The big poltical story in New York (well, in this neck of it, anyway) is the fight between Tom Golisano and George Pataki for the Independence and Conservative party lines. The real danger to Pataki is that Golisano could get his candidate for Lt. Governor nominated. In New York, the Governor and Lt. Governor run on a single ballot, like the President and Vice President (in Texas, they are elected separately, I believe). The gubernatorial candidate can only add the votes to his total if the ballots on each line are identical. Having different nominees for Lt Governor could rob Pataki of those votes and conceivably, the election (depending on your imaginative capacity).
Now in 1896, the Democratic Party nominated William Jennings Bryan, who was the likely nominee for the Populist Party. At their convention, the Populists nominated Bryan and their own choice for VP, in what has been described as a symbolic act of independence.
So my question is, did this hurt Bryan? Of course he got pretty well shellacked by McKinley anyway, but did he lose any states because he had two different VP nominees?
In Pennsylvania, Watson was the People’s Party VP candidate. There was a separate slate of electors, but there were only around 6000 votes for the slate statewide. Since McKinley lost the state by neary 300,000, it had no effect.
Watson’s electoral votes seemed to come from Democratic electors (or, rather, Populists who ran as Democratic electors).
Could you or someone else explain this in a little more depth? Would there then be two “slates” running–Pataki + Lt. Gov. Candidate A and Pataki + Lt. Gov. Candidate B–in addition to the slates from the other parties? This seems really bizarre to me, but I don’t know how else to interpret this.
That’s exactly the situation Zen. In New York, you can run on multiple party lines. The votes on all the lines are added up and credited to the candidates. Lots of politicians use extra lines on the ballot here on the theory that it will attract voters who wouldn’t normally vote for the party, but would for the candidate.
When Pataki was first elected, for instance, he got fewer Republican votes than Cuomo got Democratic votes. But Pataki got enough votes on the Conservative and other lines to make up the difficit (Cuomo also had the Liberal party line, but that didn’t help).
However, all names have to be identical. And for governor, both the Governor and Lieutenant Governor are elected as a single ticket (like President and VP). If the names don’t match, the votes can’t be added together. Usually, no one contests Lieutenant Governer candidates, but Galasano, running on the Independence Party line, has paid people to run against Pataki.
That site doesn’t actually give totals for multiple ballot lines, probably because the election laws vary so widely. If they did, a number of Bush and Gore votes would show up on the Conservative, RTL and Liberal lines.
Obviously it didn’t matter in New York, where the Republicans romped, with the unaccountable exception of Schoharie County. I suppose the dual ticket would only matter in states with a rigid, machine-dominated political culture, since this law seems to confound non-New Yorkers. I’ll try to find a site with the raw BOE numbers again.
No, the dual running mates didn’t hurt Bryan. But they could have hurt his Democratic running mate, Arthur Sewall, if Bryan had won the election.
The question needs to be looked at from two different levels, the state level and the national level. On the state level, in states where the Populists were strong, they negotiated “fusion slates” of electors with the Democratic Party. All of the electors were pledged to Bryan for President, with some pledged to Sewall for VP and some pledged to Populist Tom Watson. In states where the Populists were unable to negotiate fusion, they ultimately declined to run their own slates. So Bryan ran a single slate of electors in every state.
However, if Bryan had won by a narrow majority in the electoral college, the Watson electors could have denied a majority to Sewall. The choice of a vice president would have devolved upon the Republican U.S. Senate, which would probably have elected McKinley’s running mate, Garret Hobart. This would have resulted in the entertaining combination of a Democratic President and a Republican Vice President.