Huh, well ignorance fought. It doesn’t look like this would apply to today’s congress, but I’m assuming there’s been situations in the past where one party controlled a majority of states but didn’t have a majority of seats. That would be a fun constitutional crisis.
Also if a state delegation is tied between 2 candidates it would be forced to abstain.
At this moment the Republicans have a majority in 33 state Congressional delegations, and three other states are tied between Republican and Democratic seats.
My rough calculation is that, properly spread out, as many as 40 Republicans in those 33 states could vote for a non-Republican candidate and those state delegations would still have Republican majorities.
It gives them a 7 state cushion to begin with and I wouldn’t expect a single member, let alone state, to defect anyway. The last thing politics is about is conscience.
Unless the Dems take the Senate in November. Then it would be Kaine as VP, and acting President.
First question: if there are any “faithless electors,” almost certainly a Representative and a Senator from the losing party would challenge that state’s vote, just as was done with the Ohio vote in 2004 (and was tried with the Florida vote in 2000, but no Senators would challenge it). If the Republicans control both houses of Congress - and note that the newly elected Congress makes this decision, as it takes office on January 3 (2oth Amendment) and the electoral vote count is January 6 (Title 3, Section 15, Untied States Code) - then, presumably, whichever count favors the Republicans would be counted.
Now, there’s a question: is it beyond Donald Trump to pull a Rutherford B. Hayes?
Second question: since the Constitution is not clear on this, the Supreme Court would make the decision, although my best guess is, anybody tied for third could be included. Note that an elector voting for Bernie Sanders as VP in hopes of getting him into the top 3, then having him elected while the House’s vote is deadlocked so he becomes acting President, is out of luck; only the top 2 in the VP electoral vote count are voted on by the Senate.
No, they wont even get one electoral vote. But yes, disaffected Bernie bros could pull a Nader and give us 8 years of Trump.
It very nearly happened in 1948 when the Dixiecrats got 39 EVs. But Truman won handily, pre-election polls notwithstanding. Incidentally, the Dixiecrats won states with 38 EVs, but one other elector voted that way, even though the Dems won his state. (IIRC, he was from KY.)
Here is an amusing scenario. The EC splits 279-279 and it goes to the House which quickly elects Trump. But then the VP choice goes to the Senate, which could also be tied 50-50 (not even that unlikely). In that case, the vote is tied and the tie is broken by the presiding officer who is: Joe Biden. Guess how he will vote.
Biden cannot vote in this case. The constitution requires that “the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.” The Vice-President is not a Senator.
The faithless elector was Preston Parks of Tennessee.
Not entirely correct. In the case of a tie the sitting Veep would be the deciding vote.
The “majority of the whole number” part means that the VP is irrelevant. With the current size of the Senate, there have to be 51 senators voting for the winner, period.
Except that the electors don’t even vote until the new Senate is seated, thus the VP vote would have to occur afterwards.
So if the senate splits 50-50, no VP will be chosen. Then what? Well the president can nominate a VP, but congress has to agree and the tied senate won’t. Maybe Biden will continue until a new VP is actually chosen. Gack, the founders and the people who wrote the amendmants set up this ghastly system.
No, the Senate keeps balloting until a political agreement is reached, just like the 1801 vote in the House of Representatives, between Jefferson and Burr. It took 36 ballots over a week before Jefferson won.
Third parties very rarely are from the center, drawing votes from both of the major parties in equal measure. What we’ve tended to see is third party candidates usually either: cause the “major party” from their “side of the spectrum” to lose, or they cause a candidate to either win by a smaller margin than they otherwise would or lose by a larger margin than they otherwise would.
Examples:
Election of 1912: Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) v Taft (Republican-Incumbent) v Wilson (Democrat), Teddy largely succeeds in ending Taft’s Presidency. Taft only gets 8 electoral votes, Teddy gets 88, and Wilson gets 435. Wilson, a Southern Democrat, even won in States that had been Republican strongholds since the Civil War–places like New York (which had broken for Democrats a few times since the CW, but always for native sons like Grover Cleveland, Samuel Tilden, Horatio Seymour–incidentally a lot of major party nominees from 1860-1920 were from New York. In the very next election Wilson loses New York to native-born Republican Charles Evans Hughes.) This actually very powerfully shows the negative (for a major party) effect of a strong third party candidate. If you combine TR and Taft’s popular vote totals it was 50.6%, Wilson only got 41.8% of the popular vote but won 81.9% of the electoral votes. It’s quite likely if TR had been given the Republican party nomination he would’ve won a (then) unprecedented third term, and likely in a landslide over Wilson (who himself lost about 6% of the votes of his spectrum to Eugene Debs–a fate that mattered little since Taft actually lost a majority of his spectrum’s votes to Roosevelt.)
Election of 1924 - Calvin Coolidge wins 54% of the popular vote as an incumbent (this was his first election, he succeeded the Presidency when Harding died in office), largely because the left-wing side of the country is split, between John W. Davis running as the Democrat and Robert M. La Follette running as a Progressive. Now, La Follette only wins one state (his home state of Wisconsin, with 13 electoral votes), but he wins 16% of the popular vote, and Davis only wins 28% of the popular vote. So while La Follette doesn’t succeed much in the electoral college, his vote share makes it so that Davis loses a lot of states he would’ve otherwise been competitive in. Since Coolidge won an outright popular vote majority of 54%, it’s unlikely there was any path to victory for Davis anyway, but he likely would’ve done a little better. The effect of a third party on this election was less important primarily because the winner was so strong outright that they weren’t likely to lose even without the opposition being split.
