Tag: parties

Cracking the Blocks

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Thanks to electoral-vote.com I discovered the efforts of Colorado Democrats who hope not to be disenfranchised in the presidential election this year as reported in the Rocky Mountain News at the beginning of August.

This is exactly in line with what I was advocating in response to the New York Times editorial about abolishing the electoral college. Right now there are too many states taken for granted in every election but if we put the vote of every elector in play to some degree we will have a much more democratic system as it was designed to be. I suggest that the voiceless Republicans in California and New York try to get similar measures on their ballots for November.

Tags electoral college, issues, parties

National

Two Non-Binding Parties

I was interested as I read this article from Wired Magazine about the new opportunities in politics for people to define themselves outside the strictly Republican vs Democrat framework. Instead they can define themselves in contrast to a party affiliation. The example in the article is Governor Schwarzenegger who is a Republican, but is much more centrist or liberal position on many issues than the National Republican party.

Tags parties

State

Utah Race Defined

Now that the republican primary is over I can say difinitively who I am voting for in the governors race. I have spent months looking at everything I could find on the candidates and so far as I can tell the least promising republican candidate just won the republican primary so I’ll vote for Scott Matheson.In Utah that is not quite as bad as voting for a third party candidate because the democrats still have a slim chance of winning. This is not a state where every vote counts. The majority is overwhelmingly republican so that nationally both parties have eternally roped Utah off as being a given red state.

Right now I am voting for a change in the political structure of the state. We no longer have political dialog, we are stuck with republican diatribe. There is no discourse here. I understand that a huge percent of the population share common values on the largest issues, but that has stifled the discussion on what seems to be the second tier issues where there is not as much uniformity of opinion.

Somehow the political atmoshpere here has to change so that presidential candidates do more than fly over Utah on their way to California and, if we’re lucky, stop for fuel occationally. We also need to have more diversity of opinion so that there can be real discussion in our state legislature because of the uncertainty caused by neither party having an overwhelming majority.

With the same rules as the US Senate a democratic fillibuster on a key issue would last only long enough to count the first 60% of hands as 80% of the legislature voted to end the filibuster. In truth we have a one party state in a two party nation.

Tags 2004, candidates, parties