Roseyland

Once upon a time, I was senior in High School. As a senior, I had to take a class called American Government. In my high school, everyone was required to take American Government as a senior, which sucked. The nice thing about senior year was that different types of people had self selected themselves onto different paths. Some of us were taking AP classes and applying to college, and some of us were doing other things. American government was the exception to this though, because it threw us all back into one big collective high school student pot. Wonderful. Do I come off snobbish in this paragraph? Oh well, just calling it like I vaguely remember it.

None of what I just said is important. What is important is that in American Government, we learned all about the constitution and the legislative process. At the end of the class, our teacher asked us what change we would make to our government, if we could. My answer at the time was pretty lame. I think I said that I would give Washington D.C. a senator and house representative, since D.C. had no representation in the U.S. congress, which does seem unfair.

Today I have a better answer. Prepare yourself, are you ready to digest my radical ideology??? Wait for it… If I could change one thing about the United States government, I would eliminate the primary election system. For all national elections, there would be a run-off election in May. In this election, every voter would vote among every candidate. There would be no partisan elections. Then, the top two candidates from the run-off election would move on to the general election in November.

This solves a few problems. First, we no longer have the third party candidate problem. I hate the fact that people are forced to choose between the candidate they love, and the candidate they just like, but has a realistic shot of being elected. Under this new plan, you can vote for whomever you want in the run-off election to let your voice be heard. Then, in the general election, you choose the remaining candidate you like the most. If the remaining candidates are two republicans, fine. If they are two democrats, fine. If they are two independents, fine.

Another benefit to this plan, in my mind at least, is that it gives the most power to the moderate majority of America. Under the current primary system, the most conservative segment of society chooses one candidate, and the most progressive segment chooses the other. Then the rest of us are left to choose between two extremes in the general election. If we had a run-off election system, we could choose between two different but moderate candidates. This would do wonders for our sanity.

To be fair, I think our system works well, it could just be better. In my probably biased view, most Democratic candidates are actually fairly moderate. The Republicans on the other hand, ehh, not so much. John McCain is fairly moderate, and would have been a decent President. Sarah Palin on the other hand? She’s a whack job. I should probably say something more diplomatic, but sorry, that’s how I see it. I feel like today’s moderate Republicans are being held hostage by the tea partiers. This is unfortunate, and I believe our country would benefit from a system that prevents these unhealthy relationships.

So, what do you think? Am I crazy? I mean because of this blog post, not because of anything else you may have read (or heard, or witnessed). If I could change another thing about the American government, I would probably eliminate the electoral college. Which is an interesting thought experiment. How would U.S. elections change if there was no electoral college? Maybe I’ll blog about that tomorrow.