President McCain?

My off-again/on-again poker buddy Matt Glassman has a fascinating article at TCS (I know, yuck), about scenarios under which the election is thrown to the House of Representatives and neither Bush nor Kerry ends up as the next president.

To summarize, if neither candidate gets 270 electoral votes, then the House gets to decide from among the top 3 electoral vote-getters. In order to avoid the inevitable Bush victory in the house, the Democrats would be well advised to throw one of their electors to a moderate Republican like John McCain in order to split the Republican caucus. Of course, the Republicans could counter that strategy by dispersing their electors among a variety of left-wing Democrats; which would necessitate the Democrats throwing even more electors to a McCain. The final result would be a complicated game theory problem and it might involve Bush and Kerry receiving few or zero electoral votes.

I'm almost rooting for this to happen because it would be so fucking cool.

My dream scenario, in fact, would be a Kerry electoral college victory and a Bush popular vote victory. That way, Bush gets retired and we can get bipartisan support for junking the electoral college. Not that I'd put it past some Republican demagogues (ahem, Sean Hannity*) to try and mount a putsch if there were such an outcome on Nov. 2. I just have faith that in case of such events, the proper constitutional processes will obtain.

*A week before the 2000 election, Hannity called for mob action in case Al Gore won the electoral college and Bush won the popular vote. Since the reverse took place, Hannity was confident that the will of the people had been expressed.