Don't worry, this won't take long.

The polls had begun to close. Across America, television sets flickered on, fingers were crossed, and beer bets were laid. For the first time in living memory, the Presidential election was a three-way tossup, and it was all down to one eccentric man’s ambition.

Before February, the race had looked to be a conventional one, with incumbent George Bush facing a rough economy and looking vulnerable to any of a crowded field of Democratic candidates. That was before Ross Perot, a Texan high-tech billionaire, had rocketed to national fame with the announcement of his independent campaign on Larry King Live in February. Unlike previous cycles’ also-rans and flashes in the pan, however, Perot set himself apart with a unique mix of left- and right-wing ideas that were broadly popular with the public but not on the radar in Washington. These included his advocacy for a balanced federal budget, his touting of direct democracy and e-voting, and his embrace of the conspiracy theory that the US government had abandoned POWs in Vietnam. By far the most significant of his pet issues was protectionism: Democratic and Republican leaders were both committed to the upcoming North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the millions of Americans who suspected it would cost the country its remaining manufacturing jobs had seen their views unrepresented by the major-party candidates. He was a populist without adjectives, a pure throw-the-bums-out candidate.

Perot’s voters might have been stereotyped as grumpy old white kooks, but there were a lot of grumpy old white kooks in America, and besides, the campaign’s appeal broadened as November drew closer. Voters have always liked an outsider, and Democratic and Republican attacks on Perot’s inexperience managed to turn the authoritarian billionaire into a hero of the little guy.

That type of populism, however, had a ceiling, and Perot had struggled to break it. Despite maintaining a plurality in the polls, narrowly leading Bush and his Democratic challenger Bill Clinton, two-thirds of Americans still had trouble trusting the Texan. Acid-tongued comedian George Carlin spoke, for once, for most of the country: “Just what a nation of idiots needs,” he sneered on his latest tour, “a short, loud idiot.”

Political junkies of all stripes – Young Republicans in their ill-fitting blazers, think tank operatives in their polyester shirts, wingnuts in their threadbare bathrobes – were on the edge of their seats all night. By the time the results were called at five a.m. EST, many must have thought they were hallucinating. The Perot campaign had fulfilled its promise, pulling in over a third of the popular vote and ringing in a new era by surpassing both established political parties. But the Texan's supporters were spread so widely that despite topping the polls in toto, he had only won a plurality in two states: Alaska and Maine. Every state in between had been carried by either the Democrats or the Republicans, many by razor-thin pluralities of hundreds or thousands of voters. Bill Clinton had received an electoral college majority, despite being almost five percent behind Perot in the popular vote. To millions of Americans - including many who had voted for Clinton or Bush - the whole thing was just too absurd for words.

Clinton’s acceptance speech acknowledged that most of the country had not voted for him, but he pledged to be a President for all, to “work with Mr. Perot” and to “reform the political system, to reduce the influence of special interests and give more influence back to the kind of people that are in this crowd tonight.” Bush’s concession statement didn’t even mention the issue. Privately, both felt that America had dodged a bullet. A controversy of this magnitude, however, couldn’t be brushed under the rug, even by the orator of Hope. By the day after the election, the grassroots movement to abolish the Electoral College had begun.

Previous attempts to reform the archaic process, a relic of the Founding Fathers’ Enlightenment-era suspicion of “mob rule,” had been stymied by the opposition of legislators from small or thinly populated states. They typically argued that doing away with the College would cause political attention to shift exclusively to large urban areas. As November faded to December and the presidential transition began, opponents of the proposed Twenty-Eighth Amendment – such as former Delaware governor Pete du Pont, soon to be honorary chairman of the pro-EC Americans for a Balanced Constitution (ABC) – continued to make the small-state case against a popular vote, but their argument was considerably flimsier now that Perot's greatest successes had come in Alaska, Maine, and Montana. A quickly commissioned series of opinion polls showed clear majorities of voters in all three states supporting the abolition of the Electoral College and agreeing with the notion that the 1992 result had been undemocratic. It wasn't only urban voters whose voice didn't count under the current system – it was the entire nation.

So when Ross Perot emerged from seclusion in December to lead the charge on constitutional reform, Clinton began to realize that he hadn’t escaped election season just yet. He might have to take the rest of his term, it seemed, on someone else’s terms.

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United We Stand, Ross Perot’s new nonprofit campaign group, opened its doors in the first week of December and immediately sucked up all the media oxygen. Nobody was watching the 102nd Congress carry out its lame-duck duties. Nobody was bothering Bill Clinton about his cabinet nominees. The only person getting more airtime than Perot, it seemed, was Diana, Princess of Wales, whose separation from Prince Charles had just been announced.

The UWS manifesto contained much of Perot’s trademark vague promises to “reclaim government from the special interests.” Beneath the rhetoric, there were two clear demands: the elimination of the Electoral College and the introduction of Congressional term limits. The idea was that the political goals of Perot voters, such as deficit reduction, could never be achieved in a two-party Washington dominated by lifelong incumbents with deep ties to lobbyists. One of the first staffers taken on by UWS was Jack Gargan, the Florida financial consultant who had won fame before the 1990 elections with an anti-incumbent ad campaign known as THRO – short for “Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Out.” Perot’s sponsorship of THRO had been his first venture into electoral politics, and it now seemed destined to be the genesis of an illustrious career.

The political narrative, it seemed, was being penned in the United We Stand press office. Media retrospectives on the November elections focused less on the fact that the partisan composition of Congress had barely changed and more on the fact that thirty-eight incumbent Representatives and five Senators had been defeated, more than twice the toll in 1990. Many had been thrown out by voters, either in the primary or general, due to malfeasance or incompetence. Several of those implicated in the previous spring’s House banking scandal had met their fates – including Bill Alexander of Arkansas, once the Chief Deputy Whip, who lost the Democratic primary to his former secretary Blanche Lincoln after thirty years in office – but there were more exotic cases, such as that of Chicago’s controversial Gus Savage, who stood accused of orchestrating a drive-by shooting against his primary opponent. Others, however, seemed to owe their losses simply to a general anti-incumbent feeling, or to the year’s unexpected surge for third-party candidates. Veteran North Carolina Senator Terry Sanford lost to Republican challenger Lauch Faircloth. Long-shot liberal Russ Feingold beat two better-funded Democrats to unseat incumbent Wisconsin Senator Bob Kasten. Don Young, Alaska’s sole Representative since 1973, was replaced by Democrat John Devens on a small plurality after a three-cornered race in which the Alaskan Independence Party candidate pulled in a quarter of the vote. Minnesota Democrat Gerry Sikorski was slammed by both of the year’s trends – his reputation was in tatters after the revelation of almost 700 overdrafts from the House Bank, and he was beaten into third place by Republican Rod Grams and by an independent Perot supporter named Dean Barkley.

