Posted on 09/19/2004 11:49:50 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Saturday night I met Michael Graham at the NRO Party. Exceptionally smart guy. He's got a scarily plausible theory about what the Democrats could do if things look grim in October.
So - presume, for the purposes of this theory, that some significant scandal comes out of Max Cleland's comments that he briefly spoke with alleged CBS memo source Bill Burkett.
Suppose that the Democratic National Committee's "Operation Fortunate Son" attack ads and press conferences were organized as a result of the CBS memos. Suppose the Kerry campaign sees these memos from Burkett, thinks they are fake, but decides to pass them along to CBS anyway and to launch a DNC ad campaign based on them.
(All of this, I remind you, is speculation.)
Suppose Kerry is tainted by the memo, and the whole thing crushes his chances. His poll numbers plummet around the country. By October, he looks like he's on his way to a Dukakis-Mondale style blowout. Worse, he's dragging down Senate candidates in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Colorado, etc. The Democrats face an election day with even worse losses in the House.
Would the Democratic party dump Kerry, and bring in some other candidate at the last minute?
Michael decided to figure out just what it would take to do this.
Apparently, not much. A simple majority of the Democratic National Committee could vote to replace its nominee. According to Disinfopedia:
While anyone who is registered to vote as a Democrat is a member of the Party, there are 440 members of the Democratic National Committee. The National Committee has 9 elected officers: The Chair, five Vice Chairs, Treasurer, Secretary, and National Finance Chair.
"Membership on the National Committee is composed of individuals selected by the Democratic Party organizations in each state (including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico), the U.S. Territories (American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands), and Democrats living outside the United States and those Territories listed above (Democrats Abroad).
"Each jurisdiction is represented by its Chair and the next highest ranking officer of the opposite sex. An additional 200 votes are distributed to the states and territories based on population, with each receiving a minimum of two additional seats. Each delegation must be equally divided between men and women.
"Also seated on the DNC are representatives of various Democratic constituencies and elected officials. These include two U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives, two members of the College Democrats, and three representatives each from the Democratic Governors, Mayors, State Legislators, County Officials. Municipal Officials, Young Democrats, and the National Federation of Democratic Women. Fifty members are appointed by the DNC Chairmen, and approved by the DNC, and are considered 'Members-at-Large.'
So all it would take would be for 221 members of the DNC to agree it’s time to replace Kerry. The closest precedent to this is the post-convention replacement of Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern's running mate, with Sargent Shriver in 1972.
Would a majority of those folks vote to dump Kerry if he seemed to be a McGovern-style disaster in the making?
Probably not. For starters, there's no easy choice to replace him. Hillary Clinton appears to be laying the groundwork for 2008. The party could bump up Edwards, or bring in two new guys.
The advantage for the Dems would be that all of the anti-Kerry efforts of the GOP and conservative groups - all the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ads, all the flip-flop jokes, all the "I voted for it before I voted against it" — all of that would get wiped off the table. And if things are looking so horrifically grim, the point of the last-minute switch wouldn't be to win, it would be to make it respectable.
It's like pulling a struggling quarterback in the fourth quarter of a rout, and hoping that the backup QB can at least make the score look respectable when time runs out.
The problem for the Democrats is that there isn't any universally-respected safe alternate. You would need someone acceptable to the Deaniacs, yet that the country could trust in the war on terror.
This isn't likely, and it's just a theory. But if radio talk show host and NRO contributor Michael Graham has thought of this and looked into it... it's probably a safe bet some DNC lawyer has looked into it.
I bet they have. Dumping Ketchup Boy would look like a move of total desperation. They're already looking ahead to 2008.
I think it would be great if this happened, (The Dim party would be finished for this year.), but it will never happen.
Realistically, the idea of a dump Kerry in October maneuver doesn't work. By that time, a significant percentage of the electorate will have already cast absentee ballots. What're you going to do? Count votes for Kerry/Edwards as votes for Player-To-Be-Named-Later/Edwards? Think the Dims can afford to concede that many potential votes?
