Phew

(Updated below)

I hate to put the whammy on it until we've buried it, dug it up, and killed it again just to be sure, but it looks like the Republican effort to split the California electoral vote is dead. The L.A. Times has the good news.

The LAT claims credit for breaking this story back in July. Well done, Andrew Malcolm. Kudos, as well, to Bob Herbert for getting the word out, and for reiterating it, to those of us who spend too much time reading the other Times.

If you don't know about this, here's the short version. California, like almost every state, assigns electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Its 55 electoral votes are key to a Democratic victory in the presidential race (270 are needed to win). The plan that just died would have apportioned California's electoral votes based on the voting in the state's individual Congressional districts. This would likely would have cost the Democrats about 20 electoral votes. Based on recent history, this would almost certainly kill any chance to put a Democrat in the White House in 2008, and for the foreseeable future.

There are any number of good arguments to be made for reforming -- or downright abolishing -- the Electoral College system, but doing it one state at a time is hardly the way to go about it. For my Republican friends, I invite you to contemplate passage of the same initiative, but instead, only in Texas.

Anyway, the interesting thing is that the death of the effort is being blamed on lack of money -- evidently, fundraising efforts failed miserably. And we're not talking astronomical amounts here. The backers of the plan, the LAT says, would have needed about $2 million to get the initiative onto the June 2008 ballot. (By comparison, all of the major candidates have already raised tens of millions of dollars.) And it's not like you'd need a grass-roots effort to get the money. As the LAT notes:

Unlike federal campaign law, California law permits corporations to make political donations. And though there are caps on the size of donations to federal candidates, state and federal law permits donations of unlimited size to support or oppose ballot measures.

Granted, getting the initiative on the ballot is just the first step. A lot more money would have been needed to campaign for its passage. But still, when you think about the number of really rich people out there who you'd think would like nothing finer than a permanent Republican presence in the White House …

Good thing Richard Mellon Scaife forgot to get a pre-nup, I guess.

(h/t: Political Animal, via Lawyers, Guns and Money)

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Update

2007-09-28 12:22 EDT

Via email, Cousin AK checks in with this:

The man behind the money was an a$$ chomper (literally)

By which AK meant: read this article.