We discuss the role of the independent – both the independent voter and the potential for an independent presidential candidate – in the race for the White House with Colby College Political Science Professor Sandy Maisel and the Wall Street Journal's Dante Chinni. We’ll also discuss how a contested convention might work, and what the possibilities are of the Congress determining who is elected president.
Guests: Sandy Maisel, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and founding director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College, where he has taught since 1971. He is the author or editor of 17 books including American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction and Evaluating Campaign Quality: Can the Electoral Process Be Improved? From Obscurity to Oblivion: Running in the Congressional Primary chronicled Maisel’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Maine’s First Congressional District in 1978. His published articles have appeared in many political science journals and anthologies, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Dante Chinni, is the director of the American Communities project, a collaboration of The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, and WNYC radio that “correlates economic and demographic data to election results and consumer data to see how changes in technology and economics have redefined the social, political, and cultural fault lines” of the United States. He also writes the regular Politics Counts online column for The Wall Street Journal and is the creator of Patchwork Nation, which won a 2009 Knight Batten Award for journalistic innovation and is the focus of the book Our Patchwork Nation published in 2010.
