With GOP frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney floundering in the debates and with the new queen of mean greatly outdistancing her liberal competition, the likelihood of a Republican capturing the White House in 2008 seems about as great as that of the Notre Dame football team making a bowl game.
But before we, as Republicans, gouge out our eyeballs and slit our wrists in anticipation of the longest four years of our lives, might I suggest that we turn our attention to California for a moment.
In late July, the law firm of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, acting under the direction of its managing partner Thomas W. Hiltachk, filed California ballot Initiative No. 07-0032—the Presidential Election Reform Act—which is aimed at ending the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner.
Under the initiative, should it pass, California would apportion two electoral votes to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner of each of its 53 congressional districts. This would mean that the 2008 Republican nominee would now have a shot at picking up in the neighborhood of 20 electoral votes in California in 2008 rather than zero. Such an electoral pickup would be roughly the equivalent of winning Ohio in 2004.
For those of you out there who might be inclined to argue that California Republicans are engaging in a Fantasia-like powerplay and that this initiative will never pass muster once California voters get wind of this, think again. Recent polling indicates that a sizeable portion of Californians are in favor of the initiative.
But wait a minute; wouldn’t it be unconstitutional if the California Election Code was altered so as to require that congressional votes be counted by congressional district? No, because, as The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg rightly notes, California would join Maine and Nebraska as the only other states who do not follow the winner-take-all policy of allocating electoral votes. The systems in place in those two states have yet to be successfully challenged.
Hey Democrats, don’t you just hate states’ rights? Not really, because you are currently trying to pull the same shenanigans in Republican controlled North Carolina after you failed miserably with a similarly tailored ballot initiative in Colorado in 2004.
So what’s next? Now that the California offices of the Secretary of State and the Attorney General have approved the language of the initiative, there is still a lot of work to be done before The Presidential Reform Act reaches California voters. First, the bill’s sponsors, Californians for Equal Representation, will have to collect the necessary 434,000 signatures from registered voters by February 4th in order for the measure to be placed on the ballot. Second, once on the ballot, California voters will then have a chance to vote the measure up or down next June 3rd.
Although the endeavor of collecting the needed signatures is going to cost Californians for Equal Representation a pretty penny, chances are it will be done. Why? Because the firm of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk has been involved in many well-financed ballot initiatives and public relations campaigns including the Swiftboaters. Once on the ballot, national attention will shift to California and things are likely to get ugly, as California law places no restrictions on the amount of money donors can spend on initiatives. In fact, opposition against this initiative has already started to mount. Liberal California moguls, such as Thomas F. Steyer of Farallon Capital Management, have already vowed to oppose it.
So stay tuned, because the fight for the White House in 2008 just got interesting, and it has nothing to do with the candidates.
With GOP frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney floundering in the debates and with the new queen of mean greatly outdistancing her liberal competition, the likelihood of a Republican capturing the White House in 2008 seems about as great as that of the Notre Dame football team making a bowl game.
