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Stephen Gottlieb: Political Dream Team

I keep hearing people who should know better, chattering about Democrats not having good candidates for the White House. Just the reverse, there are too many. In fact, each and every one is terrific. Except for primary rules that make them competitors, this would be the political Dream Team ready to wipe away all opposition as if it were the ‘92 Olympics.

Elizabeth Warren takes a deep dive into policy questions, driven to figure out what will do the most good for us. Bernie Sanders instinctively connects with young people and working people. Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar work the room, so to speak, talking and connecting with people to figure out what works. People like Klobuchar, Sanders and mayors Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg have administrative experience. Bloomberg and Steyer are used to crunching numbers. And all strike me as having their values and ethics in the right place. I’d have said good things about some of those who dropped out too. Truly the party has had an embarrassment of riches, white and black, men and women, from rich and poor backgrounds.

The team has experience in business, finance, working with poor and minority groups, factory workers, farmers, the middle class and those of us we’ve been calling ordinary Americans. It has people rolling up their sleeves to deal with some of the country’s major problems now, not waiting until they get elected.

The problem is the scoring. Instead of giving each voter a single choice, bouncing their preferences against one another, Democrats might have done much better with forms of voting in which voters could list, in order, the candidates they’d support, so their choices could be added together to get the most widely admired candidates.

The Iowa caucuses went part way. They got everyone’s initial preference when they walked in. Then discussions winnowed that down a little. We never saw what would have happened if they’d had to get to 50% plus 1.

I’m not sure that voters are grouping candidates by their place on a spectrum from centrist to liberal rather than whether candidates seem like people they’d be comfortable with. But whatever, we wouldn’t have to eliminate candidates because they didn’t get enough first place votes and we could instead search for agreement on candidates that most of us could be enthusiastic about. A campaign like that could give us candidates who would happily become the Dream Team in office.

To be fair, it is one of the ironies of democracy that every voting system has its flaws. It’s pretty obviously too late to change this year – we’d have chaos if we did. And we might decide to try ranked choice voting on local elections before trying it out on the presidential primaries. Other systems, like cumulative voting, are better suited to legislative elections. There’s room for experimentation.

My major point is that it would be useful if we all started to think about our second choices. I think most of us would find that there’s a lot to like. I’ve had a first choice from the beginning, a woman I’ve met, like and admire. But if you asked me about my second choice, wow, there are a lot of good people and we’d be blessed with any of them – or with them all on the New Democratic Administration Team in one position or another.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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