as Romney, that raises the total to 20 million–just over 6%. Does that make Romney’s and Obama’s nominations somehow less representative of the people’s will? Of course not.

There are many problems with the primary process, but this is not one of them. The barriers to entry are ridiculously low. In open primary states, you just have to register to vote. In closed primary states, you have to register to vote with a party. Both of these are free, and voting takes just a few minutes of one day. Caucuses take a little longer–a couple of hours, but still a minor commitment for someone who cares about the direction the country takes in the next four years.

The Times article is nicely presented and has their usual great graphics. But as an attempt to point out a legitimate problem in the electoral process, it falls short.

Who Lost Appalachia, Part II

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Last night, the Democrats’ retreat from Appalachia turned into a rout as Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky. The state had elected a Democrat to the office four years ago with a large majority, and mainstream opinion this time was that Bevin (who unsuccessfully challenged Mitch McConnell from the right in a primary in 2014) had no chance. He won by 9 percentage points.

This was a real test in Republican strength, and two points show that strength to be quite real. The first we knew for months: GOP voters outnumbered Democrats in the primary for the first time ever. That’s not always dispositive, but it shows a core party strength of numbers that conveys at least some advantage.

Second, the success carried down the ballot to some of the fairly anonymous row offices. These are as good a test as any for a parties’ statewide base, since it involves choosing a candidate that you know little or nothing about for an office you might not have known even existed. All you have to go on is the person’s name and party. The Republicans took most of these, with the Democrats holding only those in which their candidates had famous names (both are the children of Democratic politicians).

Kentucky has been Republican in presidential politics for a while now, but after last night we can say that it is well and truly a red state.

Bye bye Biden

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Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he would not seek the Presidency, effectively ceding the field to Hillary Clinton. I had planned to write up my thoughts on each of the contenders, but we’ve already lost two Republicans and two Democrats. What’s worse is they were some of the better candidates out there. I should write up my thoughts on Chafee before it’s too late.

Webb and Biden were my two favorite Democrats, although that’s not saying much. Webb I liked because he is, in many ways, more of a Republican than a Democrat. Biden was the best of the real Dems, to me, because he seemed likable and not corrupt, even if he’s been wrong on most of the issues other than his support for Amtrak. But let’s be honest: I would almost certainly never have voted for him.

What excited me about a Biden candidacy, beyond an indecent schadenfreude in seeing her1 discomfited, was the thought that if he were to get in, it would have to mean that he knew something was coming down for her. Something bad. Something disqualifying.

I figured that Biden jumping in, against his better judgement, would have meant that he knew Clinton would be indicted for her crimes and that the Democrats would need some suave Trans Am enthusiast to save them from Sanders and his legions of Wobblies. Now that Biden’s out, the same thought process makes me fear that he knows the fix is in, which leaves him with no shot.

There’s still a chance that President Obama’s Justice Department will indict a former member of his cabinet, but that chance is a little smaller today.

  1. Yes, like Shelob to the Orcs of Mordor, there is only one her on this blog. ↩

Election Day, Canadian style

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It’s election day north of the border, and the campaign has been an interesting one. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party, has been in office nine years and hopes to add a few more. The Liberals are challenging him, led by Justin Trudeau, the charismatic but relatively unaccomplished son of former Prime Minister Paul Trudeau (see, they have dynastic politics, too!) The New Democratic Party, farther out on the left, currently holds the second-most seats in Parliament, but looks to shrink to third as the Liberals challenge them for the lion’s share of the left vote. There are also a few minor parties, and Quebec is its own thing, but that’s the gist of it.

The election campaign has been every bit as ugly an petty as our own (this morning the National Post called it the Worst Election Ever). Take a look at that piece if you ever have that absurd impulse of the American left to imagine that Canada is some sort of utopia and that America alone is trashy and lame.

Let me tell you: everybody’s trashy.

Remember Rob Ford, Toronto’s crack-smoking, hard-drinking mayor? He’s back on the scene, and still fairly popular. And has American politics ever featured a Congressional candidate dropped by his party because he was caught urinating in someone’s kitchen? We’ve had some odd stuff, but I don’t recall that one.

None of this is to say we’re superior to Canada, but rather to point out how similar we are. Elections bring out a lot of fervor and weird behavior on both sides of the border. But it’s more fun to watch from a safe distance, knowing that none of these folks will ever be in charge of your country.

