海角大神

The Washington Post鈥檚聽Sebastian Payne notes that, in all likelihood, the person who wins the Maine governor鈥檚 election in November will be聽someone who most of the voters have voted against:

The New York Times鈥檚聽Katherine Seeyle has her own profile of the race in Maine in her paper, repeating the theme that聽Governor LePage鈥檚 best hope for survival is keeping the three-way race alive:

As Seeyle goes on to note, this simple electoral fact has had some rather interesting impacts on the race as a whole, most especially as manifested in the debates that the three candidates have held so far in the race. To a large degree, it appears as though LePage and Cutler have both used the majority of their time to attack Michaud and his positions and have largely laid off of attacking each other. One report even described the relationship between the two in pre-debate banter last week as friendly and even 鈥渂uddy-buddy.鈥� Given the fact that, just four years ago, it was Cutler who came within 10,000 votes of beating LePage in a race that included not only a Democratic nominee but two other Independent candidates, this seems somewhat surprising. However, it seems entirely understandable given the nature of the race. For LePage, beating Michaud at the moment seems to require that Cutler remain a strong enough candidate all the way through Election Day to peel sufficient votes away from the Democratic nominee. For Cutler, any hope he has of moving out of third place in this race and once again becoming the contender that he was in 2010 requires peeling more and more votes away from the Democratic nominee. In such an environment, it鈥檚 entirely natural that the former 2010 rivals would be, at least informally, teaming up to go after what each campaign sees to be their primary adversary.

While all of this is unusual for Americans in most states, it is by no means unusual in Maine. In the 10 elections for governor in that state that have been held in the last 40 years, a candidate has been elected with a majority of the vote only twice: Democratic incumbent Gov. Joseph Brennan鈥檚 1982 bid for reelection,聽when he got just under 62% of the vote; and in 1998, when Independent Gov. Angus King聽won reelection with just over 58% of vote.聽In the other eight elections since 1974, there has been at least one Independent candidate for governor who put up a strong enough showing to keep the winning candidate below 50%. In fact, only three of those eight 鈥� the聽1978 election,聽the聽1990 election, and the聽2002 election聽鈥� were ones in which the winning candidate got above 40% of the vote. In each of the remaining elections, the winner received less than 40% of the vote, with winning percentages ranging from as high as聽39.90% in 1986聽to聽35.37% in 1994聽when Angus King was first elected. For his part,聽LePage was elected in 2010 with 37.6%. In other words, 80% of the governor鈥檚 races have been three-way affairs where the winning candidate received less than a majority, and 50% of them have been races where the winner received less than 40% of the vote. To a large degree, this is due to peculiarities of the politics of Maine, particularly a strong independent and Green Party movement, but whatever the reasons it is entirely normal as far as Maine is concerned.

On some level, I suppose, one could object to the idea that someone could be elected to a position like governor with less than a majority of the votes, and there are certainly ways to prevent this from happening. Some states deal with the issue by making it incredibly difficult, if not virtually impossible, for viable third-party and independent candidates to get on the ballot and into debates, but those draconian methods have always struck me as improper and distasteful, since they essentially involve the two major parties colluding to keep potential competition from messing up their duopoly of power. The most obvious, of course, would be to require a runoff election any time a candidate doesn鈥檛 receive more than 50% of the vote. That is an option that is used in many states in the Southern United States, although it must be said that the historical reasons for those runoffs is rooted more in efforts to limit the political power of African-Americans than it was in a desire to ensure that the winning candidate was the one that received majority support. Even without this history, though, runoff elections cost the taxpayers money and, given the fact that they generally produce lower voter turnout than the general election, one wonders just how representative the electorate that decides the election actually is compared to the one that had voted a month or so beforehand. Another solution would be some form of Instant runoff voting, where voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than voting for a single candidate. In such a system, if no candidate receives a majority of votes, then the candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated and his or her votes are distributed to the remaining candidates based on the second preference of the people who voted for the eliminated candidate 鈥� a process that continues until someone has a majority of the votes. This system is used in some selections in other parts of the world, such as Australia. Personally, I have doubts about the system, because I can easily envision a situation where there is only one candidate on the ballot that someone wants to vote for. Absent an option to give every other candidate a 鈥渮ero鈥� rank, such a system essentially requires someone to vote for someone they really don鈥檛 want to vote for.

In any case, though, there鈥檚 nothing preventing Maine from enacting either runoff elections or instant runoff voting. Indeed, such a system would seem to be in the interests of both major parties, since it would likely ensure that one of them would end up having the candidate in the final two most of the time. There have been some proposals to introduce IRV to Maine, but they seem to die in the legislature without any real consideration, though. That suggests that the people of Maine are pretty much okay with the way things are working right now, and they don鈥檛 really mind the fact that the existence of a robust independent streak in state politics means that their governors will often win with less than majority support. If they鈥檙e okay with it, then I鈥檓 not sure there鈥檚 any real reason to upset the apple cart.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.