What are the people behind Americans Elect thinking?

Sandy Levinson

The NYTimes reports that Americans Elect is very likely to have a place on all 50 state ballots for the 2012 election and that the organization continues to plan to nominate, via an internet "primary," a "unity ticket" consisting of a presidential candidate and a v.p. candidate not from the same political party. Consider the following paragraph from the Times article:

Those who have lent their names to the effort include Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist Democratic research group; Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and one of a dwindling band of moderate Republicans; Mark McKinnon, the strategist who guided Mr. Bush’s message in 2000 and 2004 but backed Mr. Obama in 2008 and now says his interest is “anything that disrupts the current system,” and Doug Schoen, a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton in the 1990s but is now frequently critica of Democrats.

“This is an effort to empower people,” said Ms. Whitman. “This ticket could win, but at the least it could drive both parties toward the center.”

Two observations: As should be obvious from many of my posts, I resonate in many ways to Mr. Schoen's rather flamboyant statement. But is it really true that anything disruptive of the current system" would be a good thing? Consider, for starters, systematic attempts at assassination of political leaders. So presumably we should interpret Mr. Schoen to be saying that "anything that disrupts the current two-party duopoly over presidential elections would be a good thing." I think that a lot of us can support that view. But again one must ask about the meaning of "anything" in this context. What if the Americans Elect effort should lead to the election of Newt Gingrich, who will certainly get only a minority of the popular vote and would limp through to an electoral vote victory only because he gets, say, 40% of the vote in several large states that split 35-25% between Obama and the Americans Elect "unifier"? What continues to be missing in the Americans Elect analysis is even the slightest recognition that we elect our presidents under the lunatic electoral college system, placed in the Constitution in 1787 in large part to benefit slave-holding states (who would get the benefit of the three-fifths clause in computing their electoral votes) and without any redeeming value since then.

Ms. Whitman's comment is even more mysterious. She ignores the presence of the electoral college and the possibility that the Republican Party, especially, would, in their efforts to gain 270 electoral votes, emphasize ever more a combination of high-turnout of their zealous base and suppression, through voter-ID and other even more nefarious tactics that Republicans are good at. (I recognize that the Democrats might also be tempted by a similar base-mobilization strategy, but there would be no parallel effort to suppress the vote of their opposition.) But she also doesn't confront the point that orthodox political science (which may deservedly be under attack) would predict that in a two-party race for a winner-take-all office like the presidency, the "rational" electoral strategy is to aim for the fabled "median voter," which means a move toward the center. The amazing thing about the current Republican Party is that it demonstrates no real desire to do this, though that is clearly the basis of the Romney campaign, if only he can survive the circus of the Republican nominating process. Obama seems to be thinking much more of the median voter, though he has to worry about losing some of his base that might, unwisely, just choose to tune out of the election.

Frankly, the only sensible defense of America Elects is the belief, which might be quite rational, that if Gingrich does indeed knock Romney out or otherwise simply makes Romney ever more unelectable by exposing him as the ultimate in core-less pandering, then it is thinkable that a centrist ticket would actually win by cobbling together 40%+ of the vote in the largest states. So, as suggested by an extremely politically savvy friend, might we see the re-emergence of Chris Christie after all as the America Elect candidate, coupled with, say, Evan Bayh as VP? Or consider the Times's lead sentences: "To those who bemoan the lack of better choices in presidential elections, third-party fantasies come easily at this stage in a campaign. End hyper-partisanship and Washington dysfunction: Vote Bloomberg-Petraeus in 2012!" I doubt that the Jewish, hyper-rich, anti-gun, and secretive mayor of NYC is actually the best path to an electoral victory, but I have thought for some time that Petraeus may be in our future, though once Obama brilliantly neutralized him by sending him first to Afghanistan and now to the CIA, I assumed that the year for Petraeus's Caesarist candidacy would be 2016. Perhaps we should start thinking of the strange bedfellows (Jerry) Brown-(Scott) Brown! Or maybe Tom Brokaw (presumably an independent)-(Susan) Collins or (Olympia) Snowe, since the two Maine senators do nothing useful in the Senate other than to provide key votes, when needed, to maintain Mike McConnell's hammerlock on getting anything done. But, no doubt, they are perceived as "moderate" because they don't often take demonstrably crazy positions.

And, of course, there is always the possiblity that Ron Paul, the only candidate with any intellectual integrity in the Republican race--even if, as Paul Krugman demonstrates, many of his ideas are aptly described as "monetary madness," albeit sincerely believed--will decide to accept the entreaties of the Libertarian Party to run as its candidate and get probably 10% of the national vote, with whatever particular effects on Obama and the Republican candidate. We are living in "interesting times."
Posted 3:18 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]