Texas Politics

Voting for President of - Ohio?


 

 

How can we get more attention paid to women’s issues in the presidential campaign in Texas?

The question came from a women’s studies student at Texas a&M University.

The answer is obvious to political pros: move to Ohio. Or one of the 10 or so other battleground states.

As of mid-October, $177 million had already been spent on TV ads in Ohio by the campaigns of Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, and the SuperPACs backing them. That was more than in any other state in the nation.

Between now and election day Tuesday, Nov. 6, it costs four times more to put a TV ad on the air in the Buckeye State than half a year ago.

“I feel like I’m voting for president of Ohio,” one Texan recently grumbled to a friend.

It was his way of observing that his vote for president in Texas is pretty much ignored by the campaigns, because it won’t make any real difference in who will occupy the White House the next four years.

Even though almost twice as many people will vote in the presidential race in Texas as in Ohio, and Texas has 38 electoral votes to Ohio’s 18, those states that conceivably could go either way get all the attention of the campaigns. And the advertising money.

In the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Obama got 43.7 percent of the Texas vote. Republican John McCain got 55.5 percent. A Libertarian and write-in candidates got 0.8 percent.

By comparison, in Ohio in 2008, Obama got 51.5 percent, McCain got 46.9 percent, and others got 1.7 percent.

Under the winner-take-all method used by every state but Maine and Nebraska to allocate their electoral college votes, both Obama and Romney camps presume Texas’ 38 electoral votes will go to Romney. One recent newspaper headline about the presidential campaign declared: “Rivals Wooing Swing States.” The truth is that the same headline probably could have been used every day for the past three or four weeks, and be mostly correct.

The occasional exception was demonstrated on Obama’s 48-hour whirlwind swing-state tour, where he stopped in Blue State California to tape Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” which reaches millions of viewers nationwide.

And another detour was to Blue State Illinois, his home — to cast his ballot early – and hope that his example would spur his supporters to do likewise, and not wait for election day to vote.

• • •

Electoral College Tie? . . . . It takes a majority of the 538 electoral college votes to elect a president. That is 270 votes.

But what happens in the unlikely but mathematically possible event of a 269-269 tie? Political statisticians have figured out there are 32 different groupings of swing states that could produce such a result.

If that were to happen, the U.S. House of Representatives would pick the next president. Each state’s congressional delegation would collectively have one vote.

The Senate would pick the vice president. Conceivably, the president could be Republican Romney, and the vice president could be Democrat Joe Biden.

If no one got a majority in the House for the presidential choice, the matter would go to the Senate. Should the Senate deadlock, the decision would move to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Just about every election cycle there are efforts to change the electoral college system, so that the campaigns have more incentive to compete nationwide. It was initially created as a compromise between those who wanted the popular vote nationally to be deciding, and those who wanted to let Congress choose the president.

So a system was worked out to have each state choose electors, who then would choose the president and vice president.

Some want the nation’s popular vote to be the decision maker. Proposals have been made that if states which together have more than 270 electoral votes agree to award their electors to the popular-vote winner, that would do it.

Another proposal would have other states join Maine and Nebraska in allocating electors by congressional district.

Under that system, the popular-vote winner in each congressional district gets one electoral vote, and the statewide winner gets two electoral votes – one for each of the state’s two senators.

Meanwhile, two suggestions:

Please, do not take this column about the political reality of the electoral college as an excuse not to vote. It’s your civic duty, and you’ll feel better about yourself, even if your choice doesn’t win the election.

Besides, if the winners of the electoral vote and the popular vote are different, as they were in 2000, your vote could help underline that problem.

Secondly, there are several other decisions to be made on down the ballot — for congressional, legislative and other races, plus in some jurisdictions bond issues, city charter questions, and even school district and community college boards.

DAVE McNEELY is political columnist. You may contact him at davemcneely111@gmail.com or (c edd512)458- 2963.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *