- The winning party gets automatic access to the runoff
- The other candidates face off in a first round, where the winner goes to the runoff

This would be interesting!

I should be unhappy and frustrated. There were eight candidates at the start, and the two remaining competitive candidates were my fifth and eighth choices. Yet I am excited. I am about to go cast a vote that I feel is both sincere and will count, in a way in which few votes I have ever cast in my life have counted.

Interestingly, with the passing of the House of Bush from the presidential scene (this being only the second quadrennial election in 32 years where no George Bush will get any votes in the Electoral College), not only that era but a chain stretching back to Reagan, or even arguably Goldwater, will have ended. For as Reagan handed the sceptre he’d received from Goldwater to GHW Bush, who in turn bequeathed it (or, perhaps, who saw it devolve upon intestacy) to GW Bush, now with Cheney’s “nolo presidere” and Dubya’s neutrality in the 22008 GOP primary contest, the sword has been cemented back into the stone… so to speak.

Overlapping with the Goldwater/ Reagan ascendancy within the GOP was, of course, that of RM Nixon, who seems to have left no heir (who will acknowledge that heirship), but who – if my calculations are correct – would have received more Electoral Votes (either for President in 1960, 1968 or 1972) or for Veep (in 1952 and 1956) than anyone else in the history of the Republic, not excluding FDR.

[*] My understanding is that California wasn’t all that liberal when Reagan first took over in 1966. Is this correct? All I can name OTTOMH among the preceding Governors is Earl Warren and Pat Brown, ie, a centrist GOP and a centrist Democrat.

And the de jure equivalent of mortality, ie, term limits.

I was recently thinking how Dubya’s legacy – like that of another famous conqueror of Mesopotamia, 2,300 years ago – has been split four ways, with no one of the four the obvious successor.

Richard Winger of Ballot Access News has found this gem in the Chicago Tribune. When I was a student in Chicago (a long time ago) the Trib was one of the most right-wing papers in America. Might still be true, so this might not be the whole, unbiased story of Obama’s political good fortune.

The decision rule has been something like: (1) Gravel or Kucinich (with various complicated rules for resolving that choice) for expression of sincere policy preference (especially on political reform); (2) Edwards on sincere delegate-preference grounds; (3) Obama on sincere grounds of a candidate’s projected use of the presidential office for persuasion.

Every two years, he will ask 1 million citizens nationwide to participate in Citizen Congresses combining local town halls with the latest technology to create true national discussions, unfiltered by interest groups. Americans will discuss the challenges and trade-offs facing our country and offer advisory opinions to leaders.

Why does this remind me of the elaborate acclamations staged by every modern dictator?

I have never seen systematic data on the frequency of (non-) Duvergerian outcomes in US primaries for non-presidential races.

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* Consider this year’s rules for the California Democratic presidential primary, for example.

The easy answers is that the Democrats now allot delegates proportionally, so one wouldn’t expect Duverger’s Law to hold.

But more importantly, the primaries aren’t repeated contests between parties. Instead individuals are competing, which for a number of reasons can’t work quite the same way–mortality being the most obvious. There are ways that Duverger’s Law could still be made to apply, but under conditions different from those in the US right now:

* If a party were composed of multiple well-defined sub-groups, the number of such groups might be expected to decline to two. But in the US, intra-party interest groups are much too amorphous and not very good at massing their support behind a single candidate.

* If the top candidates could maintain their high profile between primary cycles, and were inclined to anoint successors when they retired, then these dynasties could substitute for the “parties” or Duverger’s Law. In parliamentary systems, especially within a perpetually ruling party, this is quite plausible. But in recent years Americans seem to view losers of presidential elections as somehow tainted and no longer viable, so I see this as especially unlikely in the US.