According to this story, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has said publicly he won’t vote for Donald Trump for President, even though Schwarzenegger has always before voted for the Republican nominee for President. Schwarzenegger doesn’t say who he will vote for.
This is ironic, because Schwarzenegger was one of the biggest backers of the California top-two system. The California top-two system has no effect on presidential elections in California or any other state. But if the California top-two system did control California presidential elections, then voters would be forced to vote for either Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, or else to skip voting entirely. Thanks to Carla Marinucci for the link.
Actually Richard the Top 2 Rule makes no provision or mandate that both candidates be of different Political Parties. If the rules of Top 2 were applied strictly to the Presidential Race the Voters of California would be choosing between Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Actually Top 2 is demolishing the Republican Party which wasn’t in all that good a shape before Top 2. Large numbers of California Voters will leave their ballots blanks for the US Senate Race which features 2 Democrats Kammela Harris and Loretta Sanchez. I live in a Congressional District in the same situation, 2 Democrats to choose from. I plan to go Blank Ballot there also.
There is a large and growing number of people that are pissed off about Top 2, some of them very powerful. I don’t expect it will be around much longer.
The entire election would have been conducted differently if there were not segregated partisan primaries.
Hillary Clinton got 17,024,372 votes in all the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, according to The Rhodes Cook Letter of July 2016, which is a print publication that is not on-line. Donald Trump was second, with 13,723,620 votes in all the Republican primaries. Bernie Sanders was a close third, in all the Democratic primaries, with 13,115,574.
But even if the top two had been Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, requiring all U.S. voters in November to choose between them, with no write-in space (mimicking the California system), simply would not have been accepted as legitimate by the U.S. population. There would have been far too many voters who would have wanted to vote for someone other than those two.
Here in California there will be no winner on November 8th for Presidential Electors, because Governor Brown will not recall the legislature to vote on a joint resolution
to allow voting of slates of presidential electors. Let’s see if the legislature selects Presidential Electors when they return on December 5th.
Richard Winger,
You forgetting the uncounted Write-in vote for Trump in the AIP primary.
Maybe Arnold should support Gary Johnson.