Tag: caucus

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ballot access election law partisanship political challengers

Parties Demoted

voting, elections, primary, democracy, rules

Though “[s]everal left-leaning groups have sued to block the former president from the state’s ballot on 14th Amendment grounds,” Tom Ozimek of The Epoch Times reported in November, “Trump Listed on Michigan Primary Ballot,” as the headline states.

The primary was yesterday. Trump won. As expected.

But he appeared on the primary ballot only with legal wrangling. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, was under a lot of pressure to keep Trump off the ballot. Which she resisted, explicitly stating that she thought the maneuver to allow state officials to prohibit Trump from appearing on ballots because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause was a bad idea.

Michigan’s voting system is now quite complicated. First, it’s an open primary state, so there will always be strategic voting, where partisans will cross lines to sabotage opponent parties. Though in the case of Trump, there is some irony here, since Trump benefitted in 2016 from such voting by Democrats, thinking he was the candidate easiest to beat in the general election.

Michigan sports a hybrid system for selecting partisan candidates to appear on the general election ballot. “More of Michigan’s 55 delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) will be awarded,” explains Nathan Worcester, also of The Epoch Times, “through the caucus process than through the primary vote — 39 as opposed to just 16.” But there are dueling conventions for caucusing, and it’s quite a mess.*

Michigan also now offers early voting at special voting sites. Is it a sign of a healthy democracy that there are so many ways to vote?

It sure doesn’t seem healthy that national partisan politics almost kept a Republican candidate off a primary ballot. Could the solution be to take parties’ candidate selection entirely out of state balloting?

Demote major parties from their current favored position to paying their own way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In the Democratic Primary, President Biden won big against Dean Phillips, a largely unknown congressman from Minnesota, and author Marianne Williamson. But, with roughly half the vote counted, a not insignificant 14 percent of Democrats snubbed the president (and the field) by voting “Uncommitted.” Many were no doubt protesting the president’s policies concerning the Israel-Hamas War; in the county containing the University of Michigan, 20 percent voted uncommitted. Yet, even in rural counties across Michigan, more than 10 percent of Democrats opted for uncommitted.

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national politics & policies political challengers

Enemies, Bedfellows

The Ron Paul 2012 campaign’s caucus-state delegate strategy, discussed here before, aims to work around the candidate’s biggest hurdle: Republican voters. Though Ron Paul has a strong appeal to the young and to independents — constituencies needed to win against a sitting president — older, mainstream Republicans voters aren’t especially responsive to the maverick’s charms. Concentrating on selecting actual delegates at the caucuses, rather than the media-hyped (and electorally meaningless) straw polls, is a clever strategy.

But what’s good for the goose is great for the gander. A video from Washington State shows a self-proclaimed “mainstream” GOP activist offering caucus participants a slate of 31 delegates allegedly divided up amongst Romney, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, explicitly promoted to make sure that Ron Paulers don’t “take over” the party as they did, to his horror, in the Seattle area.

The Ron Paul supporters touting the video call it “election fraud.” Well, “caucus fraud” might be more to the point, considering that the slate offered was rejected by Rick Santorum’s  supporters as a con job. Since then Santorum folks and Paul folks have united. As one Santorum activist put it, “[i]n order for us to win the nomination in Tampa in August, we must deny Romney delegates to that convention. If . . . Romney receives 1,144 delegates before the national convention, it is all over for our campaign. That is the reason why the Senator himself directed us to coalition with the Ron Paul delegates to deny Romney any state delegates.”

Whether as a grand dialogue of ideas or a horse race, this time around the politics is interesting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption political challengers

As Goes Maine

On Monday I reported on the Ron Paul campaign’s “open secret” strategy: Gaining delegates in the caucus states, while letting the caucus-night straw poll numbers basically take care of themselves. The “popular” vote on caucus nights in states like Iowa and Minnesota and Maine may show Santorum or Romney as a winner, but the Ron Paul folks are picking up the actual, nomination-effective delegates.

Meanwhile, GOP insiders continue to work openly and sub rosa against the Paul candidacy, as is now pretty clear in Maine. Business Insider reports that

  • “Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong”;
  • “Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count”;
  • “nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold — held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count”;

. . . and on and on and on.

The open conspiracy of deliberately under-reporting Ron Paul votes may be more than matched, however, by the open secret of the Ron Paul delegate strategy, with the Paul campaign now believing “it has won the majority of Maine’s delegates.”

Real change is, apparently, a messy thing. And preventing it . . . even messier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access political challengers

Something Up His Sleeve

In 2008, Republican insiders in a number of states worked mightily to ensure that presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul met with no success. So, this time around, his campaign has trained supporters in the caucus states to act like insiders.

What’s the secret?

“There were no actual delegates rewarded in last Tuesday’s voting,” Greg Gutfeld clarified on Red Eye, his late-night Fox News show. The votes reported on caucus night are not the votes that count, the ones that elect delegates. Instead, the delegates — who go on to pick other delegates to go to the state convention and then the national convention, and ultimately choose the GOP candidate — are picked later, after many caucus attendees have gone home for the night.

Ron Paul’s supporters stick around. And vote themselves in as delegates.

“We do have to remember,” Ron Paul has gloated, that “the straw vote is one thing, but then there’s one other thing called delegates, yeah!”

News sources consistently report caucus night straw vote totals, but rarely mention that such caucus polling is relevant only for perceptions of “momentum.” The actual candidate selection mechanism? Something else again.

Indeed, it looks like a majority of Minnesota delegates, as well as surprisingly high percentages in Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, may actually end up supporting Ron Paul for President.

Un-democratic? Paul supporters are unashamed of their strategy, as campaign senior advisor Doug Wead happily explained to Rachel Maddow. As they see it, they are only acting according to the rules that usually serve to favor insiders in the GOP boys’ club.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.