I’m thinking a little bit about 2020 and how I am going to manage my own expectations for the Democratic Party ticket. It is a given that if Trump runs for re-election, I will support the opposition ticket with the best shot at removing him from office. It is virtually impossible to imagine that not being the Democratic ticket. So, settled. I am not going to support (or even humor) any stalking horse ‘third options’.
I’ve come up with a very simple, somewhat subjective point system for ranking prospective Dem candidates and (more importantly to me) pairings of candidates as Pres and VP. This is a personal list of my priorities and biases. There’s no reason to spell it all out for you. Suffice to say, the maximum possible score for an individual candidate is 12, the highest possible score for a Pres/VP pairing is 19. For a few examples: Trump/Pence 2016 had a score of ‘about’ 6, Clinton/Kaine 2016 had a score of ‘about’ 9, and Obama/Biden 2012 had a score of ‘about’ 14.
What the ‘about’ is about. One of my considerations is whether the candidate is from “fly-over country” or not. For individual candidates it doesn’t matter. Each candidate either gets 1 point if they are from fly-over country and 1 point if they aren’t. It’s a wash. But when I start pairing up candidates the ticket has the potential to gain a point if one’s from flyover and on aint.
Here’s where I can use some ‘wisdom of crowds’ style help. How might I easily and objectively define ‘flyover country’ and determine whether a given candidate’s political center of gravity lies within said flyover country.
For example Obama=Hawaii/Kansas/Chicago/Harvard. How would one sort that out?
If I don’t define it up front, I’ll be stretching it to mean what I want it to mean for each Pres/VP pairing which will defeat the purpose of my little spreadsheet.