I’ve said more than once: Denial of Medicaid, a bare bones medical coverage, is genocide on the installment plan.
It is an unspeakable cruelty I knew one and now know two women on Medicaid with life-threatening diseases. Without Medicaid they would suffer cruel deaths.
As I understand it, the Dems in Maine got Nader’ed.
A third party candidate came in and split the Left of center vote.
I’m sorry. Incredibly depressing, but you did ask.
He got 48.2% of the vote with the Dem Michaud getting 43.4% and 8.4% for a guy named Cutler who’s the new Nader.
That kind of shit just pisses me off to no end. Not because I don’t think a person should run if he/she really believes in it, but because there is absolutely no conception of the social contract, or your larger obligations about what is really right and what is at stake when poll numbers make it plain what is going to happen. I don’t let voters off the hook, either, because they perpetuate it, too.
Twice
Oh and before I forget
Thank you Green party
According to Charlie Pierce: the human bowling jacket.
Can a court really order LePage to stop being a jerk?
Wow.
That’s refreshing.
Typical RWNJ posture. I don’t need to comply with laws I don’t like.
EFF him.
You’re assuming there will still be a “Trump Administration” in 2019. Not to get too optimistic, but things are looking kinda weird right now…
There used to be a time in America when each elected Party operated government more or less in the same way.
Yes, they had different ideas, different priorities, different programs, which they would work to implement, but they kept government operating in the same way one expects a business to operate when changing management.
In the hands of the conservative movement, however, Republicans have redefined government to be an adversarial tool, a power tool, precedent be damned, except the adversary isn’t the Democrats.
The adversaries are the voters.
LePage failed to get a majority of the vote either time he won (38% and 48%). In the first election (2010), the Dems ran a super weak candidate who ended up getting only 19% of the vote, and sinking rapidly. If the election were held a week later, I’m sure the independent candidate (a centrist, not great, but far better than the Dem) would have peeled off enough liberal votes to win. In the second election, the reverse happened. the same Independent ran, but got far fewer votes because the Democrat (Mike Michaud, former state rep from the northern half of the state) was much stronger.
In both situations, had LePage faced only one candidate, he would have lost.
Both of these elections led to the huge push for ranked choice voting, which was voted on in the same election as the Medicaid expansion. And just like the Medicaid expansion, the Republicans are adamantly against it. Because ranked choice voting would mean an end to Republican control in the state for a long time.
That was the most recent election. In the one before that, Cutler came in second, and the Dem came in 3rd, playing the “spoiler” role.
Hopefully both Dems and left-leaning indys will learn the lesson here and coalesce around a single strong candidate to take on whatever lump of semi-digested vomitus Maine’s GOP pukes up in their primary.
You mean there are people who would rather vote for a losing Left candidate than for a winning centrist candidate? Even if the Far Right candidate wins?
I am shocked.
If @maricaibo can repost his/her “run for office” template, perhaps I can repost my “We need Australia’s Preferential Voting Process” suggestion.You rank-order the candidates and if nobody gets 50% plus one, you start distributing the lowest ranked preferences in a loop until you get somebody who hits the threshold. Your winners tend to the middle, extremists fall out and all is good.
I’ll admit that it’s a more complex system, which makes it a harder sell, and of course those who would be marginalized at both ends of the Bell curve would resist, but having lived in both systems, it seems orders of magnitude better than California’s crazy jungle primary system…
ETA: I see @agamemnon beat me to it, good to see others talking this up!
“The Court concludes that the Commissioner’s complete failure to act cannot be considered substantial compliance,”
Gotta love how their behavior is just so utterly ridiculous that any honest judge is reduced to rendering opinions full of internally redundant statements and tautologies.
The outcry here in Maine from Republicans, forced to use ranked choice voting in their primary, has been fun and intense. Still, it won’t be used in the general election in November.
As I understand it, Maine’s Constitution specifies that in certain races – including the gubernatorial and legislative general elections, whoever wins a plurality of votes wins the race. So changing that would require amending the state constitution. Correct?
Arpaio, Kobach, LePage…your modern Republican Party.
Strong according to whom? And who’s in there with a ton of money trying to destroy common sense?
Neither Trump nor LePage are helping the poor white people, let alone the other colors.