Worst Political Advice Ever

[Ubiquitous]

Writing for the Daily Beast, Michael Medved advises the Romney campaign
to throw money away buying ads in states that he has little or no chance
of carrying. Seriously:

Though the Romney campaign will naturally resist investing
precious resources on lost-cause states with hugely expensive
media markets (California, New York, and Illinois), they should
overcome their reluctance.

Why? "To prevent the very real chance that Mitt Romney will win the
Electoral College even while losing the popular vote badly to Barack
Obama."

Medved's scenario is based on a scenario in which the election outcome is
roughly the same as in 2008, except that Romney swings "as few as 650,000
votes to [John] McCain's totals in just six decisive states." In these
circumstances, Obama would outpoll Romney nationwide by millions of votes
even while losing the election.

"It's easy to imagine the national levels of rage, and impossible not to
envision the president of the United States lending his voice to the
angry chorus," Medved writes:

In the five weeks before Dec. 17, the day when electors
formally assemble in their respective state capitals, the
president could push electors to shift support to him--even
if they defied state legislation requiring winner-take-all
distribution of electoral votes to the victor in that state
and ignored laws of 24 states threatening punishment to
"faithless electors." The arguments would be fiery and, most
likely, somewhat effective: insisting that basic fairness
and democratic principle should trump any concern over the
creaky, 19th-century relic known as the Electoral College.

We certainly wouldn't put it past Obama to be a sore loser, but this is
far-fetched on many grounds. For one, the speculation about faithless
electors is silly. Regardless of the national popular vote, electors are
partisans of the party that prevailed in their state; they have no
incentive to switch.

For another, presidential campaigns are national by nature, even though
focused on particular states. If Romney wins, he will almost certainly
improve on McCain's margins in most red states and cut into Obama's 2008
margins in most blue states as well as flipping some swing states. That's
what Obama did in 2008 compared with 2004, which is why he managed to
pick up some states (notably Indiana and North Carolina) that hadn't even
been swing states four years earlier. (Oddly, Medved doesn't advise
Romney to campaign hard in red states, even though a vote from a friendly
state counts just as much toward a "popular-vote victory" as one from an
unfriendly state.)

If Romney were to follow Medved's advice and campaign in states he can't
win or doesn't need, he would also increase the possibility of the
outcome Medved fears in reverse--i.e., that Obama wins the election while
Romney "wins the popular vote." Popular-vote divergence or not, Romney
would probably be a more gracious loser than Obama. But one suspects
that's not why either man is running for president.


--
"If Barack Obama isn't careful, he will become the Jimmy Carter of the
21st century."

[clairbear]

Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote in
news:jpiguu$s1u$4...@dont-email.me:

Four candidates won the popular vote but lost the presidency: Andrew
Jackson won the popular vote but lost the election to John Quincy Adams
(1824); Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote but lost the election to
Rutherford B. Hayes (1876); Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but
lost the election to Benjamin Harrison (1888); Al Gore won the popular
vote but lost the election to George W. Bush (2000

Read more: Presidential Trivia — Infoplease.com
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/prestrivia1.html#ixzz1vhWVWdzy