As you know, the difference between real life and fiction is that the latter has to make sense.
That’s as opposed to this presidential election season, which appears to be following the path of political fiction, with possibilities of a convention without a first-ballot presidential nominee and a presidential election that ends in the House of Representatives.
Duke University Prof. Georg Vanberg explores what the term “majority” means and does not mean in a democracy:
Given Donald Trump’s continuing electoral success, it appears increasingly likely that only a “brokered convention” can prevent a Trump nomination.
Various voices have begun to suggest that such an outcome would be an illegitimate, undemocratic maneuver — essentially, the party establishment’s “stealing” the nomination (see Newt Gingrich’s comments). Party leaders “should not be able to use conventions as a way to subvert the will of the people” (see the Atlantic, for example). Even those who favor this route apologetically acknowledge a brokered convention as an “anachronistic, undemocratic” means to an end.
Such arguments represent a fundamental confusion about the nature of democratic decision-making. A little reflection shows that concepts like “the will of the people” are quite slippery – and that Trump has no special claim on that title.
Of course, what voters want is important in a democracy. But the results of elections are not simply a reflection of “the people’s will.” They derive from the combination of three factors: voter preferences, the rules that define how citizens can vote and how votes are counted, and the choices that are presented to voters.
Here’s the key point: Exactly the same voter preferences can result in widely different election results under alternative (and equally democratic) election procedures. As a result, it is not at all clear what “the will of the people” might mean.
A simple example illustrates this. The following table lists the preferences of 100 voters over three candidates — for example, 34 voters prefer Lopez to Lee to Lewis, and so on.
34 voters 30 voters 26 voters 10 voters Lopez Lee Lewis Lewis Lee Lopez Lee Lopez Lewis Lewis Lopez Lee Plurality rule — the person with the most votes wins — is standard for most elections in the United States. By this rule, the candidate who secures the most votes is declared the “winner” of a presidential primary (leaving aside the much more complicated question of delegate allocation). Under plurality rule, candidate Lewis wins with 36 percent of the vote.
But of course plurality rule is not the only plausible election procedure; many other procedures are used around the world and in the United States.
Consider, for example, an instant run-off procedure, used in some state and local elections in the U.S. Under this procedure, candidate Lee – who receives the fewest votes – would be eliminated in the first round, her votes would be transferred to her voters’ second choice (Lopez), and Lopez would win the election with a comfortable two-thirds majority (64-36) against Lewis. A majority run-off system (used, for example, to elect the president of France) would result in the same outcome.
Or consider the Borda count, which is used to elect the winner of the Heisman Trophy and baseball’s most valuable player, among others. Under this system, each voter ranks the candidates from best to worst, assigning one point for first place, two points for second place, and so forth. The points are totaled, and the candidate with the lowest score wins. In this case, Lee (180 points) beats both Lopez (192 points) and Lewis (238 points).
Finally, note that Lee is preferred by a majority of voters to both Lewis and Lopez – and thus would win a “round-robin” tournament between the candidates.
What is the point here? What the example underscores is that there is no straightforward or self-evident way to think about “what the people want” or what “the voters’ choice” is.
Step back for a moment. Does Lewis really reflect “the will of the people”? Sure, he secures the most votes if citizens can only choose one candidate. But two-thirds of the voters would prefer either of the other candidates!
Is Lopez “the people’s choice”? Almost as many voters place him first as Lewis, and he is second for many more. But Lopez would lose decisively to Lee!
So perhaps Lee represents “the people’s will”? Maybe. Lee seems to be a compromise candidate — but of course Lee is also the first choice of the smallest number of voters.
In short, it is not at all clear who voters prefer in a situation like this. The winner is determined as much by electoral rules as it is by the preferences of voters.
This fact — that aggregating the preferences of individuals is a vexing problem — is one of the most important insights of the social sciences of the past 50 years. It earned Kenneth Arrow a Nobel Prize, and William Rikerwrote powerfully about its implications for democratic theory.
Of course, these results do not imply that votes cast are meaningless, or should be ignored. This is why it is important to specify electoral procedures ahead of time, and not to change them “midstream.” By this logic, should Trump win a majority of delegates, the Republican Party should accept this outcome.
But if Trump fails to win a majority of delegates, the logic is equally clear: securing a plurality of the vote (or delegates) does not provide Trump with any special claim to legitimacy, nor does it give him the mantle of “the people’s choice.”
