The real failure of democracy in the United States · 6:33am Nov 20th, 2016
A lot of people are bemoaning Trump’s election as a failure of democracy. I think the reactions of the losing party reveal a bigger failure (which both parties are guilty of):
“Hillary failed to motivate the Democratic base.” (I hate the term “base”. It means “the extremists”.)
“Clinton got only 88% of the black vote. Obama got 93%.” (Should have run someone who would have been the first black president again instead.)
“Maybe Hillary would’ve won if she’d promised free college educations like Bernie did!” (She did.)
"We need to get everyone voting--kids who aren't interested in politics, the homeless, everybody--to make the vote truly democratic!" (Yes, we need more indifferent, ill-informed, or crazy voters.)
“We should’ve run Bernie!” (For all those people who voted for Trump only because Bernie wasn’t a choice. [1])
The common theme behind all the “we could have done X” posts and tweets I’ve seen is, “We could have won, if only we’d been more extreme! If only we’d backed further into our corner, we could have really motivated the people all the way in that corner!”
It’s easy to see that as the lesson of the election: Trump won by being extremist; therefore, extremism wins.
Yet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the fraction of the voting-age population which voted in the U.S. began falling around 1970, and has never returned to those levels. The turnout in 2016 wasn’t a surge of white racist Trump voters; it had 8% lower turnout than the 2012 election, which was 6% lower than the 2008 election. Trump didn't get even 1 million more votes than Romney [2].
Maybe it isn’t that people aren’t voting because the candidates aren’t extreme enough or special-interest-focused enough for them to get excited about. Maybe turnout is falling because the candidates are too extreme or too devoted to special interests to get excited about. Maybe it’s the moderates, not the “base” or the special interests, who stay home.
I don’t know the answer to that, but I think I know how the Democrats could have won: By compromising. Like George W. Bush did in 2004, when he won a large fraction of the Hispanic vote by opposing English-only education and providing school funding for the children of illegal immigrants. If Hillary Clinton had dropped her support for federal legalization of late-term abortion and declared that her gun control policy would be restricted to requiring background checks for purchases, I think she could have won. Or, if she’d worried less about race and gender, and more about workers’ issues. The Republicans are the party of the rich, but they’ve also become the party of the workers. How did that happen? Why is that not mentioned by the Monday-morning quarterbacks?
Game theory says that the loser of a two-candidate election should move closer to the position of the winner, not farther away.
In America, “compromise” is a dirty word. It's usually seen in the phrase “compromise your morals”, which is said to be a terrible thing.
It isn’t! Look, if Hitler wants you to tell him where the Jews are, that’s a good time not to compromise. But we aren’t talking about killing Jews. We’re talking about things like minimum wage and tax brackets. If you find yourself saying, “No more than 30% federal tax for married filing jointly under $100,000/yr--here I stand, I can do no other”, you don’t know what morality is. If you have 20 points in your platform, most of which people have argued about for a hundred years without settling one way or another, and you can’t compromise on any of them in order to get elected, you’re a sanctimonious asshole who shouldn’t be elected.
And if you say, “But then the two parties would eventually get closer together until they were barely distinguishable,” I’d say, “Yes; that’s the only way democracy can work in a two-party representative democracy.” More on that below.
Democracy is supposed to reach compromises. It isn’t supposed to find the one “correct” way of doing things, or to make your government wobble back and forth between two extremes. It isn’t supposed to be a contest that one side wins and the other loses. It isn’t supposed to reform the world [3].
Before democracy [4], everyone thought there had to be one group to tell everybody what to do, and everyone would fight over who would be that one group. Democracy is a big deal not because people vote, but because each class is motivated not to seize power, but to share it.
We say we’re a democratic society, but we’ve reverted to thinking like feudalists. Our institutions don’t give us compromise anymore; they give us one group or the other in power, and give the other group some power to block them from doing anything.
So how else can democracy work? Well, I have worked out for your convenience what I think are the two basic ways representative democracy can work. First, a little
Game Theory
... with some pictures I stole from policyinterns.com. Suppose you have two ice-cream vendors A and B on a beach. They both want to sell as much ice cream as possible. Both are free to move anywhere they want to on the beach. Suppose they start out like this.
A gets all the customers closest to A, and B gets all the customers closest to B. A realizes this means she can get more customers by moving closer to B:
B sees what’s happening, and moves closer to A. Here’s the final equilibrium position:
This example is usually trotted out by extremists of either party to explain why they don’t like any of the candidates available. However, when people in present-day America say this, they’re wrong. More on that below.
What happens if there are 3 vendors?
If A and B are standing left-right together in the middle of the beach, C will stand just to the left of A or to the right of B, and get nearly half the beach. Say C stands to the right of B. Then B will wander off down to the right of C, and C will go to the right of B, until they’re far enough away from A that they start worrying about the territory they’re losing to A. The equilibrium position has B in the middle the beach, which I’ll call .5 (the beach ranges from 0 to 1), A at 1/6, and C at 5/6. Each gets 1/3 of the beach. Similarly, if there are 4 vendors, they each end up with 1/4 of the beach.
This beach, though, is 1-dimensional. What if voters care about more than one issue? Let’s say the beach is n-dimensional. (You have to get there via Tardis.) All we really want to know is when the vendors will cluster together at a point, and when they’ll disperse across the beach.
If there are only 2 vendors, it doesn’t matter how many dimensions there are. It will always be to a vendor’s advantage to move closer to the other vendor. But if there are 3 or more vendors in 2 or more dimensions, things get interesting.
Imagine a 2D beach with 3 vendors, all standing a little ways away from each other in a triangle. Will B gain territory by moving away from A and C, or by moving towards them?
The scenario is symmetric around the dotted line, so we can ask the question for just one side of it. We draw a dashed line through the points that are equidistant from A and B. We would like to see whether the area on B’s side increases or decreases as B moves away from the line AC.