Election of 1948 - This election is interesting because the pundits of the day wrote Truman off very early on, due to a misunderstanding at the time that most people set their political choice very early in the election and don’t change it (early election seaso polling showed Thomas Dewey with a commanding lead.) Structurally Truman was at a grave disadvantage, Democrats up until the 1960s were reliant on their fortress of support in the old Confederacy states (except for a guy like FDR that went ahead and won basically damn near all the states.) Strom Thurmond was running as a breakaway “Dixiecrat”, and in fact he did rob Truman of 39 electoral votes (LA, MS, AL, SC–and 1 elector in Tennessee), but Truman won anyway, with 49.6% of the popular vote and 303 electoral votes (266 needed to win.) In fact, while this election is often portrayed as an upset, the reality is Truman would’ve likely won an electoral college landslide (and 303 votes is damn strong anyway) if not for Thurmond. So this election that was somewhat close for Truman (his margin of victory in the electoral college was sealed up by a few states that he won by very narrow margins, and it was actually still possible late into the night that Dewey might’ve been able to win in the EC but lose in the popular vote), but the main impact Thurmond had was to artificially make it so close. Truman with the full support of the South Democrats typically received at that time would’ve won in a landslide.
Election of 1960 - There was no significant third party candidate for this election, but a weird outcome in the Electoral College. A few states in the deep south (Alabama and Mississippi) had “unpledged electors” on the ballot, basically this was a weird, “States Rights” movement of protest against Kennedy’s nomination. These “unpledged electors” actually won all eight of Mississippi’s electoral college spots and six of Alabama’s eleven. These fourteen cast votes for Harry F. Byrd (a conservative Democrat Senator from Virginia), who had not actually campaigned for President at all. He received a 15th vote from a Tennessee “faithless elector.” It didn’t matter because Kennedy won 303 electoral votes. That in itself was a somewhat dramatic, but intrinsic, quirk of the electoral college. This election was the closest in terms of popular vote of any in the 20th century (49.72 for JFK and 49.55 for Nixon), but Kennedy captured 61 electoral votes from a series of states by fewer than 10,000 votes each. Essentially this close election produced about 10 very very close state elections that all went Kennedy’s way other than Nixon’s home state of California. Nixon to his dying day believed fraud was responsible, and some even suggest his own later penchant for “putting the Presidential thumb on the scale” in an election was out of his deep held belief his political enemies were conspiring to “get him.”
Election of 1968 - This is similar to the election of 1924, in that the third party candidate likely just made the loser (Humphrey) lose more than he otherwise would have. If you add Wallace’s totals to Humphrey he still doesn’t win the EC. Now, if you add Wallace’s popular vote totals to Humphreys, then Humphreys wins the popular vote by a large margin. You could make the argument Nixon won in states like Virginia, Missouri, South Carolina and Florida because Wallace was “splitting” the vote. But it’s actually somewhat hard to say. For a lot of people that Wallace was getting votes from, he largely represented the southern Whites who would never vote for liberal Northern, pro-Civil Rights Democrat Humphreys. But they had “lifetime” party identification issues with voting Republican (the party these same people had spent their lives opposing.) So Wallace gave them a vehicle to vote against Humphreys without having to vote for Nixon. If he was not on the ballot, it’s likely a large chunk of Wallace’s votes go to Nixon. So in this sense, Wallace was actually drawing votes pretty heavily from both Humphreys and Nixon. Likely if he had not ran, the “Southern shift” from Blue to Red, which was essentially completed in the 1972 election, would’ve just happened four years earlier.
Since we have a “line of succession”, and the VP’s chief job is chief successor, it isn’t really the end of the world for there to not be a Vice President. We don’t need an “acting Vice President” to the same degree we must have some way to have an acting President no matter what. If the Senate remained deadlocked until after inauguration day, and the President is incapacitated or dies, the Speaker of the House becomes acting President. Additionally, once inauguration day passed with no Vice President selected by the Senate, then the 25th Amendment would kick in. The new President would be able to select a person to fill the Vice Presidential vacancy, by submitting a candidate to a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
The Vice President’s only other constitutional duty is being President of the Senate–the Senate already has an office that fills in for the veep–the President Pro Tempore (and in fact even the President Pro Tem rarely if ever presides over the Senate, it’s a thankless nonsense job that usually falls to some junior Senator–only at occasions of State is the Vice President typically presiding.) Now, since the President Pro Tem is already numbered among the 100 Senators, he wouldn’t be able to “break ties” like the Vice President is, so the actual duty of casting a tie-breaking vote would fall to a vacant office, and thus ties would simply mean the proposed legislation fails to pass.
If the Senate is still balloting on the election, would the 25th even apply? In any event, would there be any point in invoking the 25th if the Senate is deadlocked?
This year, the Libertarians completely blew any chance they had at winning over anti-Trump Republicans by nominating two liberals who are fervently pro-gay and pro-abortion.
And liberals see no need for a third party.
So, who’s supposed to vote for Gary Johnson?