Barkley’s showing was one of the best for a third-party or independent candidate, but there were many more: in both the Alaskan and Hawaiian Senatorial elections, the nascent Green Party picked up over ten percent of the vote, while Libertarians and independents held the balance in several others. Perhaps the most widely reported third-party candidacy was that of Libertarian Jim Hudson in the Georgia senate race. While Hudson only received about four percent, that was enough to force a runoff under Georgia’s election law, which mandated a top-two contest if no candidate won over 50% of the vote. Incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler and Republican Paul Coverdell faced each other on November 24th, as the country was still buzzing with Electoral College fever. More than a few commentators remarked upon Coverdell’s victory that the Georgia system seemed a lot fairer than what the nation had seen on November 3rd.

Bill Clinton’s inauguration on January 20th temporarily pulled the media’s eyes away from the electoral reform saga. Clinton’s first major acts in office were to end, via executive order, the Reagan-era restrictions on abortion-related family planning campaigns; and to unveil a comprehensive deficit reduction plan based around progressive income tax hikes and curbs on future growth in government spending. Even the Democrats, it seemed, were feeling the pressure to act on the biggest issue of the day.

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For those keeping track at home, the differences from OTL's results are...

In the Senate:
NY: Robert Abrams (D) def. Al D’Amato (R, incumbent)
…meaning the Senate stands 58 Democrat43 Republican.

In the House:
AK-AL: John S. Devens (D) def. Don Young (R, incumbent) and Michael States (Alaskan Independence)
CA-19: Tal Cloud (R) def. Rick Lehman (D, incumbent) and Dorothy L. Wells (Peace and Freedom)
CA-43: Mark Takano (D) def. Ken Calvert (R) (meaning that Congress has its third openly gay member, the first to be out when elected)
CT-2: Edward Munster (R) def. Sam Gejdenson (D, incumbent)
FL-15: Bill Tolley (R) def. Jim Bacchus (D, incumbent)
IA-3: Elaine Baxter (D) def. Jim Ross Lightfoot (R, incumbent)
MI-8: Dick Chrysler (R)
def. Bob Carr (D, incumbent) (lol @ Michigan nominative determinism)
MO-14: Rick Hardy (R) def. Harold Volkmer (D, incumbent) and Jeff Barrow (Green)
MN-7: Bernie Omann (R) def Collin Peterson (D, incumbent)
NE-2: Ronald Staskiewicz (R) def. Peter Hoagland (D, incumbent)
PA-20: Bill Townsend (R) def. Austin Murphy (D)
TN-3: Zach Wamp (R) def. Marilyn Lloyd (D, incumbent)
TX-16: Chip Taberski (R) def. Ronald D. Coleman (D, incumbent)
WI-6: Peg Lautenschlager (D)
def. Tom Petri (R, incumbent)
…meaning the House stands 252 Democrat 182 Republican 1 independent.

In the governors’ mansions:
MT: Dorothy Bradley (D) def. Marc Racicot (R)
WA: Ken Eikenberry (R) def. Mike Lowry (D)
…meaning the governorships stand 30 Democrat18 Republican 1 A Connecticut Party1 Alaskan Independence, as in OTL.
 
Why do the Republicans do so much better in the House vs OTL? Is it a simple matter of voters in general turning against incumbents, where Democrats seem to have outnumbered House Republicans nearly 2:1 so naturally there are twice as many rebellions against Democrats as republicans?

Glancing at the list it seems there is more to it than that--the number of Republicans upsetting Democrats looks more like 4:1 than 2:1. Also on the whole Perot's challenge, and that of the Reform Party down the line, though something of an ideological mixed bag seems to me to be pretty skewed to the right; even issues that might work out with a progressive impact (such as getting past the Electoral Vote system) are justified ideologically in rather right wing terms by Reformists. That being the case its tendency is to split and hence weaken the Republicans more than Democrats--exactly what happened in the Presidential race of OTL. Thus if Republicans are overturning Democratic seats faster than Democrats overturn Republican ones, they must be pretty superpowered indeed to win despite Perot's party diverting votes away from the R candidates.

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What mechanism of escaping the Electoral Vote system would wind up being championed by Perot et al, and accepted by sufficient numbers of Democrats and Republicans to be implemented?

There is a method of making the outcome depend solely on who wins the national popular vote, namely the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC does not depend on a Constitutional Amendment to be enacted--in fact it relies on the current constitution which gives each state complete discretion in how it will appoint its delegation of electors. Technically the NPVIC does not abolish the Electoral Vote system at all, but it does guarantee that the winner of each Electoral vote across the nation will in fact be the same person who wins the popular vote across the nation, which is the outcome desired.

Sort of. Like all electoral systems that must pick one and one only individual, it strongly favors voting for one of two leading parties. Prospective voters for a third candidate, one they judge would be a superior candidate to either nominee of the two leading parties, would still face the dilemma they currently face of undermining the prospects of the candidate in the two party system who is the lesser evil from their point of view and increasing the chances that the worst candidate from their point of view will win. As in 1992 OTL, for instance, where Perot voters, in my personal judgement, undermined a strong Bush lead and enabled a Democrat they would not have preferred to win. Had we had a simple system whereby the plurality holder in a multi-way national popular vote wins the office in 1992, Clinton would again have won in OTL, due to leading the other two; had the voters instead voted as in this ATL, Perot would win--but clearly this would be a situation of questioned legitimacy since both the two leading parties, still between them overwhelmingly dominant in House, Senate, state legislatures and governorships, would be set at odds with the President. This would generally be a more interesting system and perhaps have a good dynamic, and certainly Reform candidates would have a big leg up in 1994. If in 1992, the NPVIC had been enacted in sufficient numbers of states to activate it, the Electoral Vote system would cast its votes in favor of Clinton overwhelmingly were voters to vote as OTL and Perot if they did as in the ATL--the practical outcome is the same as in a simple system of counting the national popular vote and electing the plurality holder.

In fact despite the pressure on voters to choose from among just the leading two party candidates, many US presidents have in fact been elected with mere pluralities of the popular vote, some falling very far short indeed--the worst case being the election of 1860 that elected Lincoln! In fact that election is a litmus test of sorts in my opinion; any system but NPVIC or the existing state-by-state winner take all of each state's EV would most likely result in someone other than Lincoln winning and since I think that would have at best postponed the secession crisis and Civil War, and would more likely lead to the perpetuation of slavery than to a gentler landing than OTL, that certainly gives me pause to reflect! Since we must pick one leader only, perhaps it is best to settle for the plurality winner no matter what. But the OTL system would also from time to time, as in 2000 or 2016, award the Electoral Vote victory to someone who got less votes than the plurality winner, which neither NPVIC nor a straight award to the popular vote plurality winner would do, so a straight and simple plurality system with no further requirements would clearly be an improvement on OTL--but would require a Constitutional Amendment, whereas NPVIC being adopted by enough states to comprise 270 or more electoral votes would not require an Amendment and achieve the exact same result each time.

