You obviously had the same leg tingle for Obama Chris Matthews talked about.
We’re definitely in a schism, although the schism actually started in 2009 with the rise of the Tea Party. What we didn’t know was that it’s not just about conservatives vs. K street Republicans. It’s actually conservatives vs. K Street vs. voters who are just pissed off about everything and don’t care much about ideology.
I’m not sure that anyone but Trump can get the third group’s votes, and it should be noted that Trump didn’t win by winning those voters alone. He also won among moderates who either couldn’t stand his opponents, or believe he’s “really” one of them. A nativist of the Tom Tancredo type would never have been able to pull off such a weird coalition. So assuming Trump loses, we’ll probably go back to the establishment vs. Tea Party war. if Trump wins, who knows what happens then. Probably changes the party in unpredictable ways.
There are plenty of voting systems where you still get a majority with multiple parties.
And, anyways, a vote system where you don’t have a majority is just broken. It means you denied the will of the people–most people voted against the candidate who won.
You obviously don’t have a counterargument and so just through out a textbook ad hominem.
Seriously, they aren’t the same except at the most superficial level. Heck, even the thing Rubio is most infamous for is something that could not have happened to Obama: Obama was not going to repeat the same rehearsed answer over and over. He actually cared and actually had rhetorical skills.
Rubio just did not have the skills necessary. Obama did.
Not at all. This is an artifact of a voting system where people’s choices are artificially limited. They can only vote for one candidate, and they are assumed not to want any other candidate.
In reality I’d like the chocolate icecream, but if chocolate’s not available I won’t go home empty-handed; I’ll take the strawberry and, if not that, the vanilla. Any of these are acceptable choices to me; the only one I absolutely won’t take is the garlic and liver icecream. (Or Ted Cruz, as I like to call it.)
So it may well be with candidates. I’d rather have Bernie, but if I can’t have Bernie then I would rather have Hillary than Donald (or whatever).
A voting system should be able to cope with this, since its perfectly normal and foreseeable that the preferences of voters will be divided among candidates in a way that means no one candidate is the favoured choice of a majority of voters.
A voting system isn’t broken where no candidate can command a majority of the votes. It’s broken where, if no candidate can command a majority, it can’t identify the candidate who is the most acceptable choice to a majority.
Given the reality of our computerized world, we could implement a complicated voting system. SAy, voters could vote for, against, or neutral for each candidate on the ballot in a multi-candidate race.
Although really, a better result is to require a majority and just have a runoff of the top two if no candidate gets a majority.
Voters can rank the candidates in the order of their preference, as they do in many countries. Then you can simply progressively eliminate the candidates with the lowest total first preferences and redistribute their votes according to the next effective preference until one of the remaining candidates has a majority of the votes. No runoffs needed. No computers either, unless you want to use them for other reasons.
Or you could have a more sophisticated voting system involving proportional representation, though not I think for an office that is to be occupied by only one person.
The point is, it’s not rocket science, and there are plenty of tried and tested voting models available.
The problem with proportional representation is that then people would vote for parties. It’s simple, but it takes the focus off being represented by individuals of good character to party slates.
Certainly not how it works in Ireland; quite the reverse. The parties nominate candidates, but since candidates from the same party can’t compete for votes on the basis of party affiliation, they tend to emphasise the personal - their own views, their own record/qualification, their own experiences, their own values. The voters then decide which of the candidates nominated by each party will be elected, and which will not.
The end result is a significant transfer of power from the parties to the voters. There are virtually no “safe seats” where, if you get a nomination from X party, you are confident of being elected. If the voters don’t like you, they have the option of choosing another candidate from X party (or, of course, a candidate from a different party).
How does proportional representation work if you’re voting for candidates, not parties? If it’s just candidates, and the candidates from party A win with 51% of the vote in 200 districts, and the candidates from party B win with 70% of the vote in 150 districts, then party A gets 200 season and party B gets 150 seats, despite winning more votes.
If a district elects only one representative you can’t (at the district level) have proportional representation, since 100% of the representation must go to one party (or to the supporters of one candidate, if you prefer) and none at all to any other party/the supporters of any other candidate.
If you’re going to stick with single-member districts and you want proportional representation in the legislature, then you’ll need to do something like having top-up lists - on top of the 350 members which which represent specific districts you add (say) 100 members drawn from party lists so as to ensure that the overall representation of each party matches its share of the vote.
That’s just one way to do it and obviously there could be objections. It’s not how we do it in Ireland, though, which is the system I was pointing to earlier.
In Ireland, each electoral district elects between three and five representatives (and boundaries are drawn so that the population of each district is proportional to the number of representatives it elects). Parties nominate as many candidates as, with a fair following electoral wind, they can optimistically hope to get elected. For some parties that will be just one candidate; for others three or four. So you might have, say, 15 candidates in all. The voters number the candidates in the order of their preference. A voter who is a loyalist of party X might give his first four preferences to the four candidates running for that party, but that’s up to him; he can vote for any of the candidates in any order. And even if he is a loyalist who votes 1, 2, 3, 4 for the party X candidates, he can still choose which of the four will get his first preference, which his second, and so forth. (Which is why the locally unpopular candidate imposed by the party apparatchiks can never be assured of winning, no matter how strong party loyalty in the district is.)