Usually with this sort of problem, you start by writing an equation for the area on B’s side. But it’s infinite. So is the amount that the area changes when B moves some very small distance d along the solid line. So let’s just look at the picture.
B loses the ground in the shaded triangle with the x in it. B gains the ground in the shaded triangle with w in it. The area of the triangle with the w in it is infinite. Infinity is more than the area of the triangle with the x, so B wants to move away from A and C. (If the beach is not infinite, B still moves away from A and C, but only until the areas in those two triangles are equal.)
In real life, there are only a finite number of voters, and they're probably normally rather than evenly distributed along all dimensions (which means most of them are near the center of the diagram). So the vendors don't move apart forever; they move some distance apart that's proportional to the standard deviations of all voters along all dimensions.
So, when there are 3 vendors in 2 dimensions, they spread out rather than cluster together. The way this result generalizes is simple:
- If there are 2 vendors, they cluster together, regardless of how many dimensions the beach has.
- If there are 3 or more vendors, they spread apart, regardless of how many dimensions the beach has.
(I think. Mathematicians may want to check my results.)
Voting
There are, not coincidentally, two main types of representational democracy.
In plurality voting, each voting district elects one representative, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Britain, the US, and Canada have this form of democracy.
Plurality voting leads to a two-party system, like this (from Wikipedia, Two-party system):
In proportional representation, each voting district gets multiple representatives, and each party gets a number of representatives proportional to the number of votes it receives. Proportional representation leads to more than two parties, as the natural tendency of groups to splinter is not sharply checked.
The goal of all representational democracies is, in my opinion, for the representatives to reach solutions that compromise between the values and opinions of the voters they represent. There are two levels at which it’s possible to reach a compromise: at the level of the election of representatives, and at the level of the representative assembly (e.g, Parliament or Congress).
Reaching a compromise at the level of the election of representatives occurs when the vendors all cluster together, meaning all candidates hold similar, compromised positions. As we just saw, that should happen when, and only when, there are 2 political parties.
Reaching a compromise at the level of the assembly can’t easily occur when there are 2 parties, at least not if each piece of legislation is voted on separately. (Compromise could occur, for instance, if representatives were given some number of votes per session, and could distribute them across all of the bills voted on in that session however they chose.) Compromise naturally occurs when there are 3 or more parties and none in the majority, because each party has to co-operate with at least one other party to get something done.
Putting it all together,
… we see that at equilibrium, pluralistic voting and proportional representation can each lead to a working representative democracy, but in different ways:
Pluralistic voting for representatives leads to having 2 parties. Compromise therefore happens at the first level of voting (for representatives), but not at the level of the assembly (because there are only 2 parties). Note that this relies on having a distribution of opinions in the population that’s similar in most of your voting districts; otherwise, parties don't need to produce compromise candidates.
Proportional representation in the assembly leads to having more than 2 parties. Compromise can’t happen at the first level of voting (because it’s representational, so no party need compromise), but can happen at the level of the assembly (because there are more than 2 parties).
The U.S. has pluralistic voting for representatives, which is why it degenerated to a 2-party system by 1792, when the new nation was just 4 years old [5]. Yet it doesn’t achieve compromise candidates during the process of voting for representatives. The parties aren’t close together.
Therefore, US democracy doesn’t work.
What went wrong?
It’s tempting to launch into a rant about how we should all just get along and learn to compromise again. But preaching virtues is bad political science. What mechanism led to the failure of US democracy?
I have a theory. It’s because we have primaries.
(Other people have this theory too. I just don't remember who.)
This is going to stretch the ice-cream analogy, but bear with me. We don’t have two ice-cream vendors A and B with carts. We have maybe 4 vendors who want the franchise for company A, and 3 who want the franchise for company B. But the company doesn’t get to choose the vendors. The vendor candidates all pick spots on the beach, and then all the people on the left side of the beach vote for a vendor who wants to work with A, and all the people on the right side of the beach vote for a vendor who wants to work with B. Then everybody on the beach votes between the winner from A and the winner from B.
Some beaches have rocks on one side or another, so there just aren’t many people on that side, and it’s going to be an easy win for either company A or company B. On those beaches, the people on the side that’s foreordained to win just vote for whoever’s closest to them. And on the other beaches, everybody knows ahead of time that the second vote will be close, and they ought to vote for candidates near the center of the beach--but a lot of people are stupid and vote for the ones nearest them anyway, so no candidate goes to the spot at the center of the beach that’s best for their company.
And then, all the vendors for each company go to a big convention where they all decide on one position (on a beach) where all their company’s vendors should put their carts. And those carts are heavy, and the wheels get stuck in the sand, so nobody wants to have to move their cart very far. So all those vendors from beaches with people only on the left, or only on the right, push their company farther to the left or right.
I haven’t got numbers at hand, but I think that most US Congressional districts are the type where one side is sure to win. We’ve spent decades gerrymandering districts toward that end (though I don’t understand why).
The reason U.S. democracy doesn’t work at reaching compromises, and instead our two parties carry on like ancient warriors bent on total victory or death, is thus because of two facts:
1. We have a lot of districts in which one party has a large majority, because our representatives have spent a lot of time drawing the district lines up that way.
2. We have primaries, and in those districts where one party dominates, the primaries elect extremist candidates.
So we need to do two things:
1. We need to use an algorithm to do automatic districting based on population maps. One algorithm which applies uniformly across the entire United States. There must be no redistricting, unless that's also done by algorithm. The algorithm might redistrict after each election to reduce disparities in voter demographics between districts.
2. We need to get rid of primaries.
No, really. Unless there’s something wrong with my theory, we need to get rid of local primaries. Either that, or a new Constitution. The parties should choose their own candidates. Primaries are fine for countries with proportional representation, but they break pluralist representational democracy.
(The presidential primaries aren't the major problem under this analysis--they can result in an extremist being elected, but it's the local primaries that drive the parties farther apart.)