If a President governing for 4 years with a mere plurality, meaning more American voters voted against them than for them, bothers people, I can think of various other approaches, all of which of course require an Amendment.
 
Why do the Republicans do so much better in the House vs OTL? Is it a simple matter of voters in general turning against incumbents, where Democrats seem to have outnumbered House Republicans nearly 2:1 so naturally there are twice as many rebellions against Democrats as republicans?

Glancing at the list it seems there is more to it than that--the number of Republicans upsetting Democrats looks more like 4:1 than 2:1. Also on the whole Perot's challenge, and that of the Reform Party down the line, though something of an ideological mixed bag seems to me to be pretty skewed to the right; even issues that might work out with a progressive impact (such as getting past the Electoral Vote system) are justified ideologically in rather right wing terms by Reformists. That being the case its tendency is to split and hence weaken the Republicans more than Democrats--exactly what happened in the Presidential race of OTL. Thus if Republicans are overturning Democratic seats faster than Democrats overturn Republican ones, they must be pretty superpowered indeed to win despite Perot's party diverting votes away from the R candidates.

To roughly calculate the differences in the Congressional votes, I just tilted a few percentage points away from the incumbent candidate / incumbent party, either Republican or Democrat; there were quite a few races in 1992 where a Democrat just barely scraped to victory over the same Republican challenger who would unseat them in the 1994 wave. You can see that Zach Wamp, today a senior GOP member, got into Congress two years early ITTL.

Perot's 1992 campaign was entirely focused on the Presidency; he didn't coordinate any sort of campaign for lower office, and independent candidates who described themselves as his supporters, like Barkley in Minnesota, were few and far between. I figured that in the absence of Reform Party candidates, the new voters that a more successful Perot would turn out would tend to vote against the incumbent, with a slight preference for Republicans as they are the minority party and (as you pointed out) the Reform agenda skews a little more right than left. There was already quite a bit of anti-incumbent turnover in 1992 in reality - the examples of Bill Alexander and Gus Savage are not made up. So there are quite a few Republican pickups but also a couple for the Democrats as vulnerable incumbents such as Al D'Amato who won very narrowly IOTL get thrown out. Alaska is a bit of a special case - the AIP candidate actually did very well IOTL, and it's the closest Don Young has ever come to losing his seat; I figured in a world where Perot wins Alaska there are going to be a lot more voters attracted by the very literally anti-Washington message of the AIP.

What mechanism of escaping the Electoral Vote system would wind up being championed by Perot et al, and accepted by sufficient numbers of Democrats and Republicans to be implemented?

That's the $64,000 question, and I hope you don't mind me saying that you'll have to read and find out. The NPVIC wasn't developed until 2006 IOTL, but of course in a world with more focus on electoral reform, there's no reason someone couldn't have come up with it earlier. But yes, it will be a very difficult task to get the two parties to cede any power.

You're that guy who did The American Quest. Glad to see another TL from you. Consider me a fan. :D

Thank you! Glad to hear I have a fan. This might be a little bit less wacky than Quest - at least to begin with. (Although if you want some levity, check out Jack "THRO" Gargan's Wikipedia page, which is the most painful and obvious piece of self-promotion I've ever seen on there.)
 
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During the first week of the new Congress, freshman representative Gene Green, Democrat of Texas, introduced a Joint Resolution proposing a constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College with plurality at-large election of the President. It was a shrewd career-boosting move on Green’s part, but went nowhere at first; the House referred the resolution to the Committee on the Judiciary and moved on to President Clinton’s agenda. The proposal would be marooned on page three of newspapers across the country. Electoral reform was low on the list of priorities when there was an economy to fix and a budget deficit to plug.

It was up to the grassroots to keep reform on the table by linking it to those bread-and-butter issues. Sensing that media interest in the Perot movement was finally dying down now that Clinton was in office, Ed Rollins, United We Stand’s campaign chairman, urged the organization to decide exactly what kind of electoral reform they wanted and adopt a point-by-point manifesto to which they could hold politicians accountable. Without loyal members of Congress to advance the general thrust of their agenda, UWS needed specific goals, so that volunteers could, say, call Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks to demand that he support or amend Green’s resolution.

Later interviews with UWS staff have suggested that the ideal of runoff elections was pushed by Perot himself, who already intended to run for President again in 1996 and wanted his inevitable victory to be more “legitimate” than Clinton’s. In the end, the organization’s official Statement of Purpose, published in May 1993, included three planks under the “Fair Elections” heading:
  1. The abolition of the Electoral College and its replacement by a direct popular vote, with a provision for a runoff between the top two candidates if no candidate earns over 50% of the vote in the first round.
  2. The introduction of runoff elections between the top two candidates for the House of Representatives and Senate if no candidate earns over 50% of the vote in the first round.
  3. The introduction of Congressional term limits, denying ballot access to any candidate who has already served four terms in the House of Representatives or two terms in the Senate.
The latter two points could be achieved via state-level legislation; several states had already adopted Congressional term limit laws. The first, however, would require a Constitutional amendment, as would the balanced budget law called for in the manifesto’s “Financial Responsibility” section. It was an ambitious agenda for any nonprofit. But if anyone had the resources to promote an ambitious agenda, it was Henry Ross Perot.

The luster had already begun to come off the Clinton administration. In April, a standoff in Waco, Texas, between the Branch Davidian cult and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ended in a gun battle and a massive fire that killed four ATF agents and eighty-two Branch Davidians, including children. Kneejerk skeptics and members of the “patriot” militia movement alleged that the government had gone in guns blazing and that Attorney General Zoë Baird was responsible for the deaths. The fallout only worsened as the “Nannygate” story emerged. Amateur sleuths probing for Waco-related evidence discovered that Baird had employed undocumented immigrants as a nanny and a driver, and had additionally failed to pay Social Security taxes for her employees. Clinton’s initial defense of Baird was poorly received – both Republicans and UWS claimed that the President was making excuses for illegal behavior – and the nation’s first female Attorney General was forced to resign in late May. It was a huge black eye for the White House, and took the wind out of Clinton’s sails just as he was beginning to push his signature tax reform bill. When he ordered a series of cruise missile strikes on Iraqi military installations in June, even some mainstream columnists accused him of trying to distract the public from Nannygate and the contentious confirmation hearings for Baird’s successor.

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Zoë Baird, America's first female Attorney General, was also one of the shortest-serving; she would return to private legal practice after stepping down in the "Nannygate" affair. Her successor, Philip B. Heymann, would not last much longer before resigning over policy differences with the president. The Clinton administration would notoriously go through several Attorneys General.

