Are Republicans Democratic?

OK, finally a blog entry that's not about tennis.

The lengthy Democratic primary season has raised one important distinction between the parties. While Democrats favor proportional representation, Republicans favor, majority (or is it plurality) takes all.

The electoral college also favors this way of counting votes. In hindsight, it's not that democratic, is it? If you are in the minority, your vote doesn't count at all. When people claim that we live in a democratic society, where every vote counts, they're wrong. By saying majority takes all, it basically reinterprets all the dissenting votes and says they don't matter.

The electoral college was put in place to stretch the lead of the majority. The Reagan landslide in 1984 over Walter Mondale where Mondale won two states (his own state of Minnesota and Hawaii, which almost always votes Democrat) didn't reflect that 40% of the vote went to Mondale. Reagan still took more than 90% of the electoral college, and thus 30% of the voters had their votes effectively not count. Even if, in the end, the guy with the most votes wins, it can lead to unusual situations, like when Gore lost in 2000, where the candidate with the most popular votes loses.

Republicans hold their primaries like this, presumably, so a candidate will come out on top, and because the American public is stupid, they jump on the bandwagon of the leader, and let McCain win a nomination where a year earlier, everyone said he was dead in the water. The Republican primary has ceased to be meaningful, despite Ron Paul occasional reaching 25% of the disaffected voters who want a true libertarian to win, rather than some neocon wannabe.

In the end, the Republican primaries aren't very democratic, and that's with a lower-case "d".