Martin DyckmanHoping for a moderate presidential nominee in 1972, the Democrats who controlled the Florida Legislature set up a primary intended to award Sen. Edmund Muskie most of the state’s delegates.
George Wallace won them instead — 75 of the 81– with pluralities in all but one congressional district and 41.6 percent of the overall vote. The damage to Muskie, who placed fourth, was irreparable. It contributed significantly to the eventual nomination of the party’s most liberal candidate, George McGovern, amidst a political climate that was simply not right for him.
I was covering Gov. Reubin Askew on primary night. There were unmistakable tones of shock and sorrow in his voice, overheard from another room, as he absorbed the news that an out-and-out racist had won Florida.
Here we go again.
This time, though, it’s the Republicans who may pay a painful price for planning a primary that they thought would be to some particular person’s advantage.
In making the March 15 Republican primary a winner-take-all affair, GOP legislative leaders no doubt assumed a Florida candidate would sweep the table and build an insurmountable lead in delegates. It was Jeb Bush they had in mind. But most now would be grateful if Marco Rubio took all 96.
But it’s hard to imagine that result if Rubio is still splitting the anti-Trump vote with Ted Cruz. Even if 66 percent of the voters oppose Trump, he could still win all the delegates with as few as 34 percent if other candidates split the rest
He’s been polling better than that.
People who loath the government so much that they’re eager to vote for a cynical, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered demagogue like Trump aren’t going to abandon him simply because a Floridian is in the race.
Cruz isn’t likely to make way for Rubio either.
If this nightmarish scenario plays out, a lot of Florida politicians will be as mournful on the night of March 15, 2016, as Askew was on March 14, 1972.
The Democrats learned their lesson from that and rewrote their rules to provide for proportional representation in the primaries. Whoever wins their primary in March won’t take all the delegates unless he or she — improbably — carries more than 85 percent of the turnout by district and statewide.
There’s a larger point here. Winner-take-all is a terrible way to run a democracy. It’s the wrong way to nominate or elect people at any level. It’s made to order for extremist candidates like Trump and, to an extent, like Cruz, who leaves people wondering whether he’s running for president or ayatollah.
John Kasich, the only candidate with experience as a governor and as a congressman, is the best still standing — if only barely — in the Republican race, but he’s such a long shot that any vote cast for him in the Florida primary is, in effect, a vote for Trump.
That wouldn’t be so if the Florida Republicans were using either proportional allocation or ranked choice voting — sometimes referred to as instant runoff — to allot their delegates.
Proportionality is the better method when something multiple, like a slate of delegates, is at stake. But if the Republicans aren’t open to that, the next best option would be ranked-choice voting. It is more apt to yield a consensus winner than an extremist who wins with a plurality.
There’s no trick to it. Voters simply indicate on their ballots who their first choices are, and who they would prefer in second, third and fourth order — and so on — if their preferred candidate doesn’t have a first-round majority.
In that event, the computer then counts the second choice votes cast by voters whose favorites finished last. The counting goes through additional stages if necessary until someone has a majority of first- and second-choice votes.
If this were the system for Florida’s primary, here’s how it would work:
Assume the candidates finish in this order: Trump, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Carson. Trump doesn’t have a majority, so the second-choice votes of the Carson voters are apportioned. If Trump still doesn’t have a majority, then the computer distributes Kasich’s second-choice votes.
No majority yet? Then the second-choices of Cruz voters are counted. As Cruz voters aren’t likely to make Trump their second choice, they would probably favor Rubio, giving him more first-choice and second-choice votes than Trump.
In such a scenario, the most extreme candidate is no one’s second choice.
But on this March 15, second choices won’t matter.
***
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in suburban Asheville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