The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act passed Congress in August, cutting taxes for lower-income families and small businesses while raising them on the rich. It should have been a propaganda coup for the Democrats, but the news cycle was dominated by the tragic story of Vince Foster. A junior legal counsel for the White House and a Clinton ally since their days in the Arkansas law scene, Foster was secretly suffering from clinical depression, and his condition was exacerbated by his part in a scandalette about a series of staff dismissals from the White House Travel Office. Scarcely days before the President was due to sign the new tax law, Foster shot himself in a public park. Ever crass, conspiracy theorists seized upon his death as proof of sinister forces at work in the administration, covering up loose ends with murder.

Attempting to stay above the fray, the administration moved on to the next priorities, health care reform and gun control, but the bad news just kept coming. David Hale, an Arkansas banker who had been imprisoned after the savings and loan crisis, publicly alleged that Bill and Hillary Clinton were complicit in fraud and embezzlement related to their failed Whitewater business venture. American casualties were mounting in Somalia, where the US was deployed as part of a peacekeeping mission. With government ethics and painful foreign entanglements dominating the discourse, the media continued to turn to Ross Perot, Jack Gargan, and Ed Rollins for comment, as well as to the fiery House Minority Whip, a conservative from Georgia named Newt Gingrich who had begun to make a name for himself by using Perot-style rhetoric to push a Republican agenda.

The first Republican ever elected in his Southern district, Gingrich represented a new future for the GOP. His fierce attacks on Speaker Jim Wright for allegedly evading campaign finance laws – attacks that had contributed to Wright’s resignation – had made his name in the House, and after becoming whip he had continued to make headlines through his rhetoric. Gingrich’s partisan bile reminded some listeners of a slightly sanitized Rush Limbaugh, but his image as a crusader against the sclerotic House Democrats had won him fans among the very same pissed-off white guys that had voted in droves for Ross Perot. It almost rang true, then, when Gingrich remarked offhandedly during a television interview in October that electoral reform was “an interesting idea, one worth more serious consideration than the Democrat Party has given it.” Gingrich went on to call Judiciary Chairman Brooks “an old Democrat cronyist who has been in Washington since Eisenhower was President” and implied that the committee was bottling up the electoral college debate in order to steal another term for Bill Clinton.

It was unclear how seriously Gingrich meant it. After a formal protest from Americans for a Balanced Constitution (ABC), an anti-electoral reform lobby group, the whip clarified that all he had been doing was urging Jack Brooks to allow serious Congressional debate on the issue. Whatever his real opinion on the Electoral College, Gingrich’s apparent endorsement of the Green Amendment bought the president’s political opponents valuable airtime right before the vote on NAFTA. News programs brought on UWS spokespeople to give their opinions on the Georgian’s remarks, and the UWS representatives duly linked the Electoral College debate to the Clinton administration’s illegitimacy, and from there moved on to the trade deal being “rammed through by a minority government.” It was, Democratic leadership grumbled as NAFTA scraped through Congress with a bare majority, as though Perot and the GOP were working together.

Of course, what happened next would disabuse any illusions about a vast right-wing conspiracy. On December 9, the day after NAFTA was signed into law, the UWS announced that “the Democratic and Republican Parties have failed we the people.” In a statement delivered to newspapers nationwide, the organization claimed that it would formally transform into the “Reform Party” and would contest the midterm elections in the fall, focusing on unseating the entrenched incumbents whose distance from their constituencies had led them to vote against America’s interests.

The decision was a heavy blow to the GOP, which had been heavily favored to take both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. Gingrich, now the House Minority Leader, had already begun to craft a campaign narrative tailored to appeal to Perot voters, emphasizing fiscal rectitude and anti-“special interest” reformism. His quasi-endorsement of EC abolition had been a carefully laid part of the strategy. Gingrich would later claim that he was on the verge of joining the UWS himself, in a symbolic gesture to Perot voters, before the organization “cut the legs out from under the Republicans” with the creation of the Reform Party. Outflanked by a third party that could gin up the populist vote better than he ever could, Gingrich’s plot collapsed.

1994 saw fewer achievements by the Democratic majority than 1993 had. Apart from the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit in March, the major piece of legislation was Clinton’s crime bill, an aptly named “omnibus” act including hundreds of changes unpalatable to both the right and left and at times suspiciously close to Perot’s authoritarian law-and-order attitudes. The bill established a federal ban on the nebulous category of “assault weapons,” vastly expanded the number of federal offenses and the potential usages of the death penalty, eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners, and introduced three-strikes policy into law. (Less controversially, it also expanded protections for women suffering from domestic abuse.) Clinton was still broadly popular among members of his party, but the crime bill and the previous year’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise on gay military service members had dampened the enthusiasm of the liberal base, while Reform continued to poll strongly among blue-collar Democrats. Independent voters, meanwhile, were trending Republican. Unfortunately for the GOP, after the Gingrich strategy had failed, their narrative had become an incoherent jumble, with candidates vacillating between parroting Perot talking points and retreating into the easy route of 1980s culture warring. Many were at a loss as to how to campaign against Reform candidates, who were frequently even more fiscally conservative than they were.

It may have been the sloppiest victorious campaign in American history. That the GOP won a slim majority at all was almost certainly down to the fact that the Reform campaign was even worse.

It was all down to the candidate problem, really. The party had scored a propaganda coup when it gained its first member of Congress in the person of Minnesota’s Tim Penny, formerly a fiscally conservative Democrat. Penny promised that a wave of defections to the “new party of common sense” would follow his, but none did. Reform’s candidates in 1994 would be, for the most part, people who had never held office. That was both a blessing and a curse.

Many of them were party activists – former Perot ‘92 volunteers or UWS staff. Jack Gargan was running from the House from Orlando, while Perot’s 1992 campaign manager, former White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, put his name in for the Georgia Senate race. Others were famous – or infamous – for their careers outside politics. John Silber, the loudmouthed, politically incorrect president of Boston University, won the opportunity to take on Ted Kennedy and businessman Mitt Romney in the Massachusetts senatorial election. Many of Reform’s Congressional hopefuls, however, were far less salubrious even than Silber. The awkward candidates generally fell into three categories: the far left, the far right, and the opportunists.

The LaRouche movement, thankfully, wanted little to do with the Reform Party; Lyndon’s minions were fixated on redeeming the Democratic Party for their own brand of quasi-fascistic New Deal infrastructure worship. But they were not the only wingnuts roaming the American political landscape. The Independence Party of New York, which had officially affiliated with the Reform Party shortly after the latter’s founding, was dominated by Perot-sympathizing “radical centrists” but contained a small faction of heterodox Marxists centered around psychotherapists Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani. Fulani had run for President under the New Alliance Party banner in 1988, and accounts by campaign staffers had painted a picture of a political cult – a nightmarish, authoritarian power structure into which idealistic leftists were recruited by Newman’s traumatic “therapy.” While the alarm had been raised in some circles, the state leadership of the Independence Party, based in Rochester and led by gubernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, largely ignored the New York City branches of the party in favor of upstate issues. Without any oversight, Newman, Fulani, and their allies wound up as Independence Party candidates for Congress. Golisano’s polling numbers, initially very competitive against Mario Cuomo and George Pataki, took a serious hit when the “New Alliance connection” emerged late in the campaign season, and the billionaire frequently found himself being asked whether he was a communist or an ally of Louis Farrakhan. The other notable “left Reformist” on the ballot was Ernie Chambers of Nebraska, an outspoken independent state legislator and former New Alliance senatorial candidate. Chambers didn’t have Fulani’s baggage and was very popular in his Omaha district, but he was considerably more socially liberal than most prospective Reform voters and bore the additional stigma of being one of the few open atheists in American politics. No one was expecting him to take the governorship in November.