But the parties used to hand-pick their candidates, and they stopped doing it in the early 20th century, because political bosses chose their cronies as candidates and people didn't like that. There was no possibility for a McGovern, a McCarthy, or a Trump to be a party candidate when parties picked their candidates.
Well, that's kind of the point of pluralist voting. It keeps out the riff-raff and slows change. There are no Green senators in Congress. If you want minorities and radicals to have a voice, you need proportional representation, not a crippled pluralist voting system.
But note this makes my hypothesis testable. If primaries really are a major cause of the problem, the two parties (whatever they were at the time) should have moved further apart after the introduction of primaries. I don't know whether that happened. They were pretty damn far apart in 1860, though I think that was a special case. But the test is complicated by the fact that mass movement to big cities started around the same time as the introduction of primaries, and would act in the opposite direction--bringing the parties closer together because electoral districts had a more even mix of urban and rural voters. It would be difficult to tease out the separate impacts of these changes.
Anyway, the system is lurching pretty violently now.
The Constitution and our political traditions were designed by people of a more aristocratic bent. The electoral college was designed to keep people like Trump from getting elected, and so was the pluralist voting system, and so was the lack of primaries. We introduced party primaries, to be more democratic, and that let Trump get to the election. We took away the power of the electors to vote their conscience, to be more democratic, and that cleared the way for Trump to the presidency.
We should take seriously the hypothesis that democracy itself is the problem--that giving each adult one vote, eliminating all elitist checks, and striking down all forms of voter qualification as racist, leads to more Trumps. If, having faced that hypothesis, we're still willing to pay that cost, we should consider drawing up a new Constitution that embodies radically democratic ideals, rather than keep on trying to retrofit a more aristocratic one to new democratic norms and breaking things in the process.
[1] Bernie wouldn’t have won. Bernie had an upswing in polls leading to the election because some Democrats began to fear Hillary couldn’t win, that’s all. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, were not in the position this year of having a previously-neglected voter bloc to tap into comprising half of the population. Read this for other reasons why Sanders couldn’t have won. A key reason is that Hillary was very nice to Bernie, trying not to alienate his supporters. The Donald wouldn’t have been.
[2] --and according to exit polls, Trump's gains were entirely from black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. I found this statistic through Scott Alexander's slatestarcodex post on Trump and crying wolf, which, as always, is an oasis of reason in a sea of stupidity. The exit poll statistic on Hispanics, however, is flatly contradicted by a pre-election poll which surveyed 5,600 Latinos.
[3] The impulse to reform the world is a big part of the problem. Both parties continually elevate moral issues that should be handled at the state level to the federal level, to try to force everyone to be like them. We need to learn to tolerate diversity--but that doesn't mean people of all different colors who all think the same way; it means, among other things, letting people in other states live the way they want to. Like how we tolerate the Amish in Pennsylvania. They have very different values, and you'd probably say they oppress their women something fierce--but they don't bother us, and we don't bother them [WHOOPS! Mercushio reminded me that this is a lie], and anybody who doesn't like being Amish can leave.
I know, I know: This is the exception! You're clearly right! There is no other point of view! History will vindicate you!
Just remember, if you set things up so that you can reform the whole nation, you have a 50% chance of being the one who gets reformed.
[4] I should say “between democracies”, because everyone knew about ancient Athenian democracy, and for most of the history of the West, admired its accomplishments. For some reason they assumed those accomplishments were made in spite of its form of government rather than because of it.
[5] Yes, I know how to count. The nation that we refer to by the title “The United States” didn’t exist until 1788, when the Constitution was ratified. Before that, it was a confederacy more like NATO or the United Nations. That’s why we say George Washington, not John Hanson, was the first President of the United States.
I think you've identified the biggest problems--gerrymandering and primaries forcing candidates to the extremes. Most members of Congress are more concerned with losing their primary than losing their general election. I've never thought of this issue in game theory terms, but that framing is quite useful.
I also agree that redistricting reform is a must (I think this is one of the issues Obama has said he'd pursue once out of office). Primary reform (such as instituting top-two non-partisan "jungle" primaries like they have in California) could also help. Of course, these changes can be difficult to implement. For example, here in Illinois, the Dems in the state legislature and the IL Supreme Court managed to keep a redistricting reform measure off of the ballot.
Not an american, therefore I can't say much, but in your last paragraph something caught my attention:
That isn't quite right on the US, as far as I know. "One vote" is such when it's considered so at the end result. Can't say about elections at less than presidential levels, but for those people's votes have different value depending on who you vote for and where you live. Mostly, votes can - and do - have an total worth of nothing. You talked about how primaries throw things askew by how they work, but that problem propagates to the main elections too. Hell, I can't understand just why republicans vote in guaranteed democrat states (and vice-versa). Their vote is worthless. Every state in which one party wins is one where the voters of the other are irrelevant. If I'm not mistaken about 50% of the possible voters did cast theirs in this election. But how many of those actually meant something? How many votes could be ignored and not change a thing in the results?
This is actually something that confounds me greatly in US elections. They're said to be democratic, but don't value each individual vote equally. I've talked about it with others, but never asked this directly to an american. Please, do tell me, not as an ironic question but an honest one about a system that feels honestly alien... Why? Not why the system was implemented back int the late XVIII century, but why is the american voting system still like that today?
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AFAIK, it's like that today because that's how it was made. Amending the Constitution is hard. Who's gonna devote their term in office to that?
Eh, I think the actual lesson of this election is "voter suppression works". Hillary Clinton won by over 1.3 million votes. She lost because she lost in crucial states - North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida - by very small margins. Four of those are controlled by Republicans, who worked to make voting harder for Democrats. The North Carolina Republicans in particular boasted about lowering the black vote by 9% via their voter suppression efforts.
