…and this suggests a strategy. Greens should feel comfortable campaigning in Texas and Tennessee, while Libertarians should focus their efforts in Vermont and Massachusetts.
But Libertarians might avoid Tennessee, because that would complicate the efforts of the McCain campaign (unless the Libs were really sure McCain was going to win, in which case they might try to extract concessions from the Repubs). Admittedly, purists tend to gravitate towards third parties, so expecting them to engage in give and take is a bit much.
If one candidate is getting 40%, and the other gets 60%, the first candidate clearly has much less than a 40% chance of winning the state. His chances are, in fact, virtually nil.
I agree with the “Much less than 40%” part, provided that we’re discussing an October poll rather than a June poll. Not so sure about the “Virtually nil” part. Are you saying that of the states where a candidate polled 40% in mid-October, that the candidate lost over 99.5% of the time? [1] If true, that still wouldn’t be sufficient: you would also have set the odds of a late October surprise at something under 5%, which seems dubious.
The statistical model in the link can presumably capture the former effect, but not the latter.
(Geeky issue #3: These guys probably assume normal distributions, which may or may not be backed by solid evidence. This shouldn’t matter too much for their overall prediction, but would affect their treatment of low-probability events.)
[1] Recall that the error bounds for state polling tend to be pretty wide.
The issues with PR in a parliamentary system are somewhat different than PR in our federal system, but there are still major issues.
To make a long story short, a politican remains in office by providing public or private goods to the people who vote for him. Public goods are more efficient than private goods, because they can be provided for more people and at less expense. But private goods are more effective, since if you happen to receive them from your politican, they are typically of much greater value.
The wider your personal winning coalition is, the more inclined you are to provide public goods to them. On the whole, this is a good thing. While everyone complains about pork, blah blah blah, it is by no means always a bad thing.
When a narrow demographic slice ensures your continued political office, it is potentially easier to award this slice private goods. This is bad. The more people required to pay off to maintain your job, the more likely it is that public goods will be provided than private goods. The proof behind this is very complicated, but I am happy to refer to you a very good source if you are so inclined
Of course I haven’t. I’m simply assuming that any October surprise won’t come close to erasing a 20-point lead, and I think that’s eminently reasonable.
And I don’t have a cite, but I feel confident that any state in which one candidate had a 20-point lead in mid/late-October went for that candidate in November.
Austen-Smith & Banks is the best cite in the business, like I think I mentioned upthread. I do post from work, so it is not easy to rehearse the basics of social choice theory here. I apologize for being elliptical: you seem to have some command of the material, and I did not want to insult your intelligence.
Austen-Smith & Banks is not an easy read. Perhaps we can have a separate non-Pit thread on some of the basics of social choice.
Yes. You cannot produce a unique rank ordering of outcomes from a person’s approval vote. You can only vote “tolerable” or “intolerable”. First past the post does produce a unique and complete ranking of social choices.
The problem gets really knotty, though, in multi-dimensional issue space. I have a small brain, so I tend to visualize only single issue, which admittedly can lead to some issues.
This is kind of a load of nonsense and does not demolish much of anything.
We only know that an individual makes no difference after the election. Individuals themselves tend to believe that the probability that their vote will be pivotal is very low. However, prospect theory tells us pretty convincingly that people misevaluate probabilities at the margin. So even though individual votes tend not to make a difference, individuals have just enough preferences over the outcome and miscalculate the likelihood that other voters will be AWOL on election day that they show up to pull the lever. And now that there is always the specter of the judiciary becoming involved, people want their preferred outcome to win by as large a margin as possible to eliminate extra-electoral uncertainty.
Voting is an utterly worthless exercise in self-expression because, unlike piercing your nose, no one else gets to see you do it.
You’re still stuck in that “all or nothing” mentality. I personally can’t comprehend an attitude that believes that if you can’t get everything you want there’s no point in trying to get part of what you want. The religious conservatives in this country think otherwise and they’re advancing their political agenda. The left, to judge by your example, doesn’t feel it’s worth their time to make the same effort so it’s no surprise their agenda is ignored.
True enough. But as I’ve written, people need to think long-term if they want real change. Conservatives didn’t take over in a single day - they’ve spent decades pulling the Republican Party to the right. And as a bonus, because the left has chosen not to challenge the right, the Conservatives have pulled the Democrat Party to the right as well. Which is my point - political parties go to where the votes are. Even the losing party moves to the votes so it can do better in the next election. If there was a solid liberal voting block in this country there would be a major party that was seeking their votes and supporting their agenda.
Maeglin: Would you say that your response to Brainglutton (re: public/private goods) represents the core of your argument for plurality voting? That is, are you saying that you prefer 2 party systems over -let’s be candid about it- systems that encourage continental European socialism? [1] (I’m not dismissing this, since you couched it in sharper terms than this. I just want to understand your argument.)
Or is some other aspect the central attraction?
Picking a nit:
Not really: you get to self-report your vote. And because ballot box behavior has no direct personal consequences, there’s little reason to deceive.
I feel obliged to express some boilerplate stuff. Voting is a civic obligation and those who don’t vote give up their right to gripe about the government, IMHO.
