It would not be surprising if the most important single primary in 2008 takes place in California. But don’t look for it to be the presidential primary on Super-Duper Tuesday Feb. 5. Look instead to the state primary on June 3, up to now a low-profile event that could become fraught with significance if some California Republicans succeed in getting a highly controversial proposition on the ballot.
If successful, it would ensure the party’s nominee 20 or so electoral votes from California next fall, even if the GOP candidate loses the state for the fifth straight election. And if the 2008 election is as close as the last two been have been, that could be enough to keep the White House in Republican hands.
The political weapon of choice for the GOP is a plan that would distribute electoral votes to congressional district winners (one per district, plus two to the statewide winner of the popular vote) instead of the winner-take-all format that nearly every state currently favors. The plan was submitted as a ballot proposal to California election officials in July by a law firm that has represented the state Republican Party.
The district plan has been employed for years by two small states, Maine and Nebraska, with results consistently the same as winner-take-all. But if the plan were applied in California in 2004, the state’s electoral vote would have shifted dramatically–from 55-to-0 for Democrat John Kerry (a 10 percentage point winner in the state’s popular vote) to 33-to-22 Kerry, with Bush taking one electoral vote for each of the 22 congressional districts that he carried.
In one swoop, Bush would have won more electoral votes in California than he did in capturing the highly-priced battleground state of Ohio (worth 20 electors).
And in one instant, the nationwide electoral vote tally would have shifted in Bush’s favor from 286-to-251 (with one “faithless” Democratic elector in Minnesota) to a more commanding 317-to-221. The district plan would have transformed Bush’s narrow Electoral College victory–where Kerry could have won the election by taking Ohio–into a decisive triumph.
If applied nationally over the last generation, the district plan would have reversed the outcome of the 1960 election, electing Richard Nixon rather than John F. Kennedy, would have produced a 269-to-269 electoral vote tie between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976, and would have consistently tightened the Electoral College outcomes in every presidential election from 1960 to the end of the 20th century–with the winning candidate losing electoral votes and the losing candidate gaining some each time.
However, in both 2000 and 2004, the district plan would have actually expanded George W. Bush’s electoral vote margins–from a razor-thin five in 2000 to 38, and from 35 in 2004 to 96.