Moreover, the Republicans spent years slandering Hillary, and their entire strategy was "they're just as bad, don't vote" to the Democratic base. In fact, that was pretty much their entire strategy - they knew they weren't going to convince a lot of voters, so they needed to stop Democrats from voting.
Obama should have had the IRS indict Trump for tax fraud, or had someone conveniently leak his tax records. It is dirty, but so is what Comey did.
Of course, eliminating the electoral college would also help.
The exit polls are probably wrong, as noted on 538. If you look at which states Trump did poorer than expected in, it lines up with the Hispanic vote being more against Trump than it was in previous years.
If you look at the finalish numbers, Trump got within a million votes of Romney's numbers. The idea that there was a large untapped voter base and that is what won him the election is probably wrong. The Democrats simply by and large did not show up to vote in the numbers they did in 2008 and 2012, due to direct and indirect voter suppression.
Thankfully, we live in a Republic.
The US was a single country at that point, it was just a very strange one. Most of the power was devolved to regional governments; there was, in fact, a central government, but it was relatively ineffectual. The Articles of Confederation were a terrible way of governing a country, but the US was, in fact, a country at that point, and was treated as such by other countries (such as the UK negotiating a treaty with the country as a whole, and ceding territory to the country as a whole).
TD has the right of it.
I'm seeing a lot of people going 'election's over, now just fall in line and be fine with Trump' when the actual majority of the nation did NOT want him. His plans were shoddy, his understanding of politics shallow at best, and he's a horrible human being - this is supposed to be the person who represents all of us to the world? Fantastic. Glossing over these facts, as well as just who voted for him and why, and who was against him and may not have gotten to have their voice, seems more like pulling for Trump than the election process itself, since it ignores very important issues which Titanium has already brought up in a more elegant and far less accidentally abrasive manner than I could have.
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The US is a democratic republic.
Actually I don't think the algorithm will help. Yes, gerrymandered districts are everywhere and killing them would be a great benefit, but interests _do_ cluster geographically around America. People in different states do, in fact, have wildly different ideas about what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ought to look like.
If you divided the territory into algorithmically fair chunks of the country, you'd _still_ have safe seats, especially if you keep the two-party system. Or so I suspect. We could actually test this if we used the shortest-splitline algorithm to cut apart the 'States and then re-ran the congressional votes (per-county) with those districts to see what happens.
The solution to different parts of the country truly being different is either trampling or embracing. You either _deliberately_ screw over parts of the country, centralize everything, crush dissent, and eventually your dominant ideology spreads everywhere. Big centralized empires did this a lot, actually. It's kinda evil, but it does seem to work.
The alternative, is to embrace the differences, letting each state do its own thing which you mention: just like the Amish can do their Amish thing, so does each state do its own thing. The problem with that approach (and there's always one) is that you can end up with some practice that some states find absolutely vital and others equally absolutely abhorrent and that no state is willing to let continue/stop without objecting. Violently. This has happened at least once[1].
How you solve this, I've no earthly clue. It is possible that sufficiently large countries simply do not work.
[1] The history of the runup to the Civil War is of both sides trying to manipulate the federal government into making their preferred view mandatory across the country, with the slave-holding states winning with things such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision. It was about strate's rights, in a way, but neither side supported the live and let live middle ground position. Merely which rights will win out as, in this instance, neither side would back down.
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A democratic republic. 'Democracy' and 'Republic' are different dimensions of government classifications. You can have an oligarchic republic just as well as a democratic one. Republics are elected, and in democracies, votes are apportioned equally (modulo some measure of error).
I disagree with a number of points in this post, but am not really knowledgeable enough about politics to be comfortable arguing against them. However, I do want to point out someone who seems to know his stuff - CGP Grey. He has a lot of videos precisely about this kind of thing - first past the post voting, gerrymandering, electoral college, alternative voting systems etc. If you only have time for one video, then I highly recommend The Rules for Rulers, which was quite eye-opening for me regarding politics in general.
Incidentally, I think it is an error to assume voters (on the whole) even vote "rationally", at least in the sense that their vote will change if someone alters their view on one or two things slightly. The people who voted for Trump were, overwhelmingly, voting against Clinton/the Democrats, not for Trump, despite the fact that you must, in fact, vote for someone. Minor changes to issues are irrelevant; Hillary is a Democrat, and therefore evilbadwrong (for reasons to be determined later, if need be, and always changing, if need be).
Viewing voting as more akin to tribalism is, I think, a more accurate view of things. Georg repeatedly said he wouldn't defend Trump, but he was still going to vote for him. If so, that seems unlikely to be something easily overcome by moderating on one or two particular issues - it is more about tribe than anything else.
That's also why they used the "Clinton cheated Sanders" lie; it was a means of trying to say "Clinton isn't really the legitimate leader of your tribe". It is a much more effective attack than the stuff against Trump. An effective anti-Trump attack would be emphasizing how he hates rural people and thinks that the people who suppoted him are rubes who he'll screw over once he's in office. That would actually matter to them - they don't really care much if he rapes random other people, but they do care if he fucks them and isn't really a part of their tribe.
Note that the whole tribalism thing is true of Democrats as well. While more people voted for Hillary as opposed to against Trump, still, the "I didn't really vote for this person, I voted against the other party" regularly makes up 30-45% of the vote for any particular candidate (out of their total vote total). IIRC it was in the low 40s for Hillary this year.
Coming from a country where elections actually involve more than two parties, I feel confident in saying that having a three party system ends up with much worse results – at least when talking about the Executive branch.
It is really simple. Imagine there are 3 parties, (A, B, C), that typically get (40, 40, 20)% of the votes. What ends up happening, in practice, is that neither A or B, despite being much more popular, have enough support to rule. In this case whichever manages to get C's support will rule, meaning that the position favored by 20% of the people ends up being the de-facto one to be ruling the country in the long run. Sure, it might be tinged by some issues in which A or B refuse to give up on, but at the end of the day if the current ruler changes their position at some point, then C can just go to the other party on the next election, and in such a way that they are able to demand that they adhere to those requests more strictly.
