2010 Elections – RI Future

August 1, 2013August 1, 2013

The 2010 Election Revisited: Attorney General Results (Part 12 of MMP RI)

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /hermes/bosnacweb08/bosnacweb08bf/b1577/ipg.rifuturecom/RIFutureNew/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 4387

The problem with the gubernatorial results is the massive amount of independent votes that have to be thrown out. Luckily, the AG race offers a more typically Rhode Island affair, though a large amount of independent votes are tossed, but only about equal to what the Moderate Party candidate earned.

That Moderate candidate is the most interesting. The former chair of Common Cause RI and the former President of Save the Bay, lawyer Christopher Little best represented the “environment and ethics” part of the Moderate platform. And his vote performance was better than that of his gubernatorial counterpart Ken Block. Why Little has never been emphasized by the Moderates since is an oddity to me.

If the AG race is used as our party preference ballot, the result is the best case for the Moderates short of winning a majority (which would require a crisis of voter faith).

What happens is that the Democrats retain a majority in the House (by one seat only) and have a plurality in the Senate (short by one seat). In this case, the large number of Reps and Senators won by the Moderates can act a drivers of policy. In the Senate, Democrats either have to make a coalition agreement with one of the two parties, or they have to manage to get a leadership team put together with the approval of some members of the other parties or independent Edward O’Neill.

O’Neill’s vote actually becomes very important as well. As an independent, he can be the deciding vote in a showdown between a Moderate-Republican coalition and the Democratic caucus.

The House is a bit different. House Democrats have to be really cautious and not bring any legislation to vote that alienates their caucus and fails to win cross-party support. Otherwise, they could see their leadership team overthrown by a group of disaffected Democratic reps allied with the Moderates and Republicans. Alternatively, they could spurn the left-wing of their party and join with Moderate or Republican legislators to form a cross-party leadership. However, that could damage all parties together, making Republican legislators vulnerable to right wing dissatisfaction, Democratic legislators vulnerable to left wing dissatisfaction, and Moderates vulnerable to voter scorn. How it would shake out would be largely due to personalities.

RI GA apportioned according to the D'Hondt method using 2010 AG results. (via Samuel G. Howard) — RI GA apportioned according to the D’Hondt method using 2010 AG results. (via Samuel G. Howard)

This is Part 12 of the MMP RI series, which posits what Rhode Island’s political landscape would look like if we had switched to a mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system in 2002. Part 11 (a revisiting of the 2010 election based on gubernatorial results) is available here. Part 13 discusses other electoral reforms.

July 30, 2013

2010 election revisited: gubernatorial results (Part 11 of MMP RI)

Because of the problem with the districts, let’s take a step back and look at the 2010 election again. The 2010 election is unique, because it features two statewide races with Moderate Party candidates. The first race, the gubernatorial election, is atypical. It features a well-known independent and a weak Democrat combined with this third party candidate and a somewhat typical Republican challenger. The second race, for Attorney General is slightly less atypical, with a winning Democrat, a Republican challenger, and a Moderate, plus two independents who do reasonably well.

The reason I’m focusing on these races is because they might give us an idea about what an MMP election might look like in Rhode Island with a party list vote. If you’ll remember, when MMP elections don’t rely on district results, there’s a separate ballot question asking what party a voter prefers. It’s like a statewide election for party, with the effect that it’ll change the party proportions in the chambers.

Let’s look at the gubernatorial election.

2010 MMP Election Using Gubernatorial Results

2010 Gov Election — Voter percentages from 2010. DEM = Democratic Party, GOP = Republican Party, IND = Independent, MOD = Moderate Party. Due to rounding, not all percentages will add up to 100% (via Samuel G. Howard)

I like to think of this as the worst-case scenario for Democrats. First, I’ve removed all the independent voters, simply because it’s hard to simply declare they’d go to the Democratic Party. This means we’re looking solely at the votes that the Democrats, Republicans, and Moderates received. And there weren’t that many for Democrats.

Once again, the districts favor the Democrats. They win handily there, 65 seats in the House and 30 seats in the Senate. However, they have a terribly weak performance in the party list vote. In our alternate history version, we might speculate that in 2010 the depressed turnout of Democratic voters combined with Republican enthusiasm to increase the percentage of Republican votes.

The results in the districts allow Democrats to retain power disproportionate to what the D’Hondt method gives them. The D’Hondt method awards 55 seats to the Democrats in the House, but they win 65 in the districts. That means no one from their list makes it into the House. Republicans have a different result, with 7 out of 8 of their representatives from the list.

Both chambers result in overhang thanks to institutional Democratic advantage and the presence of Sen. O’Neill. What this leaves us with is a House with a Republican plurality (exactly 50%) and a Senate with a slight Republican majority. It’s impossible for either of the two biggest parties to form a veto-proof majority without being joined by many members of other parties. In the House, at least, there needs to be a coalition leadership team. It’s either a Republican-Moderate coalition which fails to give a veto-proof supermajority, or it’s a Grand Coalition between Democrats and Republicans. So it’s probably going to be the former, but the longer MMP lasts, the more likely the latter might get (difficult as it is to imagine now).

In many ways, this is not a good position for the Moderates (despite the fact they’re in the General Assembly). Being a junior member of a coalition is a troubling position to be in, especially when much of the Moderate brand is attempting to say that they’re not Republicans (witness the Liberal Democrats in the UK). On the other hand, should they refuse to sign a coalition agreement in the House, it’ll be easy to portray them as being responsible for that chamber’s instability.

