I think you forget the first rule of government – nothing gets undone – NOTHING.

Therefore, the damage done while waiting for the nation to learn its lesson cannot be effectively repaired. Better to go with the 50% deal than simply lose.

Also, you must realize there are not enough people inthe nation that agree with you (and me for that matter) for there to ever be an 80% – there just are not.

. . . most Republicans would rather see candidates who would have a poor chance of winning election as long as they agree with them on issues.

That’s a huge problem if it holds. One cannot build a coalition that way, and coalitions are how we win; how either party wins.

First of all, I love your blog. As far as analyzing the interrelationship of religion and politics, you guys are both right on.

Unfortunately, I feel you are a bit disconnected from the common conservative on “coalitions”. We used to play the coalition game (and you could say that that was when we “won”), but we got burned, and are done with big tent conservatism.

Reagan was right when he said that someone we agree with 80% of the time is our friend, not our enemy (or something like that). Unfortunately, there isn’t anyone that agrees with the traditional conservative agenda (or classic liberalism) 80% anymore. We only have big government conservatives and big government liberals. If we are going to talk percentages, it is like we have liberals who agree with us say 10% and conservatives who agree with us 30%.

I will take the liberal who no one can say represents me over the “conservative” who supposedly represents me in that case 100% of the time. And most American conservatives are starting to move that direction. It may cost us a few, maybe several elections. But when the American people see where it gets us, well maybe then we can find that 80% friend.

Indeed, why should Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have disproportionate weight in eliminating potential presidential candidates? Why not have the earlier primaries in states that have substantial and consistent Republican majorities in the general elections?

Another enemy of a rational election process is “winner take all” states that give all their convention votes to someone who ekes out a bare plurality in a field of 3 to 5 candidates, so that the winner gets delegate votes out of all proportion to his or her actual support by voters. The one thing that is certain in such an election is that the majority of Republican voters in that state did NOT vote for the “winner”. Why not allocate delegate votes in proportion to numbers?

The support for a direct popular vote is an invitation to make every close national eleciton into a Florida 2000 fiasco of vote hunting and potential fraud. By limiting presidential election decisions within each state, the incentive for fraud in states where one party holds a large majority, and runs the mechanism of elections, is decreased. And we don’t have to wait for tardy states that don’t have timely counts of their absentee ballots.

Even better, we can remove even more of the incentive for fraud and silly contestation of election results, and respond to the calls for more popular influence on presidential elections, by assigning electoral votes in each state to the congressional districts to which the votes correspond. Each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of members of the House of Representatives, plus its two Senators. By assigning each district its own electoral vote, there will be a strong correlation between House elections and presidential elections. Once that district’s vote is won in the presidential election, there is no incentive to gild the lily by seeking a recount that seeks more votes in that one district (essentially what Gore did in 2000 in Florida, seeking more votes in heavily Democratic counties). The two Senate electoral votes can be assigned to the winner of the most House districts, or if the House districts are evenly split, the two Senate votes can be split between the two winners of House districts. Only a district with a close vote will be one that would be a legitimate target of a recount.

This is a change that can be made by individual states by state legislation, without a national constitutional amendment. It would restore to a state like California the ability for the minority party to actually play in presidential elections, rather than their presidential votes being virtually stolen by giving the whole state’s electoral votes to the majority. It would make it worthwhile for candidates to campaign seriously in California again, and would be an incentive for people in the minority parties in each state to get involved in the presidential campaign, revitalizing their sense of real democracy. Indeed, presidential primaries would be more interesting and meaningful if delegates were assigned based on victories in individual congressional districts.