[1] Or rather, some of the most dubious characteristics of continental European socialism…
Not exactly. Plurality voting meets some criteria that I think, subjectively, are very fair. I think that other electoral rules would require tradeoffs that I am personally uncomfortable with. Plenty of people have no problem relaxing the IIA (irrelevance of independent alternatives) condition, for example. I do have a problem with this. This has more to do with my particular values than anything else. That runoff voting relaxes this condition is not deniable. That this is a bad thing, well, is. Again, take a look at the details of the French election in 2002. The French ended up having to choose between a fascist and a crook, which only a small subset of the electorate actually wanted.
My arguments *against proportional representation are in the same vein. I am not gainsaying it because plurality voting is so great. PR just has some extremely negative properties that I would have a hard time accepting in the United States.
I actually have no preferences whatsoever over the number of parties, such that parties is greated than one.
My preferences are for public vs. private goods. I further prefer the provisioning of public goods over a diffuse base (i.e. mass transportation) to a more narrow base (anti-terrorist equipment for a half dozen policemen in North Dakota). Whichever system provides wide-scale public goods to many people will have my vote. Based on the fragmented demographics and identity politics characteristic of the United States, I contend that PR will funnel public (or even private) goods to smaller and smaller subsets of the electorate because these smaller subsets are more visibly keeping individual politicians in power. To be elected in the US now requires a relatively broad (and often downright unholy) coalition of voters. This is in general a very good thing, because rewarding all of them requires large public goods that benefit almost everyone, your supporters or not.
[quote]
Picking a nit: Not really: you get to self-report your vote. And because ballot box behavior has no direct personal consequences, there’s little reason to deceive.
[/quote[
You get to self-report your political opinions, too. Since this requires no sacrifice whatsoever (and voting ofen requires long lines, going out of your way, etc), the only thing you are expressing by voting is that you do not feel your time is very valuable.
I definitely agree with the former. Despite my obvious rational choice inclinations, I think the civic norm of voting is incredibly powerful. I do not miss elections of any kind, although this is easy for me as my polling place is about fifty yards from my apartment.
I disagree with the latter statement, though. I don’t think it is possible to waive your right to complain. I was pretty politically active when I was 17 despite my lack of the right to vote. I am not convinced that tying griping rights in a free society to participation is such a great thing.
You’re asking me to cite something that I said would occur in a hypothetical situation? Who am I supposed to cite for alternative realities? Harry Turtledove?
In theory, this exercise is possible. You just need to find all of the demographic data for the primary contests and define a PR rule such that Hillary was awarded sufficient delegates to earn the nomination. It is not all that complicated. Pulling all of the data and making it manageable would be a first class pain, though.
The problem is, though, that if the primaries had worked that way, both of them would have campaigned very differently. You can’t just say “If we’d taken approach X, Y would have happened” in this situation, because there’s really no way of proving or even offering substantial evidence for it. Little Nemo can’t prove that Clinton would have won with PR, but neither can you disprove it.
I understand that we really don’t have party machines, in the sense that we had them before, say, 1972. Perhaps under a PR system, a Rep like Chris Dodd or Joe Biden (or Mitch McConnell on the Republican side) would have a better shot.
Maeglin: I’ve enjoyed your comments.
Tangent
To be clear, all citizens should have the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government with their grievances, whether they vote or not (just to be clear).
But is it appropriate to be dismissive of those who moan about the government, but can’t bother to vote, extenuating circumstances aside? I think so, given the availability of absentee ballots and the ease of voting. There are some responsibilities that come with citizenship and those who can’t bother with them deserve to be taken a little less seriously in certain contexts. Admittedly, I should perhaps bear that in mind the next time I lay into a Green Party supporter. Not sure.
Well, if your aim is a comprehensive overhaul of society then you have to pursue a comprehensive overhaul of society, not minor tweaks to a fundamentally flawed system which is all that Democrats will ever bring.
I notice you keep ignoring the example I gave of the DSA. Why is that?
If you take '07 as your starting point then probably yes. On the other hand there is the question whether she would ever have been a Senator in the first place. In a more party-centric system the celebrity status gained as the wife of a Governor/President wouldn’t have bought her anything.
Thanks. I kind of have a one-track mind, and get drawn to electoral rules/third party threads like a moth to shite.
Fair enough. Though I tend to be dismissive of those with extremely ill-considered or fundamentally dishonest beliefs whether or not they vote. As far as I am concerned, when people disagree with me, I wish they would not vote at all.
Most people just don’t want a comprehensive overhaul of society, for good reason. So you don’t end up driving the changes that people will accept, you end up driving nothing at all.
Well then what specifically is your program? What are you doing to overhaul society? Is it working? Do you have reason to believe it will work?
Because it’s too soon to judge their efforts. I know they were founded in the early eighties but it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that they began to get any real numbers going. As I’ve said, these movements don’t succeed in a single election (or three). At this point, they’re still organizing the groundwork.
Maybe yes, maybe no. How the primaries work is very well known, yet Clinton ran a staggeringly bad campaign that did not reveal a great depth of understanding of delegate optimization. All we know is what did happen, and I am comfortable asserting that you cannot deduce a candidate’s familiarity with the rules from the outcome.
The point I was making about Clinton was that she worked within the party organization in her attempt to get nominated. Obama sought his support by organizing grass-roots organizations from outside the party - essentially his campaign bypassed the party and going directly to the voters. In a traditional PR system that wouldn’t have worked; the party chooses its candidate and then the voters say yes or no to their choice.
I didn’t intend to present it as a real alternate-history scenario. If a PR system existed, candidates like Obama would adjust their campaigns accordingly. I was just pointing out how the different system could produce different results.