There were more embarrassments from the hard right. John Tanton’s selection as a candidate in Michigan raised eyebrows. An anti-immigration campaigner and former president of Zero Population Growth, Tanton had a checkered history on racial issues and had been forced to resign from one of his own organizations after implying that Hispanic immigrants were naturally prone to ignorance and corruption. In Pennsylvania, the Reform candidate for Senate was a rabid ex-Libertarian named Jim Clymer, who immediately entered a race to the extremist horizon with Republican nominee Rick Santorum and made the Democratic incumbent look like the biggest man in the room. Meanwhile, in Alaska, the local Reform branch chose to endorse the Alaskan Independence Party’s gubernatorial candidate, Carl Moses, a state legislator from the Aleutian Islands and a former president of the Aleut Corporation. Unlike departing AKIP governor Wally Hickel, who made it clear that literal Alaskan independence would never be on the cards, Moses had played to the secessionist wing by choosing a young oilfield worker and pro-secession party officer, Todd Palin, as his running mate. The pick lost him Hickel’s endorsement, which went to the Republican candidate instead.

The opportunists – established politicians disgruntled with their own parties or sore about losing primaries – were even more numerous. Honolulu mayor Frank Fasi, on the outs with the state GOP, sought the Reform nomination for Hawaii governor. Fasi lost, and set up his own “Best Party” to contest the five-way election instead, but some opportunists were luckier. Renewable energy executive Angus King, a lifelong Democrat, managed to get on the ballot as a Reformist in Maine. King’s victory was the source of some consternation in Reform headquarters. While he was a fiscally reticent political outsider, it was obvious that he was a pragmatist above all, uninterested in the Perotistas’ grand visions and ideological hobby horses. King had no previous ties to the Reform movement and conducted his campaign independently, maintaining virtually no contact with party headquarters. And yet – party insiders complained – this unprincipled moderate had secured the nomination in what should be their best state, and was polling better than any other Reform candidate. “If Angus King is the only Reformist in office next year,” Ed Rollins recalls a colleague saying, “I’m going back to the Republicans.”

Rollins did not elaborate, but one presumes that his colleague was not happy on November 9, even if his worst fears technically went unrealized.

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1994 midterm election results. Note the changes since last election. In the House, two Democrats were replaced by Republicans in special elections and Rep. Tim Penny defected to the Reform Party. In the Senate, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison won the Texas special election, and Olympia Snowe was appointed to fill the seat of retiring Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell after his appointment to the Supreme Court. As for the governorships, Alaskan Independence Party member Wally Hickel switched back to the GOP a few months before leaving office.

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Eagle-eyed infobox viewers might notice some of these differences from OTL:

In the Senate:
CA: Michael Huffington (R) def. Dianne Feinstein (D, incumbent)
MI: Lana Pollack (D) def. Spencer Abraham (R) and John Tanton (Reform)
MN: Ann Wynia (D) def. Rod Grams (R) and Dean Barkley (Reform)
PA: Harris Wofford (D, incumbent) def. Rick Santorum (R) and Jim Clymer (Reform)
TN: Jim Sasser (D, incumbent) def. Bob Corker (R)

In the governors' mansions:
AL: Jim Folsom, Jr. (D, incumbent) def. Fob James (R)
CT: Bill Curry (D) def. John G. Rowland (R), Eunice Groark (A Connecticut Party), and Tom Scott (Reform)
ME: Angus King (Reform)
def. Joseph Brennan (D), Susan Collins (R), and Jonathan Carter (Green)
NY: Mario Cuomo (D, incumbent) def. George Pataki (R), Tom Golisano (Independence), and Howard Stern (Libertarian)
SC: Nick Theodore (D) def. David Beasley (R)

As for the differences in the House, some OTL-notable Democratic casualties such as Maria Cantwell, (ex-)Speaker Tom Foley, and Ted Strickland have held onto their seats. Drug warrior turned capital-L Libertarian Bob Barr hasn't made the cut in Georgia. A four-way race has sent the House's only independent, Bernie Sanders, back to Vermont by a hair. Reform congressman Tim Penny has been re-elected under his new party label and joined by a second candidate, about whom more in the next episode.
 
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I gather few to none of the reform proposals have actually passed into law? As you noted, forcing second, runoff, elections for Federal legislators in races where no candidate gets a majority is an option to be legislated, piecemeal state by state (the same way women voting and popular votes for Senators preceded the Amendments that finally mandated these universally on all states), so it is not impossible that

1) some states had been requiring runoffs all along; I suspect some do to this day OTL; it would be one of those things that fluctuate back and forth like the option of states to assign Presidential electors by Congressional District and 2 by statewide vote--typically there are one or two states doing that while the rest opt for winner take all by plurality--

2) so far as I know no state ever had runoffs for the Presidency. Which by the way is something that I suspect does not require a Constitutional amendment, for the purpose of assigning each state's electors anyway, though it clearly does for mandating the nation as a whole collate all popular votes to get a majority for President, via runoff if necessary. A reform requiring mandatory runoffs for non-majority winners state by state would get voters used to the idea of having the runoff--however I am not 100 percent sure that there isn't a Constitutional objection to runoffs for assignment of state EV since perhaps objectors would take it to court on the grounds that two elections will interfere with compliance with knowing the composition of that state's electors by the deadline for them to meet in their state and cast their EVs. Probably that objection would be dismissed as frivolous, especially since allegations of miscounts or fraud can be more easily set aside for purposes of determining the top two candidates--only if there was some doubt which candidate was second and which third would disputed numbers of first-ballot votes matter unless of course the magnitude of alleged miscounting were quite large.

Anyway aside from the unmentioned possibility of runoffs for a winner take all assignment of state EV only to a majority winner,

3) states that did not require runoffs for candidates so all Congressmembers and Senators are elected by a majority (in a second 2-candidate race that typically given OTL patterns, including the French system which has these kinds of runoffs OTL, would have fewer voters than the first one--one of many reasons I am jaundiced about runoffs) OTL and were not considering it (in over 40 years of awareness of currents and controversies in US politics I never recall the question of runoffs for these or other offices being instituted being a major thing anywhere--more likely, for various races there has been interest in streamlining the process to eliminate runoffs!) may be debating them ITTL, and perhaps even instituting them in time for the 1994 race.

