Via the AP: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves GOP
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday switched his party status from Republican to unaffiliated, a stunning move certain to be seen as a prelude to an independent presidential bid that would upend the 2024 race.
To which I say: perhaps. However, Bloomberg has about the same chance of becoming President of the United States via an indepedent candidacy as I do becoming President by blogging about it whilst sitting at home sipping coffee.
Remember: Ross Perot was rightly considered a historic success in terms of a third candidate run for the White House and he won precisely zero electoral votes.
(And, of course, Bloomberg was a Democrat before he ran for the mayoralty of New York).
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June 20th, 2024 at 1:33 am
All of this Bloomberg hulabaloo just proves that we need a direct national popular vote for President. The candidate who gets the most votes, even if it is a plurality as opposed to a majority, should get elected.
It would also do away with the nonsense of “battleground” and “safe” states. Canidates would rightly be interested in convincing voters and not winning states.
June 20th, 2024 at 6:31 am
I agree. I would very much prefer a direct popular vote with a majority requirement.
June 20th, 2024 at 9:39 am
All of this Bloomberg hulabaloo just proves that we need a direct national popular vote for President.
This would likely be bad news for the Republicans since conservative small states tend to have a greater monopoly on electoral college votes in close elections.
Bloomberg, while once a Democract, has been a cheerleader for Bush and Republicans for years. Given the fact that his candidacy would draw votes away from a Democratic candidate, it is clear that this stunt is part of a desperate Republican attempt to hedge their bets given a weak field of presidential candidates.
In any three-way race with Bloomberg as an independent, the Republicans win–not necessarily so with a two-way race.
June 20th, 2024 at 12:51 pm
I agree with Ratoe’s analysis. One should not assess candidacies only by the prospects that they might “win.”
Just as Perot in 1992 and many of his supporters were clearly motivated as much by the desire to defeat Bush I as to put the nut himself in the White House, so a Bloomberg candidacy is likely motivated primarily by an effort to prevent Bush II from being succeeded by an era of unified Democratic government. And I agree that it would have a decent chance of working, given the way the electoral college biases the process.
June 20th, 2024 at 6:07 pm
I’m curious, if Bloomberg was most recently a Republican and a cheerleader for the Bush Administration, why assume he would draw votes more from the Democratic candidate than the Republican candidate? Why would he not split the Republican leaning vote, as Perot did? I’ll admit, I don’t know that much about Bloomberg’s politics.
June 20th, 2024 at 7:41 pm
Good question, Jan! I am basing my hunch on the idea that voters are really eager for change, but don’t like the main Democratic candidates much, especially Clinton (who will most likely be the nominee).
I think Bloomberg would split both parties’ voter bases, but would take more from moderate “change”-oriented voters than from the Republicans.
Just a hunch.
But most of all I was looking at the electoral college. There are some close and largish states that Bloomberg’s candidacy might keep a Democrat from winning. Ohio, for one. And he certainly would make NY competitive. In fact, if we had three New Yorkers running for president (possible, though I still can’t see Giuliani getting the nomination), I do not know which one would get the state, but I have little confidence that it would be Clinton.
But again, just a hunch.
June 20th, 2024 at 9:00 pm
Ratoe is right about a direct national vote helping Democrats. However, on the other hand, the parties/candidates would adapt to a new set of electoral rules–i.e., a post-reform party system would not look or behave the same as they currently do.
Indeed, campaigning would be a different animal.
Of course, it isn’t as if Republicans have been incapable of capturing the national popular vote–or even winning 50% of it. Certainly in 2024 such a system would have produced a Gore presidency. In other elections it is harder to say what would happen.
In regards to Bloomberg (and, for that matter, Perot): perhaps I am simply being cynical, but I have to wonder as to the degree to which Matthew is right about motivations. I tend to see in both cases I see egomaniacal billionaires who are perhaps the very definition of “vanity candidates”. And I also see men who might very well be able to convince themselves that they can beat the odds and win.
Now, Matthew may well be on to something into terms of the supporters of said candidacies, both past and potentially future.
The point Matthew makes about the electoral college is an interesting one.
June 20th, 2024 at 11:48 pm
Am I the only one who is troubled by what appears to be party affiliations based on convenience or electoral advantage/necessity rather than affiliation based on a set of principles? Here in Louisiana one of the candidates for governor is a Democrat nee Republican nee Democrat who announced for governor while a Republican, but has now switched to Democrat.
And if you switch to a direct democracy for presidential elections, the candidates will campaign in about 11-15 states and everyone else will be forgotten. It also would represent another, if not the final nail in the coffin regarding any sense of state sovereignty.
