Wednesday, January 16, 2008

ARE POLITICAL PARTIES RATIONAL SELF-INTERESTED ACTORS? (Note: This post is, and all comments should be, certified 100% ideology-free.) Something is bugging me about this election season -- it's that neither party seems like it wants to win (I'm referring, of course, to the Democrats and the Republicans, and not to the Greens and the We-Call-Ourselves-Libertarians and the United-We-Stands and the Naders, who pretty much include not winning as part of their core platform). Right now we go from state to state, letting every voter with a party affiliation (or without one, in an open-primary state) have a roughly proportional say in who the nominee will be. It's so nice and so democratic, and thoroughly suboptimal.

Let's say I am a fat cat with a lot of juice among the party decisionmakers. When I get them all together in my cigar-smoke-filled back room and after plying them with scotch and slush funds, here's the pitch I make: There are states we're going to win no matter who we run, and there are states we're going to lose no matter who we run. Voters in those two states should have no say in who we nominate. The voters who should decide our nominee are the ones in Ohio and Florida and New Mexico, who could go either way and who will decide the general election, not the ones in Utah and California and Tennessee and Washington State and New York. So let's rig the process so that the battleground states pick our nominee.

In other words, democracy schmemocracy. We've got an election to win. What (apart from whining about fairness and donor-stroking, and also an annoying likelihood that this will result in more centrist candidates) is wrong with this?

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