But there is no mention of that unless I skimmed too much in the post.

I suspect though that with talk of runoffs in the air, and some serious action to force them in some states anyway going on, there will be much discussion after the election of how having these in place everywhere might have changed the outcome, given the actual pattern of votes cast.

This naturally involves an element of speculation; in order for any candidate to fail to get a majority of their district or state, there must be at least three candidates, and the third and lower vote-getters must collectively attract so many votes it lowers the plurality winner below the 50 percent line. With very close races between the two major parties being common, it doesn't take much third party siphoning to deny anyone a majority. But even if one assumes that absolutely everyone who voted for the leading two candidates shows up to vote again for them, the whole point of having a runoff is that some voters preferred neither and it is in principle rather unpredictable who each of them would regard as the lesser evil when forced to choose between voting for them and no one at all. If they all stay home, the outcome is the plurality winner of the first race becomes the majority winner of the second, and thus the whole thing appears as a waste of time--similarly if the third parties split evenly. But there are more variables than that--while it seems unlikely someone would vote for leading plurality holder A in the first election but then switch to runner-up B in the second, that could theoretically happen, say in reaction to some media sensation, October Surprises moved to November. But far more likely, key voters for Candidate A might fail to show up to the polls twice in one season--many of them might have found it a difficult stretch to vote on election day and made supreme sacrifices to do so, only to be unable to do it again a couple weeks later. The same malady presumably haunts Candidate B, and there is a possibility that voters who were apathetic are only attracted to a final vote which they know will be decisive, one way or the other, where their vote restricted to A or B will surely count (assuming an honest and accurate counting process anyway). But in real life, runoff elections generally attract fewer voters, in some cases dramatically fewer. Probably a race for a President or even a Senator will retain most of their base.

Anyway, how possible would it be for Reform spokesmen to point to close races with plurality victories and claim the process stole a fair opportunity for their candidates to win more seats, more reflective of the will of the people?

My posts tend to be too long and often fail to post, I will move on to more speculative stuff in another post. But I do wonder, did you, after gaming out the national elections for the Wikibox outcomes, take note of any particular elections any major spokespeople for any of the parties involved might pounce and point to as frustrating the will of the people by shortchanging their votes?
 
Now then, I took a quick look at the Wikibox. Adding up the totals of the three parties recorded there for the Congressional race and treating them as the total of all votes cast for Congress, I then applied Hamilton's Method of assigning proportional votes for 435 House seats.

(By the way, the totals given in the Wikibox add up to 436; it is unclear to me if that reflects including a race for an observer from DC, Puerto Rico or the Territories, but if so it shouldn't; we should be looking at the votes for 435 voting regular House members from the 50 states. Did I overlook a reform giving DC or PR a real live Congress Member? Or is this just a mistake?)

Anyway, the outcome I get is 207 Republicans, 198 Democrats, and 30 Reform party seats. To get this of course I totally ignored the assignment of individual district seats and distributed all 435 seats at large across the nation--with such a system in place, it would not be difficult to smuggle in DC and the territories into the electorate--whether Puerto Rico should or should not be represented depends, in my moral judgements personal to me, on whether the Puerto Ricans wish to regularize their status as US citizens, seek total independence or continue their present special status in some form, which is up to them ethically speaking. But I have no doubt that US citizens who happen to reside in territories or DC should most definitely be included in the national electorate, including influencing Congress. As a practical matter very few people live in the Territories and even DC will not affect more than their small share of the national outcomes so the difference is subtle.

But the difference between having national PR, whether including the non-state residents or not, and our OTL FPTP district system, is quite striking indeed! Since most people still vote for the two big parties despite the Reformist ferment, it might look subtle at first, but observe how, if voters had voted this way in a national proportional representation system, the Republicans, while taking the plurality position as largest party, would not themselves hold enough seats to comprise a single-party majority in Congress; to claim the mantle of "Majority" they must cut a deal with one of the two smaller parties. Getting the Reformists to caucus with them would get them a solid majority--but the whole point of voting Reform rather than Republican is that their supporters have judged both dominant parties and found them wanting.

The dynamic then would be quite different. Congress must reform its own internal rules to reflect the non-existence of an actual majority. In votes on specific items of legislation, it is conceivable that the Reformists would vote with the Republicans as a bloc on some issues, but with the Democrats on others--then, assuming both Dems and Refs vote as a complete bloc, they can override a solid party line vote of the Republicans, forcing through legislation the Repubs oppose. In reality, all three parties will often split on particular items, and then the dynamics become interesting.

In fact, I think most Reformists will tend to vote with Republicans far more often than with Democrats, especially if the Republicans trim their sails to appease and flatter the Reformists, and perhaps make pacts with them for the upcoming elections in which they withdraw opposition to seated Reformists...but wait, that kind of fusionism is an option in district races, but I have presumed national PR, which does not allow for this or that district to be protected.

Briefly I would not recommend a simple all-national party based vote determining a monolithic Congress, actually--rather I have thought up another approach that combines benefits of having districts with nationally aggregated PR. It bears some resemblance to existing systems in Germany and other countries, but is a bit different than anything I have seen proposed or practiced anywhere. Basically, that we should halve the number of districts, to 217, distributing them across the states proportionally as we currently do 435, and when people vote for an individual candidate running in a particular district, they are presumed to be voting for their party as well; thus a national vote for parties can be inferred from district votes for candidates. Then the number out of 435 seats in Congress can be proportionally assigned giving each party a number of seats (for your ATL 1994, as above) and each district sends the plurality winner to Congress. Since districts comprise less than half the seats in Congress, chances are good that generally there will always be fewer seats taken by district winners than the share assigned. Going by your Wikibox figures for instance in your own unreformed 1994 election, the Republicans took 221 districts, the Democrats 213 and Reformist 2--assume that in lowering the number of districts these proportions of seats won remain similar--then with 217 districts, the Republicans might win 111 districts, the Democrats 105, and the Reformists just one. But being entitled by the national popular vote each to 207, 198, and 30 seats respectively, here they would have added to their district-based seats an additional 96, 87, and 29 seats. Each of the additional seats are drawn from a list formed, not by party insiders as typically the case in list-based PR, but by party candidates in order of the number of votes each one got; the ones who were seated with pluralities would be stricken from the list of course. Thus each party in principle runs 217 district candidates; all but 10 Republicans, those 10 being the ones who got the lowest number of votes among Republican candidates, will be seated in Congress; all but the least performing 19 Democrats will be seated; all the top 30 most popular Reformers will be seated.

This is not the place to address some complications and contingencies of this process, nor to expound in detail how I believe it would combine district and proportional representation most elegantly, how the dynamic would permit regional and specialized concerns to be heard in Congress in proportion to the numbers of the population that care about them, how the dire effects of bad districting would be largely automatically nullified and lay the groundwork for more thorough elimination of such evils. It would also eliminate the need for runoffs for Congress. I have in mind some variants of the same system to make the Senate elections develop a more national character while still leaving state representation equal. But none of this matters here if no one in the ATL is thinking about it.