And instability ultimately seems likely to happen. With slim majority control in one chamber and a coalition in the other, Republicans would be forced to find the broad consensus in their decision-making very quickly. It’s a lot easier to whip 10 representatives than to whip 80, and Republicans have never had to whip a majority of a chamber to pass legislation since they last were in power. They’d have to learn fast.

Part of what makes the Democratic Party so effective in its control of the General Assembly is that it usually knows how to shunt aside irrepressible dissenters and how to bring along just enough people to have a large majority. This is what made the failure of the pension amendment to the budget such a surprise. The Democratic leadership doesn’t get blindsided, they blindside others.

Those effective masters of parliamentary maneuver don’t disappear either. They’d be out there causing trouble for Republicans. And with so many new legislators in their caucuses, Republicans would have a hard time keeping any dissenters from breaking ranks.

RI GA apportioned according to the D'Hondt method using 2010 Gubernatorial results. (via Samuel G. Howard) — RI GA apportioned according to the D’Hondt method using 2010 Gubernatorial results. (via Samuel G. Howard)

This is Part 11 of the MMP RI series, which posits what Rhode Island’s political landscape would look like if we had switched to a mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system in 2002. Part 10 (a discussion of limitations) is available here. Part 12 is another look at the Election of 2010 using the Attorney General results.

July 24, 2013July 24, 2013

The election of 2010 (Part 8 of MMP RI)

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /hermes/bosnacweb08/bosnacweb08bf/b1577/ipg.rifuturecom/RIFutureNew/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 4387

Voter percentages from 2010. DEM = Democratic Party, GOP = Republican Party, IND = Independent, MOD = Socialist Party. (via Samuel G. Howard) — Voter percentages from 2010. DEM = Democratic Party, GOP = Republican Party, IND = Independent, MOD = Moderate Party, GRN = Green Party. (via Samuel G. Howard)

President Obama’s first term had devolved into the massive bungling of the Affordable Care Act. Republican intransigence in Washington combined with Obama’s refusal to stake out positions for his healthcare reform left Democratic partisans confused and disheartened. Meanwhile, Republicans were rallying against any change, and they had fired themselves up into a new movement, the Tea Party.

In Rhode Island, the situation was more confused. While the Republicans had nominated outgoing Gov. Carcieri’s senior communications advisor, the Democrats had selected General Treasurer Frank Caprio. Meanwhile, Ken Block was running at the top of the ticket for Rhode Island’s newly minted third party, the Moderates. But the candidate who had the most name recognition was former US Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

Since his defeat in 2006, Chafee had unaffiliated and back Barack Obama’s election in 2008. He would go on to narrowly win the Governorship, after Caprio insulted the President and it made national news. Staunch Democratic voters were left with little choice but to choose Chafee, the man they had rallied to defeat merely four years before.

The key issue that would effect apportionment of the General Assembly were the Moderate candidates for the House. While they captured only 1.62% of the vote for House candidates, this meant they had enough to gain two seats in that chamber from their list. For first time possibly since the 1850s, a party other than the Democrats or Republicans had access to the most powerful part of Rhode Island government. Democrats also lost their veto-proof supermajority in both chambers.

Those gains came at the expense of Democrats, who lost 10 seats, with two going to the moderates, and eight going to the Republicans. Republicans managed to gain three seats from the districts as well.

In the Senate, Democrats lost six seats to the Republicans, four of which were from districts. Observers attributed the success to an abundance of general election races in the districts, though noted that much of those contests were due to independent candidates.

Implications

The 2010 election is the most interesting to me (after 1996’s Year of the Cool Moose), and it’s one I’ll return to later, but mainly because it features two statewide races with a third party candidate in it. The other thing is the nature of the Republican gains.

Even in real life, Republicans managed to increase their seats by 100% in the Senate and 50% in the House. The gains are less stunning in MMP, but still significant. And the primary reason wasn’t GOP motivation. Take the 2004 and 2006 elections for Democrats. Democrats won in 2006 (in the MMP version of events) due to a combination of Democratic fervor and Republican apathy.

For Republicans in 2010, their gains were almost completely due to Democratic apathy. While collectively, Republicans shed around 3000-10,000 votes, Democrats collectively lost over 90,000. These missing Democratic voters are what give the Republican Party gains, and why in the MMP version, the Moderates are able to enter the House. The Tea Party is really overblown in RI, because 2010 isn’t an election where the right wing rises up, it’s one where the left wing stays home.

The other thing to consider is that 2010 is the election in which the fewest candidates are without a challenger in the general election. It’s stating the obvious, but it’s impossible to beat an incumbent when no one runs against them.

2010 also lends credence to the idea that the way towards a healthy opposition to the Democratic Party in Rhode Island is not from the right as the Republicans and Moderates are trying, but rather from the left. A coordinated statewide campaign that effectively played on the disappointment many Democratic voters have had with the spinelessness of Democratic politicians could reap unexpectedly large dividends.

Alternatively, if Republicans wanted to win, they actually might benefit from a campaign that preyed on this disappointment to drive down Democratic turnout.

RI GA apportioned according to the D'Hondt method. (via Samuel G. Howard) — RI GA apportioned according to the D’Hondt method. (via Samuel G. Howard)

This is Part 8 of the MMP RI series, which posits what Rhode Island’s political landscape would look like if we had switched to a mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system in 2002. Part 7 (the Election of 2008) is available here. Part 9 is a look at the Election of 2012.