Dracula has risen from the grave.
Just when you think Dracula is dead, he rises again. He rises to prey, suddenly on the unsuspecting and unprepared — and suck their blood.
Now, just when Californians thought a widely-condemned and widely-characterized-as-partisan attempt to make California a special place where the usual rules of winner-take-all electoral college Presidential tallies would not apply was dead….it has arisen again.
With new fat-cat (Republican) financiers.
Its aim: to scuttle the winner-take-all electoral college vote distribution in California. Or, some believe, to suck the Democrats into battling it when it’s on the ballot as an initiative and to suck their financial resources so there will be fewer big bucks left for the general election, even if the initiative is beaten back.
Max Follmer writes in the Huffington Post:
Democratic Party activists responded with renewed concern Monday to the news that reports of the death of a GOP initiative to divide California’s electoral votes had been greatly exaggerated, and that a new round of financing from wealthy Republicans had resurrected the proposal.
The Republican proposal would alter the method of apportioning California’s 55 electoral votes, moving from a winner-take-all system based on the popular vote to one that awards one vote for each congressional district a candidate wins.
Such a plan would alter the political geography of the current presidential contest, shifting as many as 20 consistently Democratic electoral votes from safe Republican districts into the GOP column.
Party leaders in Washington and Sacramento moved quickly to launch a revived push to kill the initiative once and for all, setting up a new effort to challenge the legitimacy of the signatures being gathered to qualify the measure for the California ballot.
Opponents are also simultaneously laying the groundwork for an eventual legal fight over the constitutionality of the proposal.
The aggressive push back from Democrats reflects the deep concern throughout the party about the consequences of the California ballot initiative.
“I think Democrats should plan for the worst and hope for the best,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist spearheading the opposition to the GOP plan. “I don’t think Democrats can ever breathe easy in this campaign.”
Read it all.
Republican donors have given about $540,000 to help qualify a ballot measure that could give the 2008 GOP presidential candidate a bounty of electoral votes from California.
The group needs to gather about 650,000 valid signatures by the end of the month to qualify the measure for the June ballot. That effort will take at least $2 million, according to David Gilliard, who is managing the campaign.
Gilliard said the campaign has less because it has been raising money for just 10 days.
“A lot of the people on there are capable of contributing quite a bit more,” he said. “They’re also the types that are able to attract others.”
Darrell Issa, a wealthy Republican congressman from the San Diego area, gave $50,000, according to the fundraising report filed Tuesday with the secretary of state’s office.
Floyd Kvamme, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is supporting Rudy Giuliani for president, also gave $50,000. Jerrold Perenchio, the former head of Univision, gave the same amount.
Currently, California gives all 55 of its Electoral College votes to the statewide winner in the presidential race.
The proposal would change that so the statewide winner received two electoral votes and the rest were apportioned to the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts.
So far there is no word about whether these Republicans (and Republicans elsewhere in the country) are going to clamor for the same rule to ALSO be put into place in states such as:
–Texas
–Florida
–Michigan
–Ohio
–Wyoming
–Idaho
or any of the red states on THIS MAP.
The strong, civic desire to give voters a fair shake seems to be curiously restricted only to California (which coincidentally usually votes Democratic and has a lot of electoral votes) with big chunks of money for the initiative coming from (coincidentally) Republicans, including a Giuliani supporter (again, probably just happenstance).
Read our previous posts on this issue HERE
and HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.