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About once every 6 months or so, I write about a national issue, so excuse my derivation from the normally Newport-centric topics– but I think you’ll like this.
Last night, Trump won the election in Indiana, prompting Ted Cruz to drop from the race. This leaves Trump vs Kasich and no matter which way you cut this one, Trump is going to win the Republican nomination even if he stops campaigning right now. UPDATE: Kasich dropped; Trump is the only one remaining.
Bernie won against Hillary, bringing his total up to 1,400 vs her 1,682… but that’s not where it gets interesting.
It gets interesting in a little ole document called the 12th Amendment.
Back in the start of our great nation, the vice president was the runner-up in vote-getting for the electoral college. This sounds good in theory because it gives balance to the Whitehouse, but in reality, it led to bitter divisiveness, backstabbing, and a constant threat knowing that in knowing what the other guy knows: if you die, he takes your spot, and then can institute his own policies. Feel safe?
It also created the situation where there could be a “tie”– which happened with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr (Jefferson wound up winning through some… “interesting convincing tactics”).
The 12th Amendment was passed to prevent this from happening again, and from then on, people would run as a slate with their presidential and vice-presidential picks, and whoever won the majority of the electoral votes wins both the presidency and vice-presidency. Sounds good, right? Except one slight problem: If you need to win not just the MOST votes, but MOST OF of the votes.
For instance:
Candidate 1 – 32%
Candidate 2 – 32%
Candidate 3 – 36% — this person wins the MOST votes, but is not over 50%, so they still don’t win MOST OF the votes.
This, obviously, necessitates a two-party system. Because if a strong third-party decided to run, they would split the vote into roughly thirds and prevent any candidate from reaching more than 50% of the vote.
So what happens if we run two candidates against each other like Hillary and Trump– both who have extremely high negative ratings (I’m not picking fights here, just citing the numbers)? A strong third-party could emerge.
Right now, the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is already polling at 11%, and if Sanders runs as a third-party, he could also gain a huge chunk of the vote. So what then? What if nobody gets more than 50%? The current-House (not the newly-elected House) appoints a president from the top 3 vote-getters from the Electoral College.
Let’s play out some hypotheticals:
First, the House is currently Republican-controlled, so we can safely bet that they won’t be appointing Bernie, should this come down the nitty-gritty 12th-Amendment. But would they choose Hillary over Trump? Or would they choose a Libertarian over Trump? That could quite possibly be the final question. Here are the options:
1) If the Republicans choose Trump, the Establishment will lose all control– but some of the integrity of the GOP’s internal processes would remain in their classical sense, “intact”.
2) If they choose a Libertarian candidate, they can at least go back to claiming to be “small government”, but they would lose their credibility when it comes to enforcing religious-law.
3) If they choose Hillary, then the Establishment can still have someone to talk to who is friendly, but the party would face a near-certain collapse.
It could be a very interesting election cycle, and I look forward to seeing how the Democratic nominations shake out, and also look forward to watching the polls for the Libertarian candidate. This is the first time they’ve been over 1%– and they’re at 11%. Is this a fluke, or a change of tides?
I can think of nothing more interesting to watch.
(I highly recommend watching this video to visualize how our voting system necessitates a two-party system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&feature=youtu.be)
