The trouble is that we can build a million “just-so” narratives that predict absolutely any outcome because there are a million factors that influence people to vote, and usually dozens or hundreds of factors that can have significant effects.
Sure, my internals say that Bernie won’t appeal in the swing states, but my internals were also were clear that Trump had 0% chance of winning.
The electability issue will haunt everyone who votes in the primary. But only because electability is so impossible to predict. Which in some way frees people to vote as their heart demands.
My main fear is of the Democratic primary becoming so fractious that no matter who wins, 70% of the Democrats end up deeply unsatisfied (but vote), and that dissatisfaction “leaks” into the wider voting population (who don’t). It’s an entirely natural outcome to a primary that has pretty strong ideological divides.
They’re scared. MPR news finally said Sanders was second in the caucus results. I was like “SAY HIS NAME” while listening to the report on the radio. They’re frightened of him so much.
Definitely. That’s why they started out by saying there could be “multiple winners” in Iowa, and why they cravenly hedged by endorsing two candidates for nominee a couple of weeks ago. What worries me is that they’ll start submarining a truly progressive nominee, even at the cost of a second term for Biff.
Every state except those in the western empty quarter has at least one relatively large and diverse urban centre where PoC and young people flock to escape the small-minded and dying rural and exurban areas. That’s where Sanders and Warren got their voters from, and based on the popular vote results there are a lot of them.
I know I’m venturing a little away from caucuses and into abstract math here, but Arrow’s theorem only says that all social choice systems are crap if you have a certain idea of what a non-crap one looks like. But somehow I haven’t managed to mobilize national support for a switch to random ballot.
On a less loony note, Arrow’s theorem certainly doesn’t say that all systems are equally crap. Some are plainly much worse than others. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party designed a system for their last leadership race that was meant to balance the overall popular vote against regional support. Somehow the person who got the majority of the popular vote and won the majority of the regions lost. (Not that you were saying they are all equally bad, but I think as long as we’re talking about how all systems are flawed it’s an important proviso to say, “but not equally flawed.”)
I think what really irks me about the coin toss is that it is between the top two candidates. Like, if you are going to pick randomly who won then the person who had 10% support should have a 10% chance of winning. Random seems extremely fair to me, going through a big process to narrow it down to two and then doing it randomly feels like it’s not really that random.
I absolutely knew someone in highschool who could flip whatever you asked for. They could also shuffle a euchre deck to deal out single-suit hands to all the players. These are not inhuman feats of dexterity. Even though I think it’s unlikely that these coin flips are manipulated, it sure is easy to have a random system that is completely beyond manipulation so they should probably use one.
I agree that’s the fear. I think we put way too much faith in our ability to mind-control other people into not voting Democrat when we appear to have pretty much no ability to mind-control other people into voting for Democrats.
If we step back, it’s not purity tests or going too far left or anything like that that gets us another Trump, it’s continuing to do the same thing that got us Trump in the first place. And that is having so much faith that we can rationally/mathematically determine how to best elect someone that we* don’t bother to campaign in Michigan (* let’s skip unpacking “we” in that sentence). Punditry, debate panels, talking about how to get this or that demographic to vote… that’s how Trump got elected.
I can imagine that for a few different reasons. Maybe the system of competing for attention is inherently going to produce crazy assholes. Maybe white supremacists intentionally (and successfully) hacked that system. Either way it’s time to reset to being honest about how we feel instead of trying to be unintuitive and clever. Our feeling evolved to guide us through social situations and we are not seeing evidence that the “science” alternative actually produces results.
Yeah, that sums up how I feel about it. I think people need to stop trying to make a fourth level guess about who to vote for based on what other people might want and instead just encourage everyone to vote for who they think will actually be the best.
ETA: I’m completely convinced that if somehow we could miraculously get everyone to actually vote for the person they thought would do the best job of leading the country and set all other considerations aside Trump couldn’t get more than 25% of the vote.
Either way they’re fine. And jeez stop trying to set them up with some one you barely know grandma!
Right. Biden is only “ellectable” by virtue of received wisdom from elections past. During a period where the general population was significantly more conservative, significantly more white, and youth turnout was at an all time low.
Never mind that his presidential runs at that time were total face plants.
I would say the idea of “electability” has gone out the window. Trump is utterly unelectable by any standard, and here we effing are. What matters is media coverage, and the media is desperately trying to give us Biden vs. Trump because think of the headlines. Now they may have to switch to Buttigieg vs. Trump, and the media will bury the idea that actual voters prefer Sanders.
This delegate system is so frustrating. I will vote Sanders in the primary, but my delegates will overrule my vote, and then I’ll vote Democrat in the election and my state will magically turn my Democrat vote into a Republican vote in the electoral college.
This so-called Democratic process is a bunch of noise.
It may be the case that a woman candidate will face misogynistic attacks that a man would not, but confidently stating that someone can’t win because they are a woman seems silly based on recent history. Obviously Clinton didn’t win, but based on the vote totals it’s clear she potentially could have won if any number of things had gone just slightly differently, such as the timing of Comey’s last-minute announcement about the FBI investigation.
Also, it should be noted that Warren is a different person than Clinton. With somewhat less baggage. Certainly different baggage.
I’d rather whichever one doesn’t get the nomination stays in the Senate where they could help push through a progressive President’s agenda. Even a good President can only do so much if they don’t have strong allies in the legislature.
Corbyn only turned out to be less “capable and in touch” as the election drew near.
It doesn’t take much of a search to find a number of articles full of confident talk about Jeremy Corbyn, the Next Big Thing. For example, https://boingboing.net/page/2?s=corbyn nearly all of which proved to be groupthink
I would vote for Sanders over Trump. And I do agree that he is being jobbed by the DNC just like he was in 2016. But to me, he carries the vibe of being the last living survivor of a Clifford Odets repertory company, which is probably not a winning vibe.
Well, sure; I said “roughly” to avoid details. What Arrow’s Theorem, and its myriad modern derivates asserts, is that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy a set of “reasonableness” critera, where the actual set of criteria varies from one form of the theorem to the next. Most voting systems, traditional to modern, have been subject to detailed analysis as to their pros and cons, and while all necessarily have cons, in any given situation one system’s set of cons might be better or worse than another’s.
Iowa is using a form of STV+proportional representation in each precinct, with the precinct results amalgamated according to a reasonable weighting. It is really a pretty good system. Based on the numbers right as I write, after the first alignment overall Sanders had 24.4% of the vote. In a parallel universe, with no STV and with allocation at the state level (no breakdown by precinct), that would have netted him 24-25% of the delegates (depending on rounding). He’s actually getting (again, at this writing) 25% of the delegates. So, pretty close.
It seems unfair that Buttigieg might end up with a higher delegate percent than either the first or second alignment might indicate, but the difference is really tiny, and there is no good argument that that extra delegate share would or should have gone to Sanders or Warren anyway.
Meanwhile, progressives have many things to like about the outcome: (1) Sanders+ Warren together are getting over 40% of the delegates; (2) Biden is getting hardly any Iowa delegates; (3) Bloomberg is getting zero Iowa delegates; (4) Bernie can legitimately claim to have won (as can Pete, of course); (5) It looks like the moderates might well go to the convention with the same kind of 1st-round-losing delegate split that everyone is afraid will happen with Sanders and Warren; and (5) Pete, it turns out, is not the satanic monster that the meme army would have us believe.
