The
propagandist mass media has already awarded Clinton the primary stage
of the run-off election. This is not based on Clinton squeezing out
her minimally narrow
one pledged-delegate victory in the reliably blue-state
Massachusetts, but rather on her series of victories in states which
for more than a generation have not contributed a single electoral
vote to a Democrat who was not resident in the region.
Excluding
these "rotten borough" states from the scorecard, the current
count is that Sanders has won by landslides in blue states 4-1, with 1-1 tie in
purple states, and
virtual ties in Nevada and Iowa which are purple. Even the
one blue state ascribed to Clinton -- Massachusetts -- might be
viewed as a virtual tie, especially in light of the unexplained
exit-poll anomaly
which argues for a blanket DNC rule change discounting the weight of
any ballots from states that are not made on paper, and subject to
hand re-count.
A
"rotten borough" is a depopulated election district that retains
its original representation though hardly anyone lives there any
more. The term was originally used to describe the royally rigged
English voting system that founders like Thomas Paine
ridiculed as part of the corrupt system that they revolted against.
Before the Civil Rights Era, during which the Republican and
Democratic parties switched positions on Jim Crow, the southern
states were well populated with electoral votes for the party of
secession and segregation. Starting with Nixon's opportunistic 1968
Southern Strategy response to the landmark civil rights legislation
of the middle 1960's, and especially after that strategy was further
refined by Reagan in 1980 and financed by the newly legalized
political investments of plutocrats, there have been effectively no
electoral votes for Democrats in the deep South, aside from those for
"favorite sons," Carter and Clinton. Since then, even that
tactic has failed to break the solid south. In 2000,
hapless Al Gore lost the election because he couldn't even borrow a
few electoral votes from his home state of Tennessee, or from any
other former slave state.
Since the time when the DNC rules were reformed in 1972, the parties have completed their switch of regional loyalties. Then party loyalties were still in flux. In 1976 Jimmy Carter carried the solid south that George Wallace had carried in 1968. But in the typically close elections held since 1988 the two parties have barely wavered across the blue-red divide. The respective regional bases of the two parties are now clear and predictable.
The
regional realignment of the parties has relegated red states to
rotten borough status. The DNC rules must now be revised to account
for the creation of rotten boroughs since 1980 as formerly Democratic
states have been depopulated of electors. Followers of British
Premier League football would understand the concept of relegation to
the lower division. Blue and
purple states
are the Premier League of the Democratic Party because they win all
its votes in the Electoral College. Primary contests held by the
relegated red-states, who win none, should be conducted as straw
polls for rotten boroughs which carry no influence in the Premier
League.
Like
it or not, Americans select their presidents by an indirect Electoral
College process specified in the Constitution. This process enacts a
compromise between majoritarian democracy and de-centralizing
federalism. "Despite
the media-hyped fascination with election night, there has never been
a true national election for President." You
and I don't vote for president. Electors do. Electors represent
states. Therefore delegates sent to nominating conventions by voters
represent state electors, for which the rest of us are only proxies,
until elections in each state determine those electors in accordance
with state law.
Those electors and nobody else select a president. Therefore it is the numbers of these electors in each state that should properly determine the relative voting rights of those states in the nominating Conventions.
Most states assign electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. We all know those red states and blue states, where one party has a lock on the electoral votes, and also the few purple states where demographic changes or equivalence mean they do not. Red and blue states, for purposes of the Electoral College, are rotten boroughs respectively for Democrats and Republicans. No blue electors, by definition, have resided in red states for many years now. For example, no Democrat elector has shown up in a Plains State in the half century since the 1964 landslide against Goldwater, when the Republicans ran a candidate who was honest about his extreme right-wing beliefs, rather than tricky, calculating, corrupt and therefore capable of reversing that landslide just 8 years later, as Richard Nixon did.
Aside from such a rare landslide, Democrats, for all practical purposes, have exactly zero potential for finding a single electoral vote from all the deepest red states combined. If Republicans should, after a half century, nominate another honest right-wing politician like Goldwater without at least B-movie acting skills so as to enable another Democratic landslide, the otherwise unexpected additional electoral votes from the red states would not be essential to victory in any event. The winning electoral vote would have been cast, in order of margin of victory, by a purple state.
For a generation, the deep south states of the early primary South Carolina and the Super Tuesday Georgia, Alabama, and Texas have been well-established as deep red. Three of them have not delivered a Democratic electoral vote in two generations. Along with Clintons' Super Tuesday Arkansas and Tennessee, all these reliably red former slave states are the base on which Clinton is building her supposed (by the plutocratic media) Super Tuesday "major victory" over Sanders giving her "full command" of the race.
On "Super Saturday," Clinton continued this string of former slave state successes in red state Louisiana. But she lost to Sanders in two deep red Plains States, Kansas and Nebraska, as she had lost in Oklahoma on Super Tuesday. In a country that likes to side with winners, her lopsided delegate harvest in the former slave states makes effective propaganda and could shave points off Sanders' blue state victories, if believed.
No one explains why delegates from any of these deep red states, whether slave states for Clinton or Plain States for Sanders, should have a vote at the Democratic National Convention. Red state delegates are proven to a very high degree of certainty, based on past experience, to have been relegated to rotten borough status and predictably represent no single vote for the Democratic nominee in the Electoral College, which is the only vote that counts.
"It was a wise man [Aristotle] who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals." Dennis v. United States, 339 U.S. 162, 184 (1950) (Frankfurter, J.) Treating delegates from states who will make no essential contribution to victory in the Electoral College equally in the nominating Convention with those who will is to treat unequals as equals -- the greatest form of discrimination. Fantasies to the contrary cannot change the fact that red states will in fact represent no future Democratic elector at all.
Propagandists for the identity politics behind which plutocrats disguise themselves as "liberal" to undermine progressive anti-plutocracy unity will be quick to point out that the voters in the southern rotten boroughs are largely African-Americans. They will play the "racist" card. But this is a losing play because it would ignore that red states outside the South tend to have very small African-American populations and that the blue and purple states which will have their equal representation restored is where the other half of African-Americans live, not to mention most of their white political allies since the abolition movement as well. If racial equality is not a neutral factor, then it would more likely be a significantly positive result from stripping all red state rotten boroughs of their current discriminatory over-representation.
As Justice Holmes famously said, Frank v. Mangum (1915): "This is not a matter for polite presumptions; we must look facts in the face." It is self-delusion to think that the minority of Democratic voters in red states, whose voting strength for Electoral College electors will predictably be zero, actually count for anything. Those votes are effectively cancelled by force of winner-take-all state laws. Democratic votes in deep red states are no more relevant to the outcome of electing a president than if they were never cast. If the red state delegates representing those voters did not turn up for the Convention at all, it could only improve the outcome of the election by eliminating an irrelevant distraction. Their attendance as guests raises no necessary problem; but their equal voting strength without contributing proportionately equal electoral votes to the Electoral College does.
The
delusion that red states are anything else but rotten boroughs for
Democrats is based on the "polite presumption" that presidents
are elected by all the people. This myth persists in defiance of the
fact that presidents are actually selected by the Electoral College,
whose membership is all that matters. Red states voluntarily
construct their winner-take-all presidential voting rules (as almost
all states do) to intentionally create a Democratic rotten borough
for purposes of the Electoral College vote. There is no valid
principle that should require the blue states to give those rotten
boroughs unequal voting rights at their presidential nominating
Convention where blue and purple states represent the entirety of the
electoral votes needed to win. Since the rotten boroughs contribute
no electors, the eternal principle rejecting treatment of unequals as
if they are equal must be applied.
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