But--in your version, a number of votes cast equal to enough to elect 30 Representatives have been in effect mostly thrown out, leaving a token 2, while a single party that did not poll a solid majority of national support commands a solid majority in Congress--not veto proof 291 votes to be sure, but the Democrats can pass nothing without getting both total unity on their side and Republican defectors supporting their measures. Certainly all voters who did vote Reform should be more interested in a system that respects their votes. Democrats might be more ambivalent since they would have lost 15 members under a proportional system--but OTOH, 90 percent of all candidates who actually undertook to run (remember, just half as many districts!) would be seated in the House versus a bit under half, while the prospect of caucusing with the Reformists on some issues would allow a coalition victory versus a monolithic and boring tale of Republican imposed legislation.

The proposed system of runoffs, I suspect, would be a lot less satisfactory to the Reformists. Suppose we looked at the top 100 districts in terms of Reformist performance. In how many of these would the Reformists replace either the Democratic or Republican candidate to give one of them a chance at subsequently beating whichever major party remains in the cage with them? Would there even be 30? And going up against a candidate of one of the two mainstream parties--actually then their odds are pretty good--to wind up in the two-candidate runoff the leading candidate would need to have gotten less than half the total vote, and the Reformists more than half of the somewhat greater than 1/2. So say some Republican gets 49 percent, the Reformist 26 and the Democrat trails at 25--there is a theoretical possibility that all the Democrats, faced with a choice between Reformist and Republican, choose the former as the enemy of their enemy. But realistically they would be split, and then the odds strongly favor the Republican. Say instead it was 35,33,32 percent, now the Democrats don't need to favor the Reformist very strongly to put them over the top. Reformists then might be expected to win about half the number of runoffs they make it into--but the question remains, will they do so well in as many as 60 districts to make it to the runoff? If they do that well or better, they might be satisfied to keep pushing for runoffs.

But the runoff solution is still not very satisfactory in principle, and probably will yield more conservative results in practice. In principle, as with first past the post in one go, a large fraction of the electorate is left with nothing to show for their vote save the possibility of virtual representation by partisans on their side from districts where they won. A proportional representation system on the other hand has very different optics; the outcome is to positively claim as many seats as a given faction earns by votes for it; the modification I propose might fall short in certain scenarios from guaranteeing that--but the circumstances would be ones where support for parties is widely scattered.

Along with Reformists, who were clearly shortchanged by the process, there are always Republicans and Democrats who live in districts the other party is deemed safe to win; these voters are effectively disfranchised as well.

Meanwhile, I am sure that in the ATL, not all third party voters joined the Reformist banner--you have in fact itemized a number of campaigns that either claimed some Reform affiliation but were at arm's length and out of control, or alternatively rejected Reform connections outright. And also, some OTL perennial Third Party candidates such as Leonora Fulani or Lyndon LaRouche; the Libertarian Party too would surely throw its hat in the ring, along with some even darker horses such as the Constitution Party who contested election after election OTL. Some of these would lose voters to Reform, but the general hoopla and atmosphere of greater indecision might add up to considerably higher turnout than OTL that might more than make up for the concentration of habitual third party voters into the Reform crowd. Thus, the figures I was working with could not be fully accurate; probably simply copying and pasting in the other third parties of OTL 1994 would be a fairer representation of what really would happen that year. Factoring them in proportionally too would probably result in most of them getting nothing--but at least 3 or 4 I would guess would get enough votes to be awarded at least one Congressmember, and a couple of these would get more than one though less than 30--all at the expense of the top parties, is how I have found being more inclusive and thorough in the counts usually turn out. Thus the Republicans and Democrats would lose another handful each--but since both fall short of majorities anyway, as long as the Reformists hold enough to make the full balance between either major party and a majority in the House, the dynamic is unchanged, except for the nuances of coalition building with these fringe parties should that seem desirable--and possible! In reality given this election's major outcomes, the smaller parties are just along for the ride. I contend that makes a difference worth fighting for anyway, because it introduces new voices into the debates that can propose ideas that the two dominant mainstream parties might tacitly agree not to raise and open cans of worms that might be detrimental to both--such as discussion of PR for instance!

In particular, and aside from partisan polemics as such, I note how you resurrected the memory of Zoë Baird's brief tenure as AG, as OTL--there was another infamous case of Clinton's weather-vaning indecision in the matter of personnel in his new Administration that year, the sad story of Lani Guinier, who unlike Ms Baird did not commit any violations of law (hypocritical as I hold the special attention given to Baird to have been--she did indeed violate rules, though it would be most interesting to have seen the outcome of a mass expulsion of all elected and appointed Federal officials who broke the same rules in 1994!)

Family issues make this a necessary break point for now...
 
I gather few to none of the reform proposals have actually passed into law? As you noted, forcing second, runoff, elections for Federal legislators in races where no candidate gets a majority is an option to be legislated, piecemeal state by state (the same way women voting and popular votes for Senators preceded the Amendments that finally mandated these universally on all states), so it is not impossible that

1) some states had been requiring runoffs all along; I suspect some do to this day OTL; it would be one of those things that fluctuate back and forth like the option of states to assign Presidential electors by Congressional District and 2 by statewide vote--typically there are one or two states doing that while the rest opt for winner take all by plurality--

2) so far as I know no state ever had runoffs for the Presidency. Which by the way is something that I suspect does not require a Constitutional amendment, for the purpose of assigning each state's electors anyway, though it clearly does for mandating the nation as a whole collate all popular votes to get a majority for President, via runoff if necessary. A reform requiring mandatory runoffs for non-majority winners state by state would get voters used to the idea of having the runoff--however I am not 100 percent sure that there isn't a Constitutional objection to runoffs for assignment of state EV since perhaps objectors would take it to court on the grounds that two elections will interfere with compliance with knowing the composition of that state's electors by the deadline for them to meet in their state and cast their EVs. Probably that objection would be dismissed as frivolous, especially since allegations of miscounts or fraud can be more easily set aside for purposes of determining the top two candidates--only if there was some doubt which candidate was second and which third would disputed numbers of first-ballot votes matter unless of course the magnitude of alleged miscounting were quite large.

Anyway aside from the unmentioned possibility of runoffs for a winner take all assignment of state EV only to a majority winner,

3) states that did not require runoffs for candidates so all Congressmembers and Senators are elected by a majority (in a second 2-candidate race that typically given OTL patterns, including the French system which has these kinds of runoffs OTL, would have fewer voters than the first one--one of many reasons I am jaundiced about runoffs) OTL and were not considering it (in over 40 years of awareness of currents and controversies in US politics I never recall the question of runoffs for these or other offices being instituted being a major thing anywhere--more likely, for various races there has been interest in streamlining the process to eliminate runoffs!) may be debating them ITTL, and perhaps even instituting them in time for the 1994 race.

