I thought it was rare for candidates to win without the popular vote. However, we are seeing it twice within 8 years: Obama is going to win the nomination without holding the majority of votes. Fortunately, this is the nomination, and not the election. But there is so much Obama fanfare here in Silicon Valley that I don’t hear anyone complaining. Regardless of who you voted for – doesn’t this bother you? Maybe you think Michigan voters don’t deserve to vote?
Mike,
Are you indicating that in order to be a valid candidate or, in the case of the President, the candidate must win the popular vote to be valid?
If you are I’d like to remind you that our Federal system of government is not a democracy, which is majority decides, but instead a republic, which is representative government. And there are differences between the two.
And I remind you that the President of the United States is not directly elected by popular vote. The electoral college actually elects the President and Vice President.
So, does it bother me? No it does not. Until we change the Constitution we should realize that the majority doesn’t decide who is elected President.
What does bother me and should bother all good citizens is the miserable voter turnout for elections. There are so many people that complain about our government officials, yet they don’t go out and participate in self government by casting a vote.
And yes, I think that the Michigan democratic party members don’t deserve to have their vote count. Why? Because the state party leaders defied the National Democratic party by holding their primary when they were told not to. I wonder if most people actually understand how national and state political parties are actually ran. And I wonder if most people in the US actually understand that the National Democratic and National Republican parties can nominate their candidates in any manner that they deem appropriate, with or without a popular vote. The popular vote is important, but other things go into the process that people need to understand.
I do, of course, know how the representative system works.
In this case, however, it has nothing to do with Federal Law. This has to do with the rules of the Democratic Party. It is the Democratic Party’s rules at play here – and it is the Democratic Party that is ignoring Michigan.
No matter how you slice it – there is a small group of people in control of the Democratic Party deciding they want Obama. If that same group wanted Clinton, they’d add in the Michigan votes and we’d have Clinton.
The rules should have been set prior to the race. But they were changed during and after the regional elections (witness Florida/Michigan). As such, it is clear that Democratic Party Leaders are deciding who they want – not who the public wants. And if that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, I’m not sure what would.
It doesn’t scare the crap out of me. I’ve understood for a very long time that decisions such as these have and always been made by a small subset of the elected party representatives.
It is the way the party system is ran. The leaders of the National Democratic Party and each state democratic party are duely elected by the members of those parties. Those people don’t represent the desires of the whole party or the majority. In fact, one could say that the leaders of the two party system represent what they think is best for each party to maintain power and to get their candidates elected.
How much does it cost you to register as a Democrate or Republican or Liberatarian? Abosolutely nothing. The reason for this is that when you vote you are giving your individual power to the party who will represent you in and place the most electicable candidate on into the general election.
The people at the top of the party do indeed make the rules and can change those rules if they desire. MI and FL state parties went against the National Party and got slapped down for it. If I lived in those two states and was a registered member of the Democratic Party and I cared about the whole bag of crap, I could either do something about within the party or change to another party or start my own party.
And by the way, even if Hillary had the MI and FL delegates she still didn’t have enough to beat Obama. And yes, the rules were set prior to the primaries. The leaders of the Democratic Party only recently tried to come to a middle ground about the delema and decided to give MI/FL have a vote at the national convention. One would say that they set the rules, MI/FL broke the rules and then the National Party leaders tried to deal with it.
If you think the Democrats have goofy rules, the Republican “winner takes all delegates” system is even dumber.
And the Liberatarians? How they choose their canadate is even more goofy.
I don’t like everything about our system, but we’ve been doing this for a couple of hundred years now and generally it works well. Yea, the 2000 thing didn’t go very well, but our system of goverment continued and we didn’t fall into anarchy or the likes.
You know, there’s no perfect system. But I do believe we have one of the best in the world and that keeps me from being scared. If we were in China, that would scare the crap out me for sure.
At the end of the day, you are saying you think it’s okay to have your vote overridden by the party. I’m not here to change your mind; just to discuss the facts.
I think it’s funny that you say, “the 2000 thing didn’t go very well”, and yet you are happy with this one. It’s the same thing. This one might be worse because Democratic officials are tweaking the rules on the fly. (e.g. if they wanted Clinton to win, they could have accepted MI/FL, but they did not, so they did not!)
I also think its funny that you say, “If we were in china, that would scare the crap out of me.” Effectively this means you trust the Democratic leaders to tweak your vote, but not for Chinese leaders. Okey dokey! 🙂
Last comment on this I promise…
I’m not an Obama or Clinton supporter – I could actually care less who is nominated.
The MI/FL State Democratic Party Leadership violated the National Party’s directive on when they could and could not hold their primaries. Therefore, the National Party sanctioned the state parties. Yes, the National Party could have accepted the results, but how fair would that have been to Obama since he wasn’t on the FL ballot and he didn’t campaign in MI? To make people “feel” good the National Party recently decided to seat all the delegates, but only give them half of their votes, which is an attemp to make people feel good, not to change the results of the process.
My reference to 2000 was to simply state how the recount process became so politicized and turned into a fiasco. From everything I’ve read on that election post audits by both republican and democratic based organizations showed that Bush did indeed win.
Never the less, my bottom line is that like you, I think that the rules should be set prior to a competition and then adhered to. In this case, MI/FL violated the rules first and they alone are responsible for their actions. The National Party should have stuck to their guns to start with and not even entertained seating any delegates after the fact.