Thursday, January 3, 2008

Rix Pix 2008 - Iowa

I ask my regular readers to bear with me - I keep my political interests mainly out of this blog, but I have a longstanding tradition of posting my election predictions, and why stop now? So here I go with my predictions for the Iowa caucuses. If you're not 'Murrican, you don't want to know why this matters.

Democrats -

3-way tie! Hillary-Obama-Edwards, in that order, but the order doesn't matter - it will be too close, and called too late, to go into the media spin machine as anything but a tie. I say a lot more about this here, but short form: The race has been incredibly stable for a year; why should it change now?

Republicans -

Romney
Huckabee

McCain

Thompson

Not that I really care about the GOP race, but Romney wins by dint of organization, and McCain scores a strong enough (no longer really) "suprise" 3rd to add to his already impressive mo into New Hampshire.

Thank you for your patience. Your regular blog will return shortly.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not a comment on politics, but I made a comment on your 2nd real post about 'Handwavium'.

Some blogs have a list of most recent comments, which is nice if someone has an interesting though on a months old post. Could that be added here?

Kedamono said...

This comment is on topic. :-)

One thing that the Iowa caucuses have done is show how ridiculous our "Winner-Take-All" system is. Senator Obama and Governor Huckabee are being lauded as having a mandate because of their wins.

Excuse me? 62% of the caucus voters said they didn't want Obama and 66% said they didn't want Huckabee!

I'm all for proportional representation as a method to help reduce the "tyranny of the majority". In this case, a majority of 30% +/- 5%. Reading up on how the Iowa Caucus works, it sounds as though they do divide up the delegates for the Democratic National Convention. In practice, any one deviating from the "chosen" candidate will be forced to back that candidate, even though their local caucus backed a different candidate.

Washington state, my current state of residence, has a broken system. We used to have a unified primary ballot, where you could vote for whoever you wanted to. But then the DNC and the RNC went to court and got rid of that. Now the RNC will hold caucuses for 49% of the primary vote and treat the primary vote as the other 51%. Excuse me, but that means some people get to vote twice.

The Dems will hold caucuses and ignore the primary vote.

The system is broken, and needs to be fixed.

My first fix would be to limit the campaign period to only 3 to 6 months before the election.

Second, there would be one national primary, where candidates get a proportional number of delegates based on the percentage of the primary vote that they get. (This is my second choice. I'd rather go with one of the instant runoff systems, such as the one where you list the candidates in order of best to worst. However, most of these systems require an informed, knowledgeable and educated voter... not likely in the USA.) This means that the national conventions are meaningful again. Where folks will have to make deals to get their man in office.

Lastly, make it a strictly popular vote, because in the end, the race for president is a popularity contest.

Any chance of this happening? Big goose egg chance.

And finally, I don't think Huckabee will be president. Just say it out loud: "President Huckabee" and don't tell me you don't giggle the first time you hear it. :-)

Anonymous said...

I think that instead of the current system, we should have candidates campane for their party's nomanation for 6 months,ending 6 months before the general election. Then have all Republicans, all Democrates, all who ever, all vote for the person they want for their party's candidate in the national election. I'm pretty sure my suggestion has about as much a chance of being adopted as Kedamono's. But, we can dream...
Ferrell Rosser

Anonymous said...

Sorry, wrong prediction. And yes, you will be assimilated. ;-)

Here is a diplomacy link:

http://www.theforvm.org/diary/weyland/game-barsanti-achtung

Bill White of Kos

PS: The FORVM is a left/right hybrid site.

Rick said...

Hi, everyone - catching up with here before posting my next wildly incorrect prediction.

I'll save discussion of our weird election system for another time - there's an alt/future history lesson in how strangely these things develop.

Jim - I'll have to look at the Blogger controls and see if there's any way to get recent comments shown. I get email, but that doesn't help anyone visiting!

Hi, Bill! Thanks for dropping by!