Max Stearns
Although this will sound a bit nuts, it would have considerable advantages.
Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg choose any game--Monopoly, Life, Go Fish, I really don't care which--they play once, 2 of 3, 3 of 5, again, I really don't care. Whoever wins becomes the center lane candidate. The rest drop out. (Having Warren stay in to divide the progressive lane is fine for as long she can last). Whoever comes in second gets first dibs at a cabinet spot if he/she wants it; whoever comes in third, gets second dibs, etc. (I suspect Bloomberg might be the only candidate who would want President or nothing.)
The VP choice is highly strategic and depends on who wins. Amy would be a great VP candidate for any of the men, but it also might make sense to go outside this group and consider others, e.g., Booker, Harris, Abrams, especially if Buttigieg wins as he has a serious concern about motivating African American voters to turn out. Regardless, these candidates coordinate, thereby combining forces behind whoever wins this game and consolidating the moderate lane.
Post-Nevada, I'm convinced that a game of chance is as good, and as bad, as any other means of avoiding the seriously self-defeating dynamics in the moderate lane, which threaten to have Sanders get the nomination and then lose the single most important election in this 59 year old's lifetime to Trump.
Comments are, of course, always welcome.
Thanks David for this comment, and apologies for the delayed reply. I'm quite pleased about Joe Biden's impressive South Carolina victory last night even as he is not my first choice in the Democratic field. Ranked choice voting can work in some contexts, but it has problems. In social choice terms, the system violates a condition called "independence of irrelevant alternatives." This means that options that should not matter when assessing binary choices between candidates that do, say Joe Biden versus Bernie Sanders among Democratic contenders this round, or John Kasich versus Donald Trump among Republican contenders in 2016, nonetheless risk affecting how those binary pairings get resolved. A field packed with many candidates risks distorting those important choices. Also…
Hi!
And this is exactly what we moderate Republicans were wishing for in 2016.
The best solution isn't getting everyone together to play Uno for the nomination. The best solution is ranked choice voting.
On each ballot voters rank every candidate. Let's say there are 10 candidates... each would be ranked from 1st to 10th. The candidate ranked 1st gets 10 points, 2nd gets 9 and so on down to 1 point for 10th.
If anyone neglects to rank a candidate, that candidate gets 0, BUT the ranked candidates also shift down in value (9th = 1, 8th = 2, etc.). This way if someone ONLY votes for one candidate, that candidate gets only 1 point. If they only vote…