In this post, Mr. Firefly suggests, if I’m not over-reading him, that maybe the GOP ought to re-assess and decide to abort Romney’s nomination, and start over again fresh with a brand-new candidate, for moral and political reasons both.
This would be a far bolder potential game-changer than a mere Palin VP nomination, of course, and dismissing the moral (or even the Romney-specific) elements, can you foresee a scenario in which either major party learns that it has nominated a total fuckup by early September, no WAY is he going to overcome the needed ground in only two months, and puts forth a new nominee? Is RTF’s idea even feasible? Is there a mechanism by which a party can withdraw its candidate after nomination? I’m talking about a MAJOR fuckup, one that’s totally inconceivable in historical terms but which is theoretically possible: the discovery that a party’s nominee is, say, a polygamist, or a convicted felon, or a Kenyan? If running with such a nominee is either illegal or politically foolhardy, does the party that nominated him have any choice but to take the hit of a crushing electoral loss at this point?
There are only two scenarios where this would happen:
Stunningly public mental meltdown by Romney. As in he appears in a tutu and pledges to save the country from the epidemic of gnomes. Appears on good morning America and takes all his clothes off. Gives an entire speech in Klingon.
Probably the most likely method for doing this would be party leaders and major donors convinced the nominee to “voluntarily” withdraw from the race. Other than that, I know that each state sets its own deadline for a candidate to be on the ballot, so there is a certain time limit built in there.
Early voting in some states starts in late Sept. So presumably the parties need to submit their candidates to the State for inclusion on the ballot before then. IIRC, the latest point Akin in Missouri could get his name off the ballot there was late September as well. So the national parties will probably be locked into having Romney/Obama on the ballot within the next two weeks.
I imagine a candidate could claim they’ve been diagnosed with a severe illness or something and withdraw without drawing too much opprobrium for voters. After all, people do get sick and as a country, I don’t think we want people to try and hide diagnoses of Alzhimers or whatever because they’re afraid it would kill their parties chances of winning an election.
But the new guy would still have to deal with having a very short amount of time to campaign and have a certain lack of legitimacy, since he’d be chosen by party leaders instead of in the kinda-sorta democratic primary process American voters are used to.
I understand this a hypothetical, but it really comes off like the Superfans talking about Ditka and Da Bears, and maybe the New England Patriots should replace all their players with Marvel Super Heroes before the Super Bowl, but the Bears would probably still win.
Why make it about Romney? There is nothing in his campaign that is so historically bad.
Not necessarily; it’d be up to the party leaders to decide the next step.
ETA: Unless the party’s bylaws have something in place regarding a line of succession for nominees.
How does the electoral college play into this? As I understand it, even though Romney’s name (for example) is the one on the ballot, votes are not cast for him but rather for electors who are expected to vote for the specified candidate. If the Republicans decided to change their candidate, even after voting has started, couldn’t they just tell everyone that the electors should now be voting for candidate B instead? It’s up to the state legislatures to determine how the electors are appointed and who they’ll be voting for so I think they could do this without running afoul of any faithless elector laws. I could be wrong though, I haven’t looked at any faithless-elector laws.
We’re not looking at a 1984-style massacre here. As uninspiring as Romney is, he is about 4 percentage points behind Obama. Basically what that means is that if you ask 25 people who they’re voting for, 13 will say Obama and 12 will say Romney. That is not a debacle, and believe it or not Romney isn’t dead yet, although he’s definitely losing. People are characterizing
If they didn’t pull Walter Mondale or Bob Dole from the ballot, they sure as hell are not going to pull Mitt Romney, who by any standard is doing better than they did.
That said, even if Friday’s polls show Obama suddenly has a 16-point lead and is going to slaughter Romney, pulling him from the ballot is effectively conceding the election, even if you could promote Ryan to the top of the bill or find a decent alternative candidate (which you could not, or else that’s the guy who would have been nominated in the first place.) The public perception of such a move would be, quite rightly, tha tthe GOP was either surrendering or melting down, and Obama would win in a colossal landslide; solid red states would turn blue.
The GOP needs to flip about 75 electoral votes to win. That will be hard with Romney at the top of the ticket but it is their best bet. Firing Romney is a total concession and would harm their chances in 2014, 2016 and possibly a few elections after that. It’s insane.
This is just the opposite-party version of those (stupid) “the Democrats are going to drop Obama (or Biden) in favor of Hillary Clinton” rumors that started up roughly three days after the inauguration. (The difference being that people apparently actually believed the Clinton rumors).
The Republicans are stuck with Romney and, no matter what happens with the polls, he won’t be pulled, he won’t get “sick”, he won’t even be offered an out.
My feeling is the Republicans have pretty much conceded the election at this point, but simply haven’t expressed it for public consumption in the hope, as unlikely as it may seem today, that somehow Romney will pull it out.
At this point, some states would require a court order (see for example the Todd Akin mess, where the deadline to simply request a change is past and the deadline for a change with a court order is the 25th, IIRC). That’s probably a pro forma matter if the candidate isn’t trying to fight the party, however.
I think my OP is beging misunderstood a little, not that it was that clear to me what I asking.
I was asking you to imagine a lagging major-party candidate doing (or, more likely, having been discovered to have done) something that pulls him down from “fucking up the election” to “having virtually lost the election” by early September. I think that might be starting to happen with Romney now, but that might just be wishful thinking, and it’s irrelevant to my question anyway.
What would the party do?
What could the party do?
What should the party do?
It might be helpful to imagine Romney alienating more of his core on a daily basis, and project a gaffe/botch/misstatement/blatent flip-flop every day for a week, until we hit rock-bottom in terms of support, and it might be helpful to imagine this happening to the Dems if that gives you a whole lot of pleasure: i.e., how would you have felt if someone like Dukakis went from “F.U.T.E” to “H.V.L.T.E”? Would you want to pull the plug? Does a hail-Mary candidate ever make any sense?
Or are you stuck with hoping that the winning candidate drops dead or has a stroke or something of the sort? Is that always going to be the better bet than starting fresh with a whole new candidate?
The chances of Romney being taken off the ticket are basically zero. He isn’t a good candidate but people are exaggerating his ineptness. He is only 4-5 points behind and no worse than the average losing candidate of the last few decades. He still has a chance to win though it’s receding rapidly. If he performs well in the debates, finds a decent ad strategy on which to spend his considerable resources and has another couple of mediocre job reports to work with things could get really close. All three things are perfectly possible.
Something tells me there is a large pool of voters just waiting for a candidate to address the gnome issue.
I mean, nobody thought there was a constituency for a good looking housewife who liked killing fluffy animals and reads at an eighth grade level, but a third of the electorate adores Sarah Palin.
This is a good point. I think Romney is probably a better debater than Obama [I may have pulled this out of my butt, so I don’t have a cite], although I don’t know how much debates impact presidential elections anymore.
