Well, we have just passed the milestone of 2024’s first election, the Republican Iowa Caucus. In this, Donald Trump, despite being the incumbent president (as far as his Party is concerned) only got 51 percent of the total vote, though that was still 10 percent more than his two main challengers combined, Ron DeSantis at 21 percent and Nikki Haley at 19. The remaining 9 percent was held mostly by Vivek “I’ve Got A Timeshare In Florida That I Would Love to Sell YOU” Ramaswamy, and once he realized how things would play out in a real election, Ramaswamy quickly suspended his presidential campaign.
So there’s that much good news. The bad news is that this makes Ramaswamy the leading candidate to be Trump’s running mate. The good news is that being Trump’s running mate makes one the prime target for assassination by fellow Republicans if (when) Trump loses the general election.
And just Sunday, DeSantis himself suspended his campaign after deciding to not even bother going to New Hampshire. So now Haley is thought to have a better chance of upsetting things in the New Hampshire primary, which is open to non-Republicans, and might also have a chance in her home state of South Carolina, although it’s doubtful this will do more than slow Trump’s path to Party nomination.
But the margins of the discussion, like, the fact that New Hampshire is an open primary and Iowa is closed to non-party members, or the fact that Democrats didn’t have a caucus yet because that Party moved its primary schedule, get to a point that explains a lot of what is wrong with our current election system. It’s the fact that the process is decided more by party officials than by state or federal governments. And this will cause conflicts between party and government when the government decides to set a standard.
It already has. In Nevada, a primary is mandated by state law (passed in 2021, largely to counter the clusterfucks of the last two national elections), to take place this year on February 6. But while the Democratic Party has dropped the caucus format and gone with the state primary, the Republican Party has decided to stick with their caucus on February 8, probably because the primary election process also includes mail ballots, which current Republican dogma holds are the work of the Devil, or worse, Dr. Fauci. So Republicans are able to vote in both contests, but the state party has dictated that only votes from the caucus will count, and candidates who run in the primary will not be eligible to run in the caucus. Naturally, Trump is running in the caucus.
In the Colorado Supreme Court case that is now scheduled for the US Supreme Court, the State of Colorado had ruled Trump ineligible to run for president in his party’s primary on 14th Amendment grounds. The Nevada case is the exact opposite, where the state Republican Party (that is, Trump) said, “No, we’re not going to be in the party primary, because we don’t acknowledge the state position as valid.”
Nor is this strictly a Republican-created issue. As mentioned, Iowa no longer has Republican and Democrat primary/caucus elections on the same day, because the national Democratic Party decided to rearrange the primary schedule because unlike Republicans they didn’t want rural white folks in Iowa and New Hampshire to be the primary representatives of their party. Naturally, the status-conscious people in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t like that. Iowa had its Democratic caucus moved to the same day as the Nevada primary while the primary in South Carolina (where Biden really sealed the primary race in 2020) goes before both of them. So, New Hampshire, where state law apparently dictates that it hold the nation’s first primary, is still supposed to be holding its primary for both major parties on January 23, and because of the disagreement the incumbent president’s name will not be on the Democratic ballot. “The state’s attorney general is accusing the DNC of voter suppression and sent the organization a cease-and-desist letter last week that threatened further legal action.” Conversely, the Democratic National Committee will not count the delegates from New Hampshire just as the Republican National Committee will not count votes from their Nevada state primary.
The fact that state parties generally set the standards for nominating ballot candidates gives the Supreme Court an out in the Colorado case, and potentially rule that since that is the precedent, each state can decide for itself what rules to set and which candidates to approve. But that gets into the point that the President is the only office where voters across the country vote in one race, yet by our Electoral College system, the results are determined on a state-by-state level, and so barring a candidate in some states but not others would hurt their chances in the Electoral College (however unlikely it is Trump could win Democrat-majority Colorado). And as Trump’s lawyers stated to the Supreme Court (in a rare valid point) :“A ruling that reverses the Colorado Supreme Court while remaining agnostic on President Trump’s eligibility … will only delay the ballot-disqualification fight”.
Milblogger Jake Broe (a Nevada resident) has said that he switched from registered independent to Republican just to vote in the Nevada caucus and vote for Nikki Haley because that’s the only way we’re going to have a Republican party that supports Ukraine. Which I frankly think is naive. Because I remember when I switched from Libertarian to Democrat in 2016 just to vote in the Nevada caucus for Bernie Sanders, because if the Republican Party was going to nominate Trump, we damn well needed someone other than Hillary Clinton to be his opponent. Well, Hillary’s people had other plans. I posted on Facebook in real time about the shenanigans they pulled at the Clark County Democratic Party convention to keep the Bernie people from getting a majority vote, only to fail after dragging things out till near midnight, only to succeed in the end at the state convention in Las Vegas: “The rules specifically (laid) out that all convention votes must be done by voice vote, and that only the convention chair can declare the winner or call for a more specific method of voting among the thousands of delegates. During the vote the convention chair, Roberta Lange accepted the “yeas” even though the “nays” were louder than the “yeas” in the room. Both preliminary and final delegate counts showed that Clinton supporters outnumbered Sanders supporters in the room, though many Sanders delegates had left after Lange’s decision and did not stay to be counted in the final count. When Lange accepted the “yeas”, some Sanders supporters confronted Lange and other members of the party’s executive board on the main stage. The event was quickly shut down after that. Casino spokeswoman Jennifer Forkis said the event ran over its allotted time by about four hours, meaning security hired for the event would soon leave their shifts. “Without adequate security personnel, and in consultation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and event organizers, a decision was made that it was in the best interest of everyone in attendance to end the event,” Forkis said in a statement.”
Why am I STILL voting for Democrats after that crap? Because Republicans are more crooked and less reasonable than THAT.
The whole POINT of this year’s Republican caucus is specifically to thwart the popular will and get the guy the party fanatics want. That is basically what all caucuses are about, because they are more convenient for the political fan clubs and people with time on their hands as opposed to regular folks with jobs and kids.
And that is a big part of why this country’s political system is as screwed up as it is. In the Republican Party especially, you can’t get to the general election without being the biggest whacko, which either undermines the party’s chances in the general election, or ensures that the seat will be taken by a whacko. Even in the Democratic Party, the obvious self-dealing machinations of the presidential nomination process, especially in 2016, helped alienate a lot of voters that the party really needed and may need even more now.
Because the fact of the matter is, any political system that forces us to choose between the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is already broken. If you seriously tell people that the only way they can avoid fascist dystopia is to vote for Hillary Clinton, well, don’t be surprised if you get the result you got in 2016. I personally think Joe Biden is an infinitely better choice than Clinton and even she would be infinitely better than Trump. But partisan programming means that the kind of people who base their identity on being “conservative” or Republican or “Christian” means that they would never vote for a Demonrat, which means that they would vote for a three-headed Chaos mutant who eats babies (said mutant would also be infinitely better than Trump) regardless of their qualms, rather than vote independent or stay home – and even though non-Republicans with conscience and forethought who don’t like the Democrat for whatever reason would rather vote for an independent or stay home.
Which is why we need various steps to reform – or give an enema to – the federal government. Such as child-proofing the White House to make it explicit that the FBI can investigate and prosecute a President who is suspect in crimes and to make it explicit that the President and other executive officials are “officials” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. We also need to standardize election laws on a national level, at least for federal offices. And a big part of that is making sure that the election process is decided and regulated by governments, not by state parties with ulterior motives or bias. Otherwise you keep what we have now: instead of a party structure that facilitates the working of government, we have a government that exists to facilitate the establishment parties. And the results of that are all around us.