Duverger Meets Hillary

It's been a couple of days since this was posted, but I just found it and thought it was a good tie-in with the concepts of our course.

In this blog contribution on the Huffington Post, Russell Shaw explains why the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban on partial birth abortion forces him to accept Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate, despite the fact that he dislikes her. In order to save Roe v. Wade from being overturned, we need a Democratic candidate to take office in January 2009 and appoint new liberal, non-originalist Supreme Court Justices. For this, Shaw says he will accept Hillary. His fear however is that far-left liberals will fall into another Gore-Nader trap, where the extremists dislike Hillary for her 2003 Iraq vote and decide to vote for the Independent candidate, thus stealing votes from Democrats and landing another Republican in office. As we learned, Duverger’s law says that America’s single-member district plurality system necessitates having just two parties, or the result could be the one described above. Thus in order to save Roe v. Wade, and subsequently saving many a woman from botched back-alley abortions, far-left liberals are going to need a lesson from Duverger.