Could California Tip to the GOP?

Could California tip the 2008 presidential election to the Republican nominee? Democratic strategist Chris Lehane says it’s “virtually guaranteed” if a proposed California ballot initiative wins a simple majority vote in a June election next year.

In a commentary by Hendrick Hertzberg in the current issue of The New Yorker, such a possibility is outlined:

“Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes — votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.”

Hertzberg, rather smugly, writes that such a plan would provide the Republican candidate with an “unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes.”

Lehane’s response to a subsequent wire story by the Associated Press is exactly what nervous Republicans want to hear: “If this change is made, it will virtually guarantee that a Republican wins the White House in 2008.”

Predictably, California Democrats are going berserk-o at the thought of California being divvied up. Ah, but not so fast. Seems the Democratic Party in North Carolina has endorsed just such a measure, which looks as though it will be signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, giving the Democratic presidential nominee the chance to pick up six of the state’s 15 electoral votes. And yes, Republicans in North Carolina are none too pleased.

August, it turns out, isn’t such a boring month after all, with new twists and turns — and possibilities — at every corner.