Even worse, in real life A and B are actually clusters of parties which make alliances to propose candidates (A1, A2, B1, B2, B3). But eventually a single one has to be chosen, and voters will, when having to make the final decision, tend towards one of these – and the only viable choice ends up being whichever one was backed by C, often the one more willing to "bend the knee", so to speak. Add to that a healthy dose of corruption in C, and you end up with the kind of shit show that makes US politics look healthy.
A fair voting system is impossible.
I don't mean 'oh, humans are flawed and corrupt beings who will try to game the system'. I means that there is, literally, no way of counting votes where there are at least three options that is guaranteed to give an objectively satisfactory answer 100% of the time.
Consider, for instance, a race with three candidates, A, B, and C. Suppose further that we have three voters, X, Y, and Z. X would rather A won, but he'd be okay with B. Y would prefer B won, but she'd be okay with C. Z would prefer if C won, but it'd be okay with A. No matter who you decide wins, 2/3 of the voting public would be happier with someone else. And this isn't a rock-paper-scissors situation: each voter can cleanly order their preferences from best to worst.
In fact, I saw an article about the problem in Scientific American a while ago, in which a hypothetical group of voters voted on which of several ways of counting votes to use. Each voter had a consistent order or preference, from best to worst. And in every single case, using a specific method to count the votes led to the result that a different method should have been used.
I'm not saying there aren't real human issues to deal with at the polls. In fact, I have a pretty serious opinion on how the flaws of humanity hinder our political process. But there are scientific, objective issues too.
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Our system only gives two real choices.
More voted for Hillary than Trump, but Trump is becoming president because the majority isn't what determines who becomes president.
4309802 You're conflating fair and satisfactory.
4309839 In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the word 'fair', if only because nobody can agree on what 'fair' means, or if it even means anything. I hope that my point, however, was not lost.
4309841 It wasn't, I just wanted to remind you that some of those terms get messy fast if left unattended.
Frankly, I've been rooting for algorithmic governance since I was twelve years old. I figured at the time that it might take some serious bloodshed to subjugate people under new robot overlords, but that was before drones.
You usually have good social insights, but I don't agree with any of this.
First and foremost, "could have won" isn't a reasonable target to aim at. Hillary could have won in a million slightly-different scenarios. Almost anything different about her campaign "might" have won the election for her, because Trump had a remarkably low ceiling and because Hillary almost won anyway: she did win the popular vote, and a drift of not much more than one percent in just the Rust Belt states would have given her the EC.
I never used to think Russell Brand was anything but an unkempt idiot, but he changed my mind with what I think is a remarkable insight. Please, take a listen before continuing:
I'm pretty sure he still smells terrible, but I'm also pretty sure he's on to something here. At least, he's halfway right, because there's a second piece to the puzzle that (I believe) is equally large.
Russell explains why people were able to choose Trump over Clinton, but I don't think he's entirely correct about the US and Britain having reached a nadir: things don't suck for most Americans right now! Things are actually pretty good in the US. Unemployment is on the low side ("real" unemployment remains a little below 10%), and purchasing power is high due to automation and trade. Most people are much better off now than they were a decade ago, in terms of comfort and job prospects and lifestyle. There isn't a problem with immigration: it's substantially lower now than it was two decades ago, and net immigration has actually been negative over the past few years in part because Obama has been deporting millions of immigrants. There isn't a problem with the murder rate being sky-high, or terrorism affecting lots of Americans. The teen pregnancy rate is now lower than it's been in my lifetime. Yes, there are some issues with police brutality, but most of those issues likely existed before—we just have cell phones now so it's easier to catch on video. Most of America's problems are overseas. Life here is pretty good. This is no nadir.
So the second piece of the puzzle is why people think we've reached a nadir, and that has to do with a problem that the media has been heavily reporting on over the past week... though not in the intelligent depth the topic deserves. That topic is the proliferation of inaccurate and false facts. People are calling this "fake news" but that's not really the right term: The Onion is fake news; this is inaccurate or false news.
2016 is different. Tens of millions of Americans get their information from filtered sources with no fact-checking... like Donald Trump's Twitter account. For example, Trump retweeted a White supremacist account's message that nearly 90% of White murders are caused by Blacks. That's completely made up: the actual statistic is 15%. When confronted on the tweet, Donald Trump complained that he didn't have time to fact-check his sources, and he saw it on the internet, so that was good enough to make it trustworthy. Many of Trump's followers share that mindset: they see something that agrees with what they want to believe, and they believe it, simple as that. Education is negatively correlated with Trump's voters in part because higher education forces you to learn to fact-check.
A substantial number of self-identified Republicans (it might even be a majority) believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a large fraction believe he wasn't born in Hawaii. Donald Trump is one of them (except he's not a self-identified Republican). These are facts that are trivial to check, but in 2016 it's easy to find "news" sources that align with what you want to believe, be they Breitbart or Trump's Twitter, and listen solely to them. Most of the false news relies on conspiracy theory to explain why mainstream news isn't reporting that Clinton intentionally conspired to murder four Americans in Benghazi, or why the Republican commission on Benghazi came to the conclusion that there was no conspiracy to harm them and that Clinton did everything in her power to save them.
The left has a similar problem, but it's not as pronounced. A recent report in mainstream media claimed that some 40% of self-identified Republicans get their news from news sources which frequently contain false or misleading information, while 20% of self-identified Democrats do. But 20% is still an unacceptable level of ignorance, and we live in a day and age when anyone can choose to live inside a self-contained yes-bubble like this. And these bubbles do their best to warn you that real, verifiable news sources are part of a grand conspiracy.
There's a small tertiary component, which is the degree of hostility between the two major political parties, that allowed for posturing on things like Benghazi and Obama and Trump that gives cursory support to conspiracy theories on both sides. But the main two issues are what Russell Brand is talking about (the fact that people care far less about the positions both parties have pushed as platform planks, and more about the potential for real change), and the dangerous way more than a hundred million Americans receive news and information.