But there is no mention of that unless I skimmed too much in the post.

Yes, none of the reforms have been implemented yet, apart from the Congressional term limit laws some states introduced at this point IOTL. As with all discussions of Electoral College abolition or reform in our reality, caution and the slow pace of Constitutional change has held the process up despite a larger-than-usual demand for change. Jack Brooks, however, has lost his committee chairmanship along with his seat - what will the new Republican-led Judiciary Committee think of the plurality-at-large Green Amendment or the Reformists' proposed runoff system?

A few states, mostly in the Deep South, do require runoffs for party primaries at this point ITTL as a relic of one-party dominance; however, Georgia is the only state that requires runoffs for the general election. The state was in the news for conducting a runoff shortly after the 1992 general. In that case, Republican Paul Coverdell came in second to the plurality winner Wyche Fowler in the first round but won in the second, likely via transfers from the Libertarian candidate - it was seen as an example of runoffs producing a result palatable to the majority, and got good press. Georgia does not, however, use the runoff system for the Presidency, either in the primaries or the general. I don't know of any state that has done so, but I also don't know why they couldn't. Legal precedent states that Georgia's runoffs are not systematically discriminatory, and as long as, as you say, the election is completed within time for the Electoral College to meet I can't see any reason it would be unconstitutional to use runoffs to choose electors.

Louisiana has used a "blanket" or "jungle" primary since 1975. I'm personally suspicious of jungle primaries for the same reason I'm suspicious of open primaries - I view political parties as private organizations whose members, not just any rando, should decide the candidate, and I voted against introducing jungle primaries in Oregon when we had a ballot measure on the issue a couple years ago. But perhaps that would be seen as a feature, not a bug, by the anti-party types championing electoral reform ITTL.

State-level developments will be covered in the next update; TTL's more competent Reform Party will not have neglected statehouse races or ballot measures, and the electoral reform debate has been going on in venues other than the Judiciary Committee.

I suspect though that with talk of runoffs in the air, and some serious action to force them in some states anyway going on, there will be much discussion after the election of how having these in place everywhere might have changed the outcome, given the actual pattern of votes cast.

This naturally involves an element of speculation; in order for any candidate to fail to get a majority of their district or state, there must be at least three candidates, and the third and lower vote-getters must collectively attract so many votes it lowers the plurality winner below the 50 percent line. With very close races between the two major parties being common, it doesn't take much third party siphoning to deny anyone a majority. But even if one assumes that absolutely everyone who voted for the leading two candidates shows up to vote again for them, the whole point of having a runoff is that some voters preferred neither and it is in principle rather unpredictable who each of them would regard as the lesser evil when forced to choose between voting for them and no one at all. If they all stay home, the outcome is the plurality winner of the first race becomes the majority winner of the second, and thus the whole thing appears as a waste of time--similarly if the third parties split evenly. But there are more variables than that--while it seems unlikely someone would vote for leading plurality holder A in the first election but then switch to runner-up B in the second, that could theoretically happen, say in reaction to some media sensation, October Surprises moved to November. But far more likely, key voters for Candidate A might fail to show up to the polls twice in one season--many of them might have found it a difficult stretch to vote on election day and made supreme sacrifices to do so, only to be unable to do it again a couple weeks later. The same malady presumably haunts Candidate B, and there is a possibility that voters who were apathetic are only attracted to a final vote which they know will be decisive, one way or the other, where their vote restricted to A or B will surely count (assuming an honest and accurate counting process anyway). But in real life, runoff elections generally attract fewer voters, in some cases dramatically fewer. Probably a race for a President or even a Senator will retain most of their base.

All very true. Are we sure that all of the Georgia Libertarian's voters switched to Coverdell? What if Wyche Fowler's supporters just stayed home?

Anyway, how possible would it be for Reform spokesmen to point to close races with plurality victories and claim the process stole a fair opportunity for their candidates to win more seats, more reflective of the will of the people?

My posts tend to be too long and often fail to post, I will move on to more speculative stuff in another post. But I do wonder, did you, after gaming out the national elections for the Wikibox outcomes, take note of any particular elections any major spokespeople for any of the parties involved might pounce and point to as frustrating the will of the people by shortchanging their votes?

No worries about the length of the posts; more feedback and discussion is always welcome. The next chapter will focus on the post-election analysis and spin. Rest assured that there will be quite a few races (mostly those where Democratic incumbents won with a plurality) that Reform leaders will point to as evidence of electoral unfairness, while Republicans might cite the same to decry the Reformists as spoilers...
 
Now then, I took a quick look at the Wikibox. Adding up the totals of the three parties recorded there for the Congressional race and treating them as the total of all votes cast for Congress, I then applied Hamilton's Method of assigning proportional votes for 435 House seats.

(By the way, the totals given in the Wikibox add up to 436; it is unclear to me if that reflects including a race for an observer from DC, Puerto Rico or the Territories, but if so it shouldn't; we should be looking at the votes for 435 voting regular House members from the 50 states. Did I overlook a reform giving DC or PR a real live Congress Member? Or is this just a mistake?)

That's a mistake, good eye. It should be 220 Republicans.

...The proposed system of runoffs, I suspect, would be a lot less satisfactory to the Reformists...

The MMP variant that you suggest would definitely be more proportional, and would result in a lot more Reformists in Congress than a 1994 conducted under runoffs would. I didn't plot out every single House race (after all, I have no idea who the Reform candidates would be in many seats because they'd just be anonymous disgruntled voters IOTL) but I think the only gubernatorial races that I had down as decided by a plurality where a Reform affiliate was in the top two were Maine and Alaska - and helping elect a secessionist in Alaska would be worse for the party's image than electing a competent moderate in Maine who ignores party HQ.

The major reason I had the Reform Party supporting runoffs so far is that Perot-style populism is conservative in a lot of ways. It's predicated on the belief that Washington is full of entrenched crooks who are betraying their oaths of office. While not as explicitly a declensionary narrative as Trumpism or the like, it's still a story that believes in American institutions and traditions, just not their current occupants. I imagined that they would like to keep as many trappings of the constitutional order in place as possible - first-past-the-post elections, voting based on the candidate rather than the party - while tweaking them to be slightly fairer. While I could imagine Jesse Ventura advocating for something like your system, I don't see that happening with Perot still in the driver's seat. Which he very much is, convinced that he was cheated out of the Presidency and that electoral reform is his best bet to gain what's rightfully his in 1996.

But we'll see what happens as the party and the electoral reform movement evolve.

As for Baird, I could see her issue going undiscovered during the hearings in a slightly different media environment, only to blow up in the administration's face later on - a little case of be careful what you wish for, although I agree her treatment by the Senate IOTL was more than a bit hypocritical.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, by the way. Much better than silence and likes.
 
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