In this case, a brokered convention that denies him the nomination is not a coup in which the party’s establishment thumbs its nose at the electorate. On the contrary, such an outcome can represent the preferences of many voters, and have an equally powerful claim to be “democratic.”
The U.S. is organized as a republic, not a democracy. No president has ever been elected by a majority of Americans, only a majority of American voters (that is, those who voted, not merely those eligible to cast votes), and then only through the Electoral College process. If the political parties wanted a democratic process to determine their presidential nominees, then a plurality of votes cast in primary elections, not a majority of convention delegates (which are sort of a version of the Electoral College) or whatever process a caucus uses, would determine a party’s nominee.
Brokered conventions apparently were much more commonplace, according to Trey Mayfield:
With talk abounding about a potentially brokered GOP convention this July in Cleveland, a little background is in order. The convention’s primary purpose is to produce a nominee acceptable to a majority of the delegates, who are there, in turn, to represent the views of the party members of their respective states.
The delegates’ job is not to simply ratify whoever gets the most popular votes—or delegates—as the nominee. Were that the case, there would be no need for delegates, or a convention; the victor could be determined by merely tallying up the popular vote, and giving the nomination to the person with the most votes.
In the pre-telecommunications age, conventions were much likelier to need to be “brokered” because candidates weren’t well-known outside their own states or regions, and the party was much less “nationalized,” and instead needed the various factions to hash out their differences to find a commonly acceptable nominee (and platform). Today, all these things are well known to voters at the time they vote in their respective primaries, meaning the “hashing out” effectively occurs in a series of voting in the various states over a five-month process.
There’s no need anymore, for example, for states to nominate a “favorite son” who has no chance of winning in order to have other party members consider their views at the convention. In addition, a nationwide system of primaries and caucuses in which the voters at large get to participate is relatively recent, having really begun only in 1972.
All that said, the GOP has a storied history of brokered conventions where it was not obvious before the convention who the nominee would (or should) be. When a race is practically uncontested (like when there’s an incumbent president), or only two significant candidates, that process takes care of itself by producing a majority of delegates committed to one candidate, who is then obviously the winner long before the convention starts.
The GOP has a storied history of brokered conventions where it was not obvious before the convention who the nominee would (or should) be.
But where there are three or more candidates with significant support among the delegates, and none with a majority, the question of who has the most delegates is subordinated to the question of who will best represent the party in November. Indeed, since its first convention in 1856, the Republican Party has had ten presidential elections in which no candidate coming into the convention had a majority of delegates. In seven of those conventions, the GOP did not nominate the person who came in with the most delegates.
The last brokered GOP convention was in 1952 (although there was almost one in 1976 between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, where the race was close enough that control over some disputed state delegations made a difference). In the ‘52 race, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft entered the convention with 35 percent of the delegates, followed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower with 26.3 percent, California Gov. Earl Warren with 17.3 percent, and Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen with 11.3 percent. Most delegates at the convention preferred Taft as the true conservative, but shifted their votes to Eisenhower because he had a much greater likelihood of winning in November. As history showed, they were right. …
The purpose of brokered conventions is to produce a nominee acceptable to Republicans nationwide and who can win the general election. Six of the GOP’s ten brokered conventions have produced a nominee who went on to become president, with five of them winning the popular vote. By contrast, in the ten elections since 1960 in which the GOP was not nominating an incumbent, the Republican nominee has won four times.
Whatever one may think of the GOP brokering conventions, their track record in producing winning candidates has been slightly better than the modern system of choosing nominees. Perhaps the GOP ought not to be afraid of the possibility.
As for what happens after Nov. 8, I’m not sure why a minister, Rev. Adam Phillips, wrote this for the Huffington Post, but …
It’s hidden there in plain sight, even if it hasn’t happened since the election of 1825: The people will not pick the next president, Congress will.
We wrote about this last week on Medium, and now the story is beginning to flesh out.
Politico reports that leading conservatives will meet on Thursday to plot out a third-party spoiler plan to beat presumed nominee Donald Trump.
With Marco Rubio suspending his campaign after losing the Florida primary and it is beginning to appear he will reverse his previous words to support a nominee Trump.
Because there will be a third party candidate — and their name will likely be Mitt with a Kasich or a Rubio on the same ticket.
Michael Bloomberg practically left a breadcrumb for this theory in plain sight when he declared that he would not be running for President this cycle. While pundits focused on why the math wouldn’t work out for Bloomberg against Trump or Hillary Clinton, the former mayor of New York City buried this interesting analysis in his op-ed this week.
