You Won't Fix Maine's Elections Without Getting Past The Fairness Folly

In puzzling over how Maine got Paul LePage as governor the generally sensible Charles Pierce said this, 

It is possible that LePage has cracked up. If so, you can't do anything but hope he quits and gets whatever help he needs. But Maine has to look deeply into its political culture to see how this guy got elected in the first place and then, hilariously, got re-elected, and why enough people were so enamored of a) LePage's tough-guy bluster, and b) the purity of third-party candidates, that the state found itself in the mess it's in now.

I will start by noting he leaves out the major role of Maine's media ownership and control, which had more than a little to do with it.  And that would include the Republican control of the only state-wide network, Maine Public Broadcasting.  "Public" radio is a major force in Maine and their news operation has been skewed to favoring Republicans for decades.  Their morning guy who does the local news reports during Morning Edition may as well be Paul LePage's unofficial press secretary.  

But Pierce almost got there in his "b", only the spoiler who got LePage elected with a less than majority of the votes, twice, Elliot Cutler wasn't running as a party candidate, he was a millionaire who ran vanity candidacies, I would imagine trying to do what Angus King did when he ran, successfully, for governor and later the Senate, both King and Cutler are former Democrats who were too conservative to get the Democratic nomination, though King, to his credit, at least tried to.   I will point out that Angus King became widely known in Maine due to his long running show on Maine Public TV, just to show you how influential it is. 

There are more than a few reasons we got LePage, the most easily fixed would be to have automatic run-offs whenever the candidate with the most votes fails to get a majority of the votes.  In a head to head match-up between LePage and the second biggest vote-getter in either race, he certainly would have lost.  No one should become the head executive of a state or the federal government without the support of a majority of the voters, though I doubt that our absurdly anachronistic, 18th century Constitution would allow that to be fixed on the federal level.  Either you believe that the legitimacy of the government depends on its acceptance by a majority of voters or you get this kind of thing.

The other reform would be to repeal the absurdly easy ballot access that was imposed as a result of liberal niceness and fairness campaigns in previous decades.  That is part of one of the stupidest habits of posing, posturing, process liberals, they want to be fair while their ideological opponents want to win no matter what.   Democrats got suckered over and over again by some of the emptiest of platitudes into enabling their opponents by making nice to and extending a fairness to them that they had no intention of reciprocating.   It shouldn't be so absurdly easy to get on the ballot that even ridiculous candidates can get on them, never mind self-financed millionaires who never ran for anything.  The list of candidates on our ballots, the Greens, the myriad of never-could-win independents is a long one.  My personal favorite was Thu People’s Hero Phillip Morris NaPier who got a purportedly serious hearing from elections officials, demanding the right to have his name appear on the ballot that way.  As I recall he legally changed his name to that so he could run as such for Governor.  As I reported at the time, he came in fifth, right after the Green candidate Pat Lamarche, another never-could-win independent and the paleo-Republican Chandler Woodcock who lost but who Paul LePage would make look like a beacon of light.  As I also noted, the national Green Party touted Lamarche's 4th place finish as some kind of great victory.  I have to admit I really loathe the Greens. 

That we pretend this is good or important for democracy is ridiculous. 

I don't see any reason for Democrats, who have been the ones to pay the price when spoilers ran against them should remain suckers for the idea that making it easier for spoilers to run is a good thing.

The election ballot, though, is not a place for absurdist entertainment, personal posturing, or pointless political symbolism.  To pretend that it's not possible to discern those from serious candidates who have a chance at winning the major office is just irresponsible and dishonest.  But to fix it we have to cut the bull shit about a lot of the stuff we've been sold since the 60s.  The last liberal governor Maine had was Ken Curtis who retired from office in the 1970s.  If those "reforms" were good for democracy we'd have had liberals elected since they were imposed.