I think we've had some excellent discussions on GMD this week. Set aside the hostility, hurt feelings, and recriminations, and people are genuinely engaged in the real questions, including how we get more liberal candidates elected to office in Vermont. I'm starting up a new thread to try to move the discussion along.

A couple of initial thoughts.

First, I know that calling someone a “spoiler” hurts some people's feelings. You might think that this alone means we shouldn't use it, but I disagree. I think there are definitely occasions where it is appropriate and meaningful (anyone here remember Ralph Nader in 2000, or Paul Poirier in 1988?).  The fact that I'm calling someone a spoiler doesn't mean I'm “stealing your vote” either.

Still, it's blindingly obvious that there was no spoiler in this year's gubernatorial election. Any time the winner takes 55% of the votes, neither losing candidate deprived any other losing candidate of enough votes to win.

Second, although the party bosses (see how I was able to type that with a straight face?) don't control everything, I do think David has a point that if the two parties could coordinate our efforts more we could avoid electoral conflicts that harm our common interests. After all, we've been known to be at least a little critical of their decisions to run candidates who turn out to be nothing but spoilers, so they could do the same to us.

The question, then, is how we can move forward on our common goals without asking the members of either party to abandon their identity or just cave on demand, and I have a couple of ideas for that.

When Anthony Pollina was saying he was considering a run for governor, and saying that he wanted the support of the Democratic Party, I suspect I wasn't the only person who pointed out to him that the most straightforward way to do it would be to enter the Democratic primary and win.

He wasn't willing to do this, in part because of 17 V.S.A. § 2353(b). It says, “A person's name shall not be listed as a candidate on the primary ballot of more than one party in the same election.” This means that if he had run in the Democratic primary he would have been prohibited from running in the Progressive primary, and at the time this was not an acceptable choice to him.

If it had been possible this year Pollina could have run in both the D and P primaries, probably won them both, and he would have gotten his wish–a head to head race against Douglas. We could accomplish by repealing this section. It's only been on the books since 1977, and as far as I can tell it's never been cited in any reported decision of the Vermont Supreme Court or any other court. This change also wouldn't take a constitutional amendment, so it should be easier to accomplish than instituting IRV. What it would do, though, is create the conditions for fusion candidates, generally between D's and P's in Vermont, but potentially involving other third parties.

I'd like to see legislators from both the Democratic and Progressive Parties get behind legislation to repeal this section, preferably during the first year of the coming biennium, so that we can get at least the possibility of a head to head race between Douglas and the strongest liberal candidate, whether that's Pollina, Zuckerman, Racine, or somebody else.

Next, I like the idea of moving to a system in which there are no minority winners for statewide elections (and potentially for legislative races as well), whether IRV or some other system. Why are people so heavily invested in IRV? Why not set up a runoff election, the way they do in some states, if no candidate receives a majority?

Although I'm not an expert in voting theory, the reading I have done suggests that IRV might set up some circumstances in which a less popular candidate defeates a more popular one, which we would presumably want to avoid.

As I understand it, the main arguments in favor of IRV instead of a runoff election are cost and the dropoff in turnout that would be expected in a second election. I'm not convinced that either of these is a really good argument against it, though. With regard to cost I would say that getting a democratic outcome is more important than the incremental cost of holding a second-round election.

I'm also probably less concerned about a dropoff in turnout than some people, mainly because I don't care that much about protecting the electoral positions of people who can't be bothered to come out and vote. They're not disenfranchised, just lazy, uninformed, or unconcerned. If they don't vote, they've made the choice to let the rest of us decide who will govern them.

These two changes, eliminating the one-primary rule, and allowing for some kind of runoff, won't fix everything. They won't, for example, guarantee that a single ambitious individual won't run for office even when the party leadership prefers to stay out of a particular race. What they will do, though, is create the possibility for the supporters of a primary loser to line up behind the primary winner, potentially after extracting commitments from the winner, and united to defeat a candidate that the supporters of both chalengers agree is the greater of two evils.

Because really, the clearest thing you can say about two candidates, one of whom got 21.3% and one of whom got 21.7%, is that they both lost.

Once again, David Broder displays his infallible ability to parrot the conventional wisdom while failing to question his conservative interlocutors.

The occasion here is the column today about Republican governors. The headline created for the column by the Free Press was Broder column: Governors like Douglas offer hope. 

There was actually only one paragraph in the column about Douglas, but I guess you can't blame them for emphasizing the local angle. Still, what he says about Douglas embodies the credulity that is one of the hallmarks of Broder's writing:

When I asked Vermont's Douglas how he explained it, he said that his fellow governors “put progress ahead of partisanship, as I've done here. We have generous social programs, but we also have fiscal responsibility. We're the only state without a constitutional requirement to balance our budget, but we don't need it. Our deficit is zero.” 

Now anyone who knows what has happened in Vermont these past six years knows that Douglas's claim to put progress ahead of partisanship is, simply put, a lie, but you would never get any hint from Broder's column that another interpretation of Douglas's administration.

As I say, this is a good example of high Broderism: nothing really changes, the power structure stays in control, and if you want to know what's really happened, just ask The Dean. In this case, disregard the seismic shift in the election: we had slave states voting for a black President! We had the majority of under-30 Cuban-Americans in Florida voting for a Democrat! But, according to the immutable tenets of high Broderism, the controlling center controls, and always will.

Even if it takes an effort worthy of Procrustes to fit the story.

We now have an incoming President who is capable of complex thought and curiosity. There is no question in my mind that Obama is far more intellectually capable than W, the person most knotheads apparently would like to have a beer with.

But along with a high degree of intelligence comes expectations: such as chewing gum and walking at the same time (remember … this is the description the Obama campaign gave to McCain’s frenetic “drop everything and run to DC” response to the Wall Street collapse).

In my opinion a domestic priority that ranks above unions, minimum wage, environmental issuse … hell … anything else … is our democratic process.

The single most important component of democratic actions is the vote: one can call any system a democracy, but unless that democracy includes active protection of the individual’s right to vote and to have that vote counted as the individual intended … well, that “democracy” is in name only.

While our voting process has always had issues, the level of voter suppression, vote denial and vote miscounting has gone well beyond any semblance to reasonableness in the last eight years. Secretaries of State run late stage voter roll purges that catch the legitimate voter more often than not. Grassroots organizations performing valuable voter registration activities are harassed and literally persecuted rather than thanked. Huge numbers of voters are challenged at the polls by partisan trouble makers and forced into casting provisional ballots that are almost never counted. Voting machines flip votes. Vote counting machines cannot recreate the same count with the same ballots.

And it will simply repeat in two years if proactive solutions are not implemented immediately.

When he is inaugurated in January, Obama will owe that day to voter turnout and empowerment more than any other single factor (here’s just a sample of what I mean). The domestic question I will initially be looking to see answered: does Obama dive into a topic that has dirtied both major political parties? Or does he look for the sexy and easy to sell.

Obama is smart enough to do the political gum chew while walking routine. But will that translate into protecting our democratic principles?

(Oh, and can we please get rid of those photos that have us eternally looking up at people in leadership positions? They’re silly, pretentious … and I don’t put anybody like that on any sort of pedestal.)