Monday, July 16, 2012

strategy


Romney will lose the election. It's obvious at this point he's totally unable to handle anyone calling him on his BS. I guess living a life of privelege, no one has ever done that to him before. So he's going down like a sack of coal.

So the job for progressives at this point is to find a way to prevent Obama from winning. As his former law school prof, Roberto Unger said in a famous video, "Barack Obama must be defeated."

How can that happen if Romney loses?

Washington, the state where I live, is very blue. So is Oregon, just to the south of us, and so is the northern 2/3 of California, with about half that state's population.

I'm voting for Stein, the Green candidate. She's not going to win any states, even on the Blue Coast.But what happens if she gets just enough votes so that no candidate has a majority?

Let's say Obama gets 45 percent of the vote in Washington, and Romney gets 43 percent (which could happen, because the eastern part of the state is politically primitive), and Stein gets 12 percent.

My question is "What happens to Washington's 11 electoral votes if no candidate has a majority?" What happens if a similar situation arises in Oregon? or even California?

I don't know the answer, but it's worth a shot.

There must be some way to put a stumbling block in front of the Obama re-election machine, which is rolling along happily at this point like a puppy in a roomful of rubber balls.

4 comments:

Joe said...

Sadly, someone, who has gotten so elevated class-wise, has very likely crushed a lot of heads there.

©∂†ß0X∑® said...

It goes with the territory these days.

Ethan Bradford said...

I believe that the state's electoral college votes go to the candidate with a plurality of the votes; a majority isn't required. That came up in Ohio last campaign and in Florida the one before that.

However, if no candidate has a majority of the electoral college votes, then the election is decided by the House of Representatives, and they have no obligation to respect the national vote at all in their choice of president; they could pick somebody who didn't even run.

So do you want to risk putting the choice of the next president to the current House?

If Romney wins, it will be a disaster for an issue that is apparently also dear to you: global warming. Our only hope on that would be that he's a smarmy weasel who's just claiming not to believe the evidence to pander to his base. But the house could just as well pick Michelle Bachman...

©∂†ß0X∑® said...

Ethan, I believe you're right in all details, and that it would take something like an even three-way split to throw a state's electoral slate into disarray, and even then they'd likely find a legal way to distribute their votes.

The House of Reps, of course, could choose Katy Perry to be president, if she's old enough.