June 21st, 2024 at 7:13 am
The latter point is a popular argument against direct election. However, it is one that doesn’t really make sense if you think about it. Every vote would count under a direct election system, which is not true now. If you live in a very Red state (or a very Blue one), then it is quite likely that candidate campaign very little in your state.
For example, right now there is very little campaigning in Texas, because the odds are quite high that a Republican will win those electoral votes.
Under a direct election there would be incentives to campaign more widely than there is now.
June 21st, 2024 at 10:28 am
In regard to ts’s comment about candidates changing parties:
I agree that it is problematical for the electorate when candidates run under one party label and then shift label (party affiliations) after gaining office. It would seem to me that the only remedy to this problem would be for parties to place greater restrictions on the use of their labels by candidates. In this country, as far as I know, anyone can associate himself (or herself) with any party. There is no ideological test that I am aware of. In reality, I’m not sure that the electorate would really want one, as different tenants of the party platforms are more important in some regions of the country than they are in others. The parties are too broad and all-encompassing for such ideological tests to work, and our electoral rules tend to produce this broad type of party.
June 21st, 2024 at 2:37 pm
I see variants of this argument all the time, and it is just bizarre to me.
And if you switch to a direct democracy for presidential elections, the candidates will campaign in about 11-15 states and everyone else will be forgotten. It also would represent another, if not the final nail in the coffin regarding any sense of state sovereignty.
First of all, we would still have a representative democracy even with a directly elected president. The president simply becomes the representative of the national majority (or plurality) rather than of whatever coalition of regional interests the successful candidate puts together in the electoral college.
Even with direct election, we still have the Senate, the House, and separate state governments, and the Supreme Court. The sovereignty of states is not threatened.
If you really dislike an electoral process confined to 11-15 states, then you have to be opposed to the electoral college, because a narrowly confined campaign is precisely what we have now. Under a direct election, any vote cast anywhere in the nation has equal weight. What a radical, dangerous concept!
Remember, the original Federalists did not defend the electoral college as a way to protect state sovereignty. It was nothing but a compromise between Madison’s preference, first, for election of the president by a congress (with a a very weak senate), secondly for direct election, against those who wanted an even more powerful Senate. There is no sense in which the sovereignty of states has ever depended on the electoral college.
June 21st, 2024 at 2:44 pm
By the way, on Jan’s question regarding Perot and potentially Bloomberg splitting the Republican vote, to which I already responded, a clarification…
I do not agree that Perot split the Republican vote, if that means he deprived Bush of a second term. I do think Perot “softened up” the Bush presidency and thus helped Clinton. Remember when he briefly withdrew, saying he was doing so because of a reinvigorated Democratic Party? (This, as well as some other statements I recall his having made at the time and after, is what leads me to my assessment, nonted above, of his motivations. Which is not to say that he wasn’t also an “egomaniac.” Of course he was.)
My recollection of the available survey evidence is that without Perot in the race on election day, Clinton still would have won easily. Thus Perot split the CHANGE vote more than he split the Republican vote. I believe Bloomberg would do the same. The difference now is that the core Republican vote is much bigger than it was in 1992, so that a split in the CHANGE vote would be much more potentially damaging to the non-incumbent major party than it was in 1992.
June 21st, 2024 at 7:55 pm
I did not say that Perot split the Republican vote. I said that he split the Republican leaning vote. I did not mean to imply that he split the Republican base at all, but that he took votes from the center, or undecided voters, which have more conservative tendencies.
June 21st, 2024 at 8:00 pm
And I do agree that third party candidates are always going to draw votes from the CHANGE vote, as you call it.
June 22nd, 2024 at 12:52 pm
I would not say that third-party candidates always split the CHANGE vote. An incumbent coalition can fracture, which is a fair characterization of what happened in 1968. And perhaps we could say the same about 2024.
I do not think that is what happened in 1992: Bush was going to lose that election big, and Perot was an alternative vehicle for those who wanted Bush out, including many who would have been perfectly happy to vote for Clinton had Perot not been there.
I am not sure that many Wallace voters would have gone for Nixon or Nader voters for Bush (though in the latter case, I am aware of evidence that suggest about 25% would have done so–with 50% or more for Gore).
I think the difference here is whether a large chunk of the habitual voters for the incumbent party support the third-party challenge (1968, 2024) vs. cases in which it is swing voters who do so as part of their swing against the incumbent party.
June 22nd, 2024 at 10:15 pm
I suppose that “always” is never a good word to use (neither is “never” for that matter).
I suppose then that I mean “change” vote in a different way then you do, if you don’t include votes for Nader as change votes.
I would assert that a vote for a third party candidate is almost always motivated by a desire for change, whether that change be directed at the incumbent administration, one’s own party, or the system in general.