Right. In a 5-seat district any candidate who gets more than one-sixth of the first preference votes is elected. (Obviously, a maximum of five candidates can do this.) In practice it rarely or never happens that five candidates will do this, so low-polling candidates will be eliminated and their votes will be redistributed to the next effective preference, or the surplus votes of successful candidates will be redistributed, until five candidates have got over the line, or until there are only five candidates left.
The result of this is that a party can’t secure 100% of the representation for a 5-seat district unless it has the support of more than 83% of the voters, as opposed to the first-past-the-post system where any party with the support of more than 50% of the voters is guaranteed 100% of the representation and it’s possible, and quite common, to get 100% of the representation with less than 50% of the vote (as long as there are three or more candidates). Overall, if you ensure that electoral boundaries are drawn with reasonable impartiality, you can expect each party’s share of the seats in the legislature to be fairly close to its share of the first preference vote, and certainly much closer than under the first-past-the-post system.
We can see how this plays out by comparing the UK and Ireland. In the UK general election of 2015 (first past the post) the Conservative party won an absolute majority of the seats (50.8%) despite the fact that nearly two out of three voters (63.2%) voted for somebody else - the Conservative vote was only 36.8%. The Scottish National Party, with 4.7% of the votes, won 56 seats while the Liberal Democrats, with 7.9% of the vote, won just 8 seats. And so forth.
Compare the Irish general election results of 2016. Fine Gael, with 25.5% of the vote, won 31.6% of the seats. Fianna Fail - 24.3% of votes, 27.8% of seats. Sinn Fein - 13.8% of the vote, 14.6% of the seats. Labour - 6.6% of the votes, 4.4% of the seats. There are still disparities between votes and seats, sure, but nothing like the disparities that we see in the UK.
So, yes, you can design an electoral system which puts power in the hands of the voter rather than the party, and which yields results in which each party is allotted seats in reasonable proportion to the share of the vote that it has won.
That is a feature, not a bug. What we vote for is more important than whom we vote for. For my part I want to be able to vote for a left-progressive social-democratic public-policy agenda – not for an individual representative who says he’s for all of that but might change his mind when he sees things from behind the desk. If you’re a green or a libertarian or a social conservative you feel the same way, don’t you?
Or you can have a simpler voting system: approval voting. Each voter can vote for as many or as few candidates for each office as they like. Whoever gets the most votes wins.
The problem with ranked voting systems is that in a field of many candidates, small changes in ranking can produce very different results. The races where the top two candidates are close and need contentious recounts–now imagine that at any point in the process of reassigning votes. That can make the results confusing and controversial to voters.
Approval voting is extremely transparent: whoever got the most votes wins. Everyone gets to vote for all the candidates they like, so there’s no “stealing” votes.
If the current primaries were using approval voting, I’d expect Bernie would’ve won, since I think more Clinton voters like Bernie than the reverse. And Trump would’ve not, since his opponents would not have been cannibalizing each others’ votes.
I don’t want to be represented by a party, rather than an individual representative. It’s much easier to hold representatives to account for their mistakes than parties. If a representative does not act the way I like, I can focus my efforts on removing them within mine own district. If a party does not behave, I have to convince people across a much wider area, because I have to change the whole party, not simply one individual’s mind.
WHAT skills?
As I said, Obama and Rubio were BOTH freshman Senators with zero accomplishments. Like RUbio, Obama couldn’t run on his record of achievement because he didn’t HAVE any achievements.
What he DID have was one well-received speech. A speech that set Democrat hearts a fluttering and Chris Matthews’ leg a twitching. Liberals loved Obama and made him President even though he had absolutely no qualifications for the job.
If you pulled the lever for Obama, it was a purely emotional decision. NOT a rational one.
One speech? He had an entire campaign. A campaign with one of the best ground campaigns we’ve seen in a long, long time; a campaign with several well-received speeches; a campaign with a long, comprehensive platform of positions and actions. First he outcampaigned the far more experienced Hillary Clinton, and then the far more experienced John McCain, both of whom ran extremely nasty campaigns against him. And he won handily.
He also certainly benefited from the absolutely dire state eight years of a Republican presidency had left the country in, gaffes by the Clinton and McCain campaigns, the bewildering apotheosis of Sarah Palin and of course the race thing (which were emotional factors) but to suggest that “liberals” only voted for Obama because of the feelgood factor is wrong. Obama was the rational choice in 2008 on so many levels, as he was again in 2012.
Emotional like Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war? Like his stances on Iran, the Middle East, and getting Osama Bin Laden? Like his health care ideas?
He was right on all those things (at least, in my opinion), and his opponents were wrong. Voting for the guy who was right is entirely rational.
Being a human Rorschach test.
For Obama, lack of experience worked to his advantage.
His agenda was “hope and change” and being black. Trump’s agenda is “fear and change” and not much else.
The second worst outcome for the GOP would be to run Trump and lose. The worst would be to run Trump and win. Because a win for Trump would drag the party into La-la Land. At least a loss would allow them to regroup and re-focus on picking candidates who are not batshit insane.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - no, Cruz and Rubio are not batshit insane. So don’t bother.
To describe Cruz as batshit insane is an insult to guano. That boy left wack in the rearview years ago.
And being right on the issues (at least, IMO) more often than his opponents.