Donald Trump spoiled that Pa. primary; lets stop spoiling Jersey primaries | Mulshine

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Well, he did it again.

Im talking about Donald Trump indulging his penchant for taking a wrecking ball to the Republican Party.

In this case it was the Pennsylvania Republican Party that Trump took apart.

At stake was the US Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Pat Toomey. The favorite was David McCormick, a native Pennsylvanian and West Point grad who had solid senatorial credentials.

Given the GOP wave thats expected this November, McCormick looked like a safe pick to keep the seat in the general election.

But then Trump got involved. The Donald endorsed a guy by the name of Dr. Oz, apparently because he did a lot of reality TV, just like The Donald.

Mehmet Oz is a lifelong liberal who lived in Bergen County until roughly the day before yesterday. Nonetheless he rode The Donalds endorsement to victory.

But it was hardly a smashing one. Oz got a mere 31.21 percent of the vote to McCormicks 31.14 percent.

Now the Pennsylvania Republicans are stuck with a candidate whos not very Pennsylvanian and not very Republican.

Keep that in mind as you watch the results of the Republican Congressional primaries in New Jersey start coming in this evening.

Of particular interest is the race among Republicans for the right to run against Democratic House member Tom Malinowski in the Seventh District.

The favorite is former state Senate minority leader Tom Kean Jr. of Union County, who suffered a narrow loss to Malinowski in the last cycle.

But Kean is the most liberal or should I say moderate? – candidate in a district with a lot of conservative voters on the GOP side.

If he had just one opponent, Kean might have a tough time getting more than 50 percent of the vote.

But the political gods have blessed him with six potential spoilers. Depending on how they split up the vote, Kean could win with as little as 30 percent of the vote.

Its happened as recently as 2014, when the late Jeff Bell won a four-candidate Republican U.S. Senate primary with just 29.5 percent.

Ten states get around the spoiler problem by holding runoff elections in the event no candidate gets more than 50 percent.

Assemblyman Erik Peterson wishes New Jersey were one of them.

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The hard-core conservative from Warren County told me hed fare much better in a two-way race with Kean.

If we were in a head-to-head, wed win without a doubt, he said. I think that people would compare our voting records. People want somebody who votes like a Republican and is gonna fight for them.

But Petersons not the only conservative in the field. Phil Rizzo, a pastor and real-estate developer who finished second in the GOP gubernatorial primary last year, is also hitting Kean from the right.

Tom Kean has been selling out NJ for over 20 years, Rizzo said in a press release. Tom Kean would be Joe Bidens greatest Republican ally in Congress.

Other candidates are running as conservatives as well, so this looks more like a rugby scrum than an exercise in enlightened democracy.

Runoff elections would clear things up nicely. But they are cumbersome and costly.

But how else can you solve the problem of candidates winning elections without winning majority support?

As it happens, Maine faced that problem back in 2010.

The Maine voters have a penchant for supporting independents for major positions. This made it possible for a candidate to win even general elections with margins well short of a majority.

In 2010, a guy by the name of Paul LePage won the Republican primary with 37 percent of the vote. He then went on to win the general election with just 38 percent of the vote.

As you can see from those numbers, LePage was not a popular guy. So in 2016 the voters passed a referendum instituting whats called ranked-choice voting or instant-runoff voting.

Under this system a voter ranks the candidates from first through last. After the votes are tallied, the candidate with the fewest is eliminated. Then the votes are tallied again, this time adding the second-place choice of voters who chose the losing candidate in the first round. That process continues until one candidate achieves a majority.

This is a reform that is long overdue for New Jersey, at least as it applies to primaries. Unlike in Maine, we don’t have a lot of independent and small-party candidates acting as spoilers in general elections.

But when it comes to primaries, our fields are often so crowded that voters are ironically enough deprived of a real choice. What might seem like a vote for the winner may turn out to be a vote for the spoiler.

Ranked-choice voting could solve the spoiler problem for Republicans.

As for the Republicans Trump problem, only time will solve that.

More: Recent Paul Mulshine columns

Paul Mulshine may be reached at [email protected].

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