My political conspiracy theory
I do my best to avoid politics on this site because it’ll always piss someone off. I don’t like the bible-thumping direction the republican party has taken over the past decade or two, and I can’t stand the democrats demands that we give up personal freedoms to save the children.
I’m gonna talk about politics today because I’ve noticed something happening that’s so surreal I had to say something. I’ll use the names Candidate A, B, etc to represent the players in this little scenario.
After watching how the Michigan and Florida democratic primaries went down, I started to wonder if maybe there was an underlying conspiracy to guarantee those delegates to a certain candidate. Imagine the following scenario:
- Candidate A has supporters in a position of power that helps move the state’s primary forward on the primary schedule against party rules.
- Candidate A has connections in The Party that disqualifies the state and have it’s delegates stripped in punishment.
- Candidates make a pact not to campaign in the state. All act ashamed of the State’s behavior.
- Candidates B,C,D, and E remove themselves from the ballot in deference to party rules, while Candidate A leaves their name on the ballot.
- Candidate A gets the lion share of votes in the state since they’re not only the only one on the ballot, but any votes for names not on the ballot (B,C,D,E) are thrown out.
- After everything is said and done, Candidate A petitions for the state’s delegates to be reinstated, essentially saying “the citizens shouldn’t be punished for the actions of their leadership”.
- Candidate A’s connections in The Party change their minds and decide to reinstate the delegates, essentially handing over the delegates to Candidate A with no competition.
- The delegates handed over to Candidate A is enough to give them enough to get the nomination for the party.
We’ve seen everything except the last two steps. The sane thing would be for the democratic party to have a “redo” on their election and make it fair for all candidates. Anything less will be bad news.
I am curious to see how this turns out- I think that if this does play out like I’ve outlined and the American public figures it out, there’s a good chance the resulting disillusionment will result in a republican president.
Sunday 17 Feb 2008 | Jesse Morgan | Jerks, Rant
Since we’re going by letters, I’ll use the same…
The fundamental problem with your scenario is that conventional wisdom had Candidate A running alone as the presumptive nominee by this point in the Democratic primaries. Candidates B through E weren’t even supposed to be a factor any longer.
IF that wisdom had played out, the seating of the MI and FL delegations wouldn’t have been an issue. They simply wouldn’t have been needed to push Candidate A over the bar, so they’d have been seated and no one would have cared.
From my reading of the DNC funding numbers, they don’t have enough money to run caucuses, so they’re asking the states to fund them. At least in MI, the Governor is a Candidate A supporter, so you probably won’t see a new caucus happen (why take the chance?). I haven’t looked at FL closely to see how things are aligned there.
Frankly, the MI Democrats are ending up with exactly what they deserve here. They knew what the punishment for moving up the primary was going to be but they did it anyway hoping to push the national committee into accepting an early MI vote to “get our voices heard”.
How’s that working out for them?
In the end, I think the superdelegate question is going to be far more interesting than whether the MI and FL delegations get seated. Can the Democratic party possibly stomach the possibility that the winner of the popular vote loses to the winner of the delegate vote? After 2000, it’d be high comedy!