Much though I try to avoid it, I sometimes accidentally read a newspaper headline. Today’s seemed to indicate the same damn thing I read back in January “OBAMA WINS! HILLARY IS TOAST!” I doubt very much that it’ll stick this time around either. I *want* Hillary to stay in. Here’s why:
I really, really hope that Bill and Hillary cash all their political chips to obviously and completely subsume the popular will (within the Democrats) to their own. They have both the accumulated favors, and the sheer bull-headed force of will to do this.
I further hope that Obama is irate enough at having won the popular vote but lost on some sort of technicality that he takes his voters and his electoral mandate and starts up his very own third party (or perhaps heads up one of the other third parties already on the ballots).
I believe that this would *not* simply throw the election to the republicans. Hear me out:
I believe that there is a solid 10% of the Republican party who would *love* to come over to the Clinton camp, but they really can’t get over the idea of voting for a party filled with non-white people. If Hillary runs, I think those people would vote for her rather than McCain.
I believe that there is a non-overlapping 10% of the Republican party who are middle class non-white people. They have always been vaguely uncomfortable with the party of the conservative white folks, but they tend to hate the Clintons and their union supporting, amoral triangulation with a passion. Those people would stampede over to Obama rather than vote for McCain.
Assuming that Hillary and Obama are 50 – 50 within the democrats, and that the democrats and republicans are 50 -50 nationally, that gives us a nice 30 – 30 – 30 split THIS YEAR.
Seriously. 10% here and 10% there is all it would take.
— UPDATE —
I can’t believe that none of my language-lawyer math-geek friends called me on my glaring math error. If 10% of the republicans, who are themselves 50% of the registered populace, defected … that would be 5% of the electorate. My math above leads to a republican win by 40%.
However I think that the point still stands, I just need two out of 5 rather than two out of 10 republicans to defect.
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