[EL] why Ned Foley should not advocate for a top-two presidential election system

[Hess, Doug]

In general, I don’t think we can infer much from the past election as it was odd and, more importantly, a new system would create very different dynamics in all kinds of ways.

To play devil’s advocate, however, why do you think this is true: “No way would the country stand for a general election for president between two members of the same major party, and no one representing the other major party.”  If people voted (to use your example, even though flawed), 30million people voted for two Democrats. Ten million more than Cruz+Trump; how is that illegitimate?

I can imagine a Clinton vs Sanders contest causing deep fractures in the Democrats and other results, and it is interesting to speculate about what dynamics would occur, but if the GOP or DEMs were to be the minority party nationwide, I don’t see this as a problem off the top of my head.

-Doug Hess


From: Richard Winger <richardwinger at yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2019 11:26 AM
To: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] why Ned Foley should not advocate for a top-two presidential election system

Rick Hasen links to Ned Foley's Politico article, which suggests having a September pre-general election to "clear the field of minor party and independent candidates" for the general election.


That system can easily backfire.  In 2016, this is the number of votes received nationwide in all the presidential primaries put together, for the top four contenders:


1. Hillary Clinton 17,121,492
2. Donald Trump 13,757,319
3. Bernie Sanders 13,210,266
4. Ted Cruz 7,452,020

These numbers are from America Votes 2016, pages 55 and 57.  Note the virtual tie between Trump and Sanders.  The system proposed might result in a general election with only two members of the same party on the ballot, and no one else.  The legitimacy of such an election would be utterly nil.  No way would the country stand for a general election for president between two members of the same major party, and no one representing the other major party.

This horrible outcome really did happen in California in 2012 in the 31st US House district, and also in reverse in California in 2018 in the 76th assembly district.  The 2012 US House race in the 31st district was between two Republicans, even though the district is strongly Democratic (it voted only 41% in Nov. 2012 for Mitt Romney, and only 41% for the Republican for US Senate.  The district is majority-minority.  But the voters were forced to elect a Republican in November against their will.  25% of the voters who cast a ballot left US House blank.  That's because 4 Democrats split up the Dem primary vote and the two Republicans came in first and second.

In 2018 the 76th Assembly district, a strongly Republican district, was forced to elect a Democrat, for the same reason.

Richard Winger 415-922-9779 PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20190112/9f21af5f/attachment.html>