The field is set; the players are in motion. This is the reality we will face in November. Speculation of this sort is just an unnecessary distraction.
Yeah, but even assuming a Kerry replacement scenario, some of the state ballots are already pretty much locked in at this point in time. Absentee ballots are starting to be shipped out and early voting will take place shortly in a number of states (if it hasn't already).
Fortunately, there aren't 50 NJ Supreme Courts out there, which would be willing to allow a Toricelli-type switch to happen.
I don't think the Dims could make a switch right now without making it more of a disaster for them than it is already.
Yeah, but even assuming a Kerry replacement scenario, some of the state ballots are already pretty much locked in at this point in time. Absentee ballots are starting to be shipped out and early voting will take place shortly in a number of states (if it hasn't already).
Fortunately, there aren't 50 NJ Supreme Courts out there, which would be willing to allow a Toricelli-type switch to happen.
I don't think the Dims could make a switch right now without making it more of a disaster for them than it is already.
I don't think it would be legal to say that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the new candidate. The vote would have to be explicitly for the new candidate.
Absentee ballots will be going out soon. Just this past Friday, the Florida Supreme Court decided on the Nader question because the deadline to mail out absentee ballots was the next day.
-PJ
As long as the campaign is "anybody but Bush" I guess anybody would do.
Too funny....just makes the entire democratic organization look like a jigantic FLIP-FLOPPER.
They should have nominated Howard Dean in the first place. It sucks to be a Democrat when you bet on the wrong horse.
There must have been some heavy drinking at this party the writer mentions.
Congratulations, John Kerry. You make Fritz Mondale and Mike Dukakis look like serious contenders.
Dean people suck. Nice people [redacted in the name of good "taste".]
There has already been one race where the court ordered that new absentee ballots had to be mailed in order to include Nader.
While it's hard to imagine there would be any strategy helping the as-yet-to-be-designated-Dem-candidate win the Presidency. The possibility of duplicate absentee ballots floating around has got to make some Dems eyes light up for the possibility of duplicate voting for their favorite Senator and Congressman. :)
Can't happen... The time for them to do this was before the Sept. 2nd or 3rd deadline to register a candidate for the Presidential election.
So unless they registered someone else as a backup... they're not going to do it.
Legally, their only hope to pull a switch is to promise that John Kerry will resign immediately after his inauguration, and John Edwards would take his place as President. John Edwards, for some unknown reason, is more popular than Kerry. (Probably because nobody really knows anything about him. The focus has been so much on the two Presidential candidates.
Someone here on FR explained it that when you cast a vote,you're actually voting for the person as a representative of the party,and therefore if there was a switch,the votes already cast would still go to the (new) representative of the party,kind of like the electoral college.
True, but someone will ramble on soon, that this is how Hillary Clinton plans to run this year (forget the fact that in addition to the party, she would need her own election aparatus and organization, something at the moment she doesn't have, but will be developing after the election). Kerry is gonna tank this year.
If the dems did do this, whoever ran in Kerry's place becomes damaged good, and would be a sacrificial lamb, not to mention that this would set the democratic party back by about 4 or 5 years. They would have to worker harder then they can ever hope to, to convince people that the dem party is not to left wing and out of touch that its base automatically votes for left wing nuts.
Furthermore, the Florida and Missouri fiasco's were direct assaults on the legitimacy of U.S. elections. I think that the Dems would love to throw this election into some type of furor to (1) cast another shadow on the Bush win and (2) undermine faith in U.S. elections as preview of shenanigans in 2008 on behalf of Hillary.
Exactamente, the Clinton DNC wants Kerry to lose badly and Bush to be damaged goods.
I don't know what it would to the country, the Democrats, and the party system in general if the Democrats were to pull an election stunt this big, that is, on a national scale. They got away with it in New Jersey (Torricelli), Missouri (Carnahan), and Hawaii (Mink). Can they pull a switch like that at the national level without shaking the entire free election process to the core?
-PJ
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