I think what you're saying about Hillary moderating her positions wouldn't have wiggled the needle much. Politicians have traditionally thought that people care about things like gun rights or abortion, but they're wrong. Donald Trump hated on the TPP and Republicans loved him for it. The people who care about the issues you're discussing are already set to vote a certain way, and moderating position won't change their vote. The rest of the people, the majority of Americans, don't give two shits about any of those issues. Politicians thought they did because they mistakenly grew to believe their own rhetoric.
4309798
I disagree slightly with this part, but I'll note that this:
is completely and absolutely true, and part of Italy's recent political history.
4309815
It isn't that simple. Neither Clinton nor trump won 50% of the PV, and Trump came very close to Clinton's PV. 62 million Americans voted for Trump. Becoming President-Elect is not simply a matter of the EC being a broken system or the US using a "vote-for-only-one" system of voting. There are reasons people voted for Trump that need to be understood.
In short, it's no easy task to capture the Republican nomination with 16 other hats in the ring, nor win the Electoral College. There are deep reasons here behind Trump's win that have nothing to do with technicalities.
4309849
If you abolished the electoral college, it would have major impact on voting patterns and campaigning. It would eliminate the "swing state" dynamic and make it so that every vote in states where there is a major majority one way or the other actually matter; California and Texas often have relatively low voter turnout due to their presidential votes not mattering much. California has literally twice the population of Florida; if every vote in California counted for as much as every vote in Florida, a lot more people would turn out to vote for president in California. As-is, roughly as many people voted in Florida as did in California.
Texas had a lower total number of votes than Florida did, despite having a third more people.
If people in California and Texas voted at the same rate as people in Florida, Hillary Clinton probably would have had a 6 million or more vote margin.
4309854
I agree; there are debits and benefits to the EC (a lot on each side, actually). In a similar fashion, one might argue that we should abolish the Senate because it's not representative: Wyoming gets one vote for every 300 thousand people, while California only gets one vote for every 20 million.
There are plenty of things we could do that would seem "fair" by some measure and probably hoof the win to Hillary Clinton, but those are largely fictional thought experiments. The EC isn't going away anytime soon, and it isn't the primary source of disunity in the country. The fact that 62 million people voted for someone with Trump's characteristics is important to understand, regardless as to the outcome.
In a way, it's fortunate that he won because it's forcing people to actually look at what could possibly lead to the support he received. Focusing on the EC isn't productive, and complaining about it too much makes it look like liberals are whining just because they lost.
4309856
The president is a federally elected official; all senators are elected at the state level. It would make more sense for the same system (plurality rules) to apply at both levels. The electoral college is very wonky and is a bad system because it makes the presidential candidates focus on a dozen or so swing states and neglect the rest of the country.
It really is the primary problem with presidential races. It is a bad way of doing the election.
About 80% of the people in the US will vote for a candidate with a R or D next to their name regardless of how horrible they are because it is about tribalism, not about the person. And another 10-15% will always vote for the R or D because the other party will produce someone unacceptable to them 100% of the time.
This isn't readily fixable; it is human nature. People are inherently tribalistic, and as old tribes have fallen apart, the importance of political parties as tribes has gone up. The only way to really fix it would be to make people care less about politics and not identify tribally over it. Good luck.
That's why getting out the vote and suppressing the other side's vote is such a driving factor; only a tiny fraction of the population can be convinced. You get far more by just getting more people to show up on your side and getting fewer people to show up on their side. That's why negative campaigning is so common; you try and suppress the vote on the other side and encourage your own voters to turn out because the other person is a horrible person who can't be allowed to be in charge of anything.
This is a very good point
I definitely agree about the need to rejigger district lines into less dyed-in-the-wool forms... but the thing about algorithms is that someone has to write them. Even if Congress could agree to throw countless districts into unpredictable chaos, they'd still likely form some unsightly group of competing special interests that would manage to make a computer weep for the first time in recorded history.
Still, a fascinating read. Politics may depress me anymore, but it's still nice to get a lot of different perspectives.
4309882
It is also worth noting that gerrymandering, while a big problem in some states, is only part of the problem.
Look at Oregon:
Population Map
mapsof.net/uploads/static-maps/Oregon_population_map_2000.png
Districts
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_Oregon%2C_since_2013.tif/lossless-page1-800px-United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_Oregon%2C_since_2013.tif.png
So, you might say "Well, that blue district looks kind of gerrymandered". Ironically, the part that looks super gerrymandered (up in the top-left) is actually not; it follows the county lines, which have existed for well over a century.
Yes, our counties have truly special shapes. I blame using rivers as dividing lines.
Anyway, that blue district was sort of an attempt to create a more Republican-leaning district in the state; the red and yellow districts are Portland and Portland Metro, but that blue one is basically the more rural areas of the coast, plus the Willammette Valley, though it contains some cities as well (Salem, the state capital, for one).
It is, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI), EVEN. That is to say, it doesn't lean towards the Democrats or the Republicans.
This year, Kurt Schrader (the Democratic incumbent house rep) won that district with 53% of the vote. The Republican lost by 10 points. It was the closest election in the state.
That huge orange section (which is basically all of Eastern Oregon, plus the more rural part of Southern Oregon - it is extremely sparsely populated) had 72% of its vote go to the Republican.
The thing is, it is hard to really call it gerrymandered - it is a logical cut across the state, encompassing a region with similar interests. Just like that yellow district is basically dense urban areas, and the red area is suburban exurbs of Portland.
But the Portland yellow bit gets 72% Democrat, and the rural orange bit gets 72% Republican. But it doesn't make sense to try and cut out half of Portland and stick it with half of rural Oregon.