In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president.
What could be a major story-arc out of House of Cards or Veep may likely become a reality for our country come November when both Trump and Clinton do not secure a simple majority of electoral votes and Mitt Romney is elected President.
Here’s how it will happen:
Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination out right. The establishment won’t be able to stop him. He will get 50 percent. So there will be no brokered convention. There will be no Mitt Romney savior moment in Cleveland.
When Trump secures the nomination out right this summer, the establishment goes ballistic: Terrified at the prospect of losing their party with Donald Trump as president.
Suddenly they realize, “holy shit, what if we could stop Donald Trump and keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House?”
So they run a moderate establishment Republican as a third-party candidate — 100 percent as a spoiler candidate. Worst case scenario oh, they prevent Donald Trump from winning the White House. Best case scenario they pull enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to prevent her from securing the necessary majority of 270 electoral votes.
Then the election goes to a House of Representatives ballot presided over Speaker Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s former running mate in 2012.
If neither candidate gets 270 electoral college votes, Congress picks the president. And he will be called President Mitt, the one who is laying the groundwork for this doomsday electoral scenario.
It’s right there, hidden in plain sight in the 12th Amendment of the US Constitution:
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.
And Congress can pick whomever they damn well please.
A moderate conservative third-party would definitely pull enough votes away from Trump to tank his candidacy, but the right candidate could also spoil it for Clinton.
If you remember, in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton was unable to secure a simple majority of the popular vote, with Ross Perot serving as a third party spoiler — not only taking votes away from the Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush, but pinching off the odd moderate vote from the Democrats as well.
But Ross Perot was never able to win a state, thus, he was never awarded any electoral college votes.
In this cycle, however, a third party spoiler candidate could in fact carry a handful of states. Bloomberg recognized it and realized the grave implications of that type of candidacy — taking the highest elected office in the free world out of the hands of the people and into the hands of a Tea Party-influenced, yet establishment-Republican Congress.
If you are an establishment Republican right now, this is actually an even better outcome than a brokered convention: Because you have even greater control over, not only the conservative nominee, but the ability to handpick the next president.
And Speaker Ryan will ensure that Mitt Romney will be handpicked. Why else would you fly out for dinner in Utah?
The election of 1825 is our reference for this crazy-likely theory.
The election was actually in 1824 and Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, raking in 42 percent. John Quincy Adams came in distant second with barely over 30 percent of the popular vote. William Crawford and then Speaker of the House Henry Clay came in third and fourth respectively. Problem was, no one won a majority of the electoral college (also fun-fact: all four of the candidates were part of the same party, the Democratic-Republicans. Oh, also: Crawford had a stroke after the November election). With no legally elected President, the decision was kicked over to the House, where they deliberated for 3 months to determine who would be the victor.
Lobbyists? Everyone thinks they were invented in the lobby of the Willard Hotel during the U.S. Grant Presidency 45 years later. But believe it, lobbyists were in full effect those three months. And, they delivered the “Corrupt Bargain:” an unprecedented decision where Henry Clay presided over the ever-so-unpopular-with-the-electorate election of John Quincy Adams.
There is potentially a corrupt bargain underway in plain sight in the election of 2016 with the possibility of not only saving the Republican party but remake American electoral politics. John Kasich won big in the Ohio primary — he could carry Ohio again in the general.
Just imagine: a third party spoiler candidacy is waged by Mitt Romney (choosing, say Kasich as his running mate). The addled country is fatigued by Donald Trump’s endless shenanigans as well as burned out by the scorched earth campaign against Hillary and her emails.
Ohio goes. So does Michigan. And Utah. Maybe Idaho and/or the Dakotas.
With even just one of those states spoiled, you have a doomsday scenario where both Donald and Hillary do not have a majority of electoral college votes.
And so the election goes into 2017 — and Speaker Ryan holds the gavel.
Where does the hammer drop? …
This harebrained theory was co-conceived and written with Chris LaTondresse, VP of Communications and Strategy at The Expectations Project and former advisor at USAID’s Center for Faith Based and Community Initiatives.
“Harebrained” or not, who, other than diehards for Clinton and Trump, would consider this a bad thing? I am neither a fan of Romney nor Kasich specifically, but I would certainly vote for either over Hillary, Comrade Sanders or The Donald. I would also vote for, to throw another name out there, Paul Ryan over The Terrible Trio.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
Leave a comment