Blogs > Cliopatria > A Portion of Egg on My Face

Jan 29, 2004

A Portion of Egg on My Face


by Cliopatria


OK, when I wasn't looking, the Democratic Party did something smart: they switched to Proportional Allocation of primary convention delegates. So, all my thrashing and fulminating turns out to be misdirected (you'd think someone might have mentioned that before I got to my third post on the subject). I still think IRV would be good, particularly in the general election, and I also think that proportional allocation of electoral college votes (which my father suggested many years ago) would be great ideas. But the Democratic primaries will give convention delegates to any candidate who gets 15% or more of the state primary vote. No wonder William Safire is having visions of a really interesting Democratic convention. Robert Kuttner, whose article alerted me to the change also sees a brokered convention as a distinct possibility. I'm not sure: the candidates are still campaigning like it's"winner take all" and the reporters are still treating it that way. You'd think that Kerry got all the delegates from NH and is sitting pretty, and Dean got nothing but is plucky enough to keep going anyway, the way they're reporting it. It's like being on the wrong end of a psy-op campaign.....

Pick-a-Candidate Quiz update: Minnesota Public Radio has a candidate-matching quiz that corrects a few of the flaws of my earlier offering. This time you only get to choose policy options that have been offered by a candidate (which I see as a flaw:"Other" should be an option), which means that the choices are sometimes closely overlapping, but not comprehensive. Your final score is a real percentage, not normed to your closest match: this time my top score was in the 60s, though Kucinich still held the lead position. Al Sharpton still scored higher than you'd hope, tied with Kerry and Lieberman, but Dean actually was the second place finisher. This time, though, I had zero match with the Republican nominee.....

It occured to me, looking over the results, that an important control process would be to see how the candidates actually score against each other. If Wesley Clark were to take this test, would he really come out even with John Edwards? Would they be more likely to consider as VP someone who scored a close match? (They Should) OK, it's not deep theory, but it's starting to interest me.


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More Comments:

Anne Zook - 1/29/2004

I didn't realize it either, and while it's a good thing to know, I'm a bit disappointed.

I've been thinking about the IRV thing and I was working on a somewhat longer response to your last post.

Ralph E. Luker - 1/29/2004

Jonathan, You may have subconsciously recalled the winner take all electoral college votes with winner take all in Democratic Party presidential primaries. I don't think that it's been winner take all in Democratic Party presidential primaries since the post-1968 reforms, mandated after Hubert Humphrey won the party's nomination without entering a single primary. I think the 15% threshold rule is fairly common in the Democratic Party process.

Name Removed at Poster's Request - 1/29/2004

I just did the Minnesota quiz, and got a 73% match with Kucinich, 53% with Dean and Sharpton, 40% with Kerry and 6% with Bush. That was agreement with Bush on one issue only - gun rights.

I noticed that none of the Democrats agreed with me on gun rights. I know that at least one Democrat has a "let the states make their own gun regulations" stand, and this may fly for a lot of swing voters, but if the Democrats nominate someone with a strongly anti-gun rights stand or record, they could have some real trouble on election day. Speaking of the Southern states....