Partisanship is heavily geographically segregated. And while gerrymandering can mess with that, even if you draw natural lines, if you draw a line around a city which is the urban area, then a second line which is the suburban one, then give a big huge space to the rural areas, you're dividing things up logically, but there's a good chance that at best 1 in 3 and possibly 0 of those are going to be competitive.
But it makes sense to divide things up that way.
4309856 don't forget the original purpose of the senate was not represent the people, that's the job of the house. The senate was designed to be the voice of the state governments in congress and they used to have the power to recall senators before the popular election of senators amendment, the 17th I believe.
4309815
The reason for that is it's fair for the smaller states. Since i can't explain this well take a look at this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VIhAN5ULXk
4309761
Um, if you go to Fivethirtyeight, the top headline is "Trump probably did better with Latino voters than Romney did." http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-probably-did-better-with-latino-voters-than-romney-did/
I came here for politics and got math. I have been lied to! D:<
Also, I swear you called for replacing primaries with a completely undemocratic selection process. I don't think that would improve things, unless you're going off a "people are inherently ignorant and shouldn't be voting in the first place" sort of base. :B
Out of this big, long, and very detailed post, I'm going to choose to cherry pick one little point that I wanted to talk about:
You later go on to say that moral issues shouldn't be a federal level anyway (which I mostly agree with). I just wanted to say that compromising your morals is not the same as compromising your positions/stances on things.
4309934
I was looking back at something from a week ago. I stopped visiting 538 a few days after the election because it is kind of a waste of time.
That being said, from the article you linked to:
4309924
It isn't fair at all. It is a shitty system.
The original idea behind the electoral college was to make it so that all the states had a say. But the electoral college also had it so that you voted for electors, who voted for president - the people didn't vote for the president.
Additionally, the present system doesn't actually really benefit smaller states. While it may appear to do so on the surface, in reality, it creates a bizarre system where what really matters are the swing states and nothing else. In fact, it is possible to win simply by winning California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, and New Jersey. 11 states, 270 electoral votes. Every other state can go suck an egg.
While yes, it may give smaller states a disproportionate amount of EVs, IRL, it doesn't necessarily advantage them, and indeed, may lead to them getting ignored in favor of states that actually matter (i.e. have a lot of electoral votes). If you lose Florida, winning New Hampshire doesn't really do much for you.
It is a terribly designed system. It should be done away with and the president should simply be elected via direct popular vote.
4309946
Direct democracy is horrible, which is why the Founding Fathers did their best to keep away from that. Representational government exists for the purpose of keeping the fiddly bits away from the people, who really lack the ability to understand these things on any sort of sophisticated level. Most people have zero understanding of 90% of what the government does.
Having the parties decide on who the nominees are makes sense because they're the people who know who is and is not qualified to do these things. If a party nominates people no one will vote for, the party will quickly die, so they have a strong incentive to nominate qualified nominees who the public will support.
4309924
4309967
The electoral college was not instituted to give small states more power; it was instituted to give slave states more power:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/five-myths-about-the-electoral-college/2012/11/02/2d45c526-1f85-11e2-afca-58c2f5789c5d_story.html
4309972
It just seems to me like the easiest way to nominate someone the people will vote for is to have them vote for who to nominate. <.<
If the parties got to choose their own candidates, you would 100% certainly not get moderates in there. What they both would agree on however is big government and getting the biggest slice of the pie for themselves. IE it would run more like the top leadership in congress.
You would have someone like Ryan running on the republican side.
You would have someone like Nancy Pelosi running for the democrats.
Having the people choose the candidates allows for a breath of fresh air when the party stops representing the people in the party. It also means that the beach can change. The "republican" voters Trump got were different from the "republican" voters Ryan would have had supporting him.
4309946 Fimfiction: Come for the politics, stay for the math!
It's a trade-off. If you let people vote in primaries, that will drive the parties farther apart, create logjams in Congress, and sometimes elect extremist candidates like Sanders or Trump. Perhaps there's some elaborate voting mechanism that could avoid that.
Remember the parties can pick their own candidates any time. Primaries aren't a constitutional right of the people; it's just a thing parties do to excite the voters
and entertain them with a gladatorial Battle Royale between their candidates. I would say instead that having only 2 parties, or having strict rules about who can get on the ballot, is the undemocratic aspect. Heck, let anybody on the ballot. We've got computer voting. The ballot could have a million names on it and a search bar.4309981 I don't think you're following my logic. I'm thinking more of elections for Congress than for President. The presidential primary isn't the thing that drives the parties apart; it's all the little primaries where red areas and blue areas let extremists into Congress.
This is why I'm a Monarchist. You need an impartial voice.
4309802 You may be interested in Arrow's impossibility theorem. But I caution that, while it's important to understand these theoretical constraints, it's irrelevant to bring them up in a discussion about large, fixable problems with broken systems. It's like two mechanics are arguing about why an engine has lost its power and how to fix it, and a third says, "Well, you know it can never go faster than the speed of light anyway!"
4309781 There are a lot of one-issue voters. I don't think most Democrats are even aware of which of their stances drive away the most voters. They keep talking about racism, but gun rights and abortion were the big issues with Hillary here in Pennsylvania. Take a more moderate stance on either of those, and some of those one-issue voters would have switched, or at least stayed home. Catholics, for example, are about evenly divided between Republican and Democrat voters, even though they favor the Democrat platform on most issues. That's largely because of abortion. I base this not on polls, but on having talked to Catholics.
4309767 So are you going to start calling George Washington our fourth president? It's either one view or the other. You can't mix and match.
4310020
You can have primaries that are non-shitty really, really easily. I mean, hell, just using an open instant runoff in the primaries, then running the top 2 candidates in the general would fix the bulk of the problem right then and there. In district's like TD's aforementioned
4309915 Portland & Rural Oregon, it'd mean the generals would be between likely two democrats in Portland & 2 Republicans in Rural Oregon, but that's actually better because now the bulk of your electorate is actively in play in the general, instead of 'You autowin by having a D or R next to your name' like it is now.