Who Lost Appalachia?

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There was a lot of talk during the Democratic debate this week about Jim Webb, and his place in the Democratic party. Was he too conservative? Too martial? Too old-fashioned?

The real problem with Webb for Democrats is not what ideas he represents, but what geographic region he represents: Appalachia. Once the stronghold of FDR’s Democratic coalition, this region has been abandoned by Roosevelt’s successors. And the change is happening quickly. Look at this chart of the decrease in Democratic vote in Kentucky, and note that the mountainous counties have been in much steeper decline:

Appalachia Democrats

If we take the date back to 2004, the shift is even more pronounced:

Appalachia Democrats 2

Democrats in Appalachia are abandoning their party in droves, and they’re not coming back. Democrats at the national level claim to be the party that supports the poor, but when it comes to America’s poorest region, they seem to be going out of their way to alienate their erstwhile supporters. (For more on that, check out Kevin Williamson’s 2014 article on Appalachia here.) On guns, on religion, and on individualism, the party promotes everything Appalachians are against, and tries to make up for it with more welfare spending.

The people Jim Webb represents don’t want handouts, they want jobs. The Democratic establishment responds by fighting the coal industry, historically the biggest employer in Appalachia. Every step the Democrats take pushes them farther away from these historic stalwarts of the party. Webb is the last Democratic leader to care about them. With his inevitable defeat, Democrats will close the book on the region as they’ve closed their hearts to its people long ago.

Voting in Washington

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I originally published this post at a former group blog, The Closet Moderate, in 2013.

I’ve been thinking about Washington, D.C. and its unusual quasi-colonial status.

People in what became the District of Columbia had voting rights as citizens of Maryland and Virginia until 1801, when the District was incorporated.  In 1847, the federal government retroceded the Virginia portion of the District to that Commonwealth, so the voters their got back their rights as citizens of Virginia.  Citizens of what remained of the federal district did not.  In 1961, the states approved the Twenty-Third Amendment, which granted the citizens of Washington three electoral votes for President and Vice President.  By that time, Congress had also given the District home rule, which guaranteed them some of the control over local affairs that a state has, though not all of it, and not in any way that couldn’t be rescinded by Congress.

L'Enfant_plan

That still left Congressional representation.  Although Washington elects a delegate to the House of Representatives, she has no vote.  In 1978, Congress sought to remedy this problem by passing another amendment to the Constitution that would have treated the District as a state for purposes of representation in Congress.  It went over like a lead balloon, with only sixteen of the necessary thirty-eight states approving the amendment before time expired in 1985.

Since then, several bills have been introduced in Congress that would admit Washington as a state, but none have come close to passage, and there is some doubt about whether it would even be constitutional without Maryland’s permission.

Several other options have been proposed.  Retroceding the remaining District to Maryland is one solution  and Representative Regula of Ohio regularly proposed bills to that effect, but none were successful.  There was also some question as to whether Maryland would want it back.  Further, the Twenty-Third Amendment would be nonsensical without a federal district, and would need to be repealed.

So as long as a Constitutional amendment is required, here’s my solution: let the people of Washington vote as though they were Marylanders in federal elections, but not in state elections. That sounds like it violates all sorts of constitutional provisions, but it’s an amendment, so we can mostly do whatever we want. I even wrote a draft of the text, if you’re into that sort of thing:

AMENDMENT XXVIII

§1. For the purpose of election of the President, Vice President, Senators, and Representatives, and for the purpose of apportionment of Representatives, the residents of the District constituting the seat of the government of the United States shall be treated as residents of the State from which that District shall have been ceded.
§2. The Twenty-Third Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
§3.  This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States within seven years from the date of submission.

This gives everybody something.  To those who think the District shouldn’t be a state: it still isn’t.  For those Washingtonians who want voting representatives in both Houses of Congress: you got it.  For Democratic officeholders in Maryland: your re-election just got easier.  Democrats in Congress: you just got a new House member.  Republicans in Congress: yeah, they got an extra member, but you didn’t give up any Senate seats, and Maryland’s Senate seats have both been held by Democrats for the last twenty-six years, anyway.  Republicans in Maryland state government: yeah, you guys would kinda get screwed.  Sorry.