BY KARI ANDRADE
Republican delegates are bound on the first ballot at the national convention to vote based on election results even if that is not their chosen candidate. If there is no candidate with a majority, then there is a contested convention and delegates can change whom they vote for at the national convention.
What does this mean going forward? It appears that Trump will have a majority of delegates going into the national convention. If delegates must vote for him on the first ballot and he has a majority, then game over and he is the nominee even though the majority of establishment Republicans do not support him.
On the Democratic side, Bernie will continue to win delegates into June and his supporters are fiercely loyal. It is possible that such a large voting-block, perhaps one-third of delegates, will band together to force Clinton to choose Bernie, perhaps Elizabeth Warren or someone further to the left to be the vice-presidential nominee. Clinton should do something to appease the young voters and strong Bernie supporters or she risks them not turning out in November.
Trump is so disliked by establishment Republicans that they may break ranks and run a third party candidate, or the Libertarian candidate could gain traction, taking traditional Republican support. Watch out for former New Mexico Republican Governor Gary Johnson. If he wins the Libertarian nomination again, he could draw Republican support away from Trump. Whatever happens, this is not politics as usual and we may look back at this election as the year everything changed. Is this the end of the Republican Party or the end of a two-party system? Only time will tell.
The likely scenario is that the third party candidate takes votes away from Trump and then Clinton wins more states due to the third party candidate. If the third party candidate, Gary Johnson, Mitt Romney or someone else wins enough states or big enough states to get enough electoral votes to deny the Democrats the needed 270 electoral votes, then they have a BIG problem.
According to the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, referring to the electoral college votes, “The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.” This gives the House of Representatives the power to select the next President. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will tell the Republicans who to vote for from the list of three. The Republicans have almost 60 more representatives than the Democrats at this point. I cannot imagine any scenario where House Republicans elect a Democrat. Would the House Republicans care if they were hated by the electorate for thwarting the will of the people if the Democratic candidate won the popular vote? I doubt it.
If this election is indeed the end of the two-party system, then we need another way, other than the Electoral College, to elect our President. If in every cycle we have three candidates splitting electoral votes, then Congress will continually be picking our Presidents. We live in a representative democracy. Do we really want to abdicate presidential selection to the Congress? I hope not. It may be time to elect our President based on popular vote and abolish the Electoral College.