The EC definitely needs to go. Just California, NY, and Texas alone contain 85 million people - about 25% of the population in this country - and none of their votes matter for President. Every hard red or hard blue state is the same way. It's utter bollocks, and the entire purpose of the EC is to stop someone like Trump getting power; instead, it's enabled it, which would be delightfully ironic were it not, for people like me, so genuinely frightening that a man like Mike Pence is now going to hold that much power.
4309798
That's what compromise is. That scenario doesn't result in the candidate of C's choice; it results in the candidate from A or B that compromises the most with C.
I want to say that the candidate chosen will be e.g., 2/3 A's policies and 1/3 C's policies, but the result depends on the dynamics, the speed at which parties can change their candidates or platforms. If A and B each have a candidate that bends to C on 1/3 of the issues, each of them then have an incentive to bend a little more, because 3/5 A and 2/5 C is still better for A than 3/5 B and 2/5 C. But at some point, it will no longer be advantageous to compromise with C.
You're claiming that B can rationally choose a candidate who agrees with C more than with B. Suppose there are 2 points of view on each issue, and the parties' positions are maximally anti-correlated. In a 2-party system, it would be possible for them to take opposite positions on every issue, but in a 3-party system, any 2 parties should have opposite positions on about 2/3 of the issues (the maximal possible if maximum correlation between any 2 parties is minimized).
If B agrees with C on 1/3 of issues, what is the point where B's compromise candidate X agrees with B and C equally? It's where X agrees with B on 2/3 of the issues and with C on 2/3 of the issues (1/3 are shared, and the remaining 2/3 divided equally between B and C). X disagrees with A on all of the issues that B and C agree on. On the other issues, X agrees with A half the time. So X agrees with A on 1/3 of issues.
At this point, however, B could instead run a candidate who compromises with A on one-half of the issues on which B and A disagree. That would also result in a candidate who's 2/3 B, and that candidate would easily win the election.
So your hypothesized situation in which the winning candidate mostly agrees with C can't happen. Before that happened, the two big parties would compromise with each other instead of with the little party--unless one of the parties already has a big overlap with C, in which case it doesn't require as large a compromise. My intuition is that if you work out the math for all cases, you'll still find there's no case in which either A or B's candidate is mostly C. Remember that the situation is symmetric with respect to C, and that if you could really win elections by being the smaller party, everybody would try to become the smaller party.
4309859
Why would it make more sense? "They should both be the same" isn't a reason.
Have you got studies to back that up, or are you just making those numbers up?
4309995
When I talk about the evils of primaries, I'm talking about Congressional elections, not the Presidential election. It's because of primaries in Congressional elections that a lot of the people currently in power in the parties are extremists and wouldn't pick moderates.
4309960
This is an important point!
Suppose that they aren't the same thing. Even so, using the word "compromise" for both means the word has the connotations of both. It compromises "compromise". You can't use it in the phrase "compromise your morals" 70% of the time, and then expect people to read "compromise our position" without reading that negative moral connotation into it. Heck, the phrase "compromise our position" is often used in a military context, in which case it means not to compromise, but to undermine your position.
But are they really different things? I claim not. Take any situation in politics where someone talks about "compromising our position." Say they're talking about the minimum wage, and compromising on a lower minimum wage than they want. Some other politician can just as easily talk about that same compromise as "compromising our morals." The two phrases are used to describe the same situations. They have the same objective meaning, but very different subjective meanings. You pick which one to use depending on whether you want to imply the compromise is beneficial or evil.
4309761
You're as wrong as the pollsters, and for the same reason: different people vote in different elections. You can label people choosing not to vote as "voter suppression", it's nice and scary.
Thing is though, a lot of people didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, media or not. Calling it "voter suppression" like the Republicans successfully orchestrated something is preposterous. The Republicans got destroyed in the primaries and haven't recovered. It's Trump's party that happens to be called "Republicans".
The truth is, Democrats lost voters in the primaries too, and their party is just as destroyed. You just refused to see it until the results came in. You should label it responsibly.
"voter suppression". pfft. As if every person who registered one party or another actually votes that way (or at all) in the general election.
4309780
My issue with Grey is he harps on "anti-democratic" practices in US politics but utterly fails to examine the EU's own issues. He's rather insistent on his "mathematical" 50%+ is true democratic values despite the many historical issues with majority rule. A typical schoolteacher: can't be satisfied in educating and has to add his own persuasion to teach his worldview (and only his worldview) on top of it.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Other posters have talked about how gerrymandering is a geographical problem as well both due to the way the land is shaped (rivers, etc) and how people with similar views seem to group together naturally.
... Grey is smart enough to have researched this. Why wasn't it covered? (His agenda is more important)
4310060
Stated another way, this is the exact reason the EC works: So one pluralistic element of the population (city-dwellers for instance) can't permanently hold sway on the election of the highest office in the country. Swing states change as the country changes.
The thing I personally like most about the EC is that it produces a definitive outcome most of the time. It's much more common for candidates to win by a lot of electoral votes than a little. Pretty hard to argue with that when it comes to who holds power for the next period.
Gosh. People are bemoaning the fact that the guy who got less votes getting to be President is a failure of democracy. Imagine that.
One, it doesn't. "The base" in a political context is an ideologically agnostic term; it means "those demographics that are, as a group, statistically very reliable voters for our political coalition" and that's it. It doesn't give a damn what the ideological bent of those demographics are.
Two, even if it did mean that... so what? You continually use "extremist" as some sort of slur, as if holding extreme views is somehow politically illegitimate. That doesn't seem right. Leaving aside the fact that "extreme" is a completely relative term, the fact that a viewpoint is extreme has no bearing whatsoever on whether it is correct or not.
Yeah, this one is legit.
Clinton did about as well among black people as any Democrat in the modern era ever has. A five percent wobble when you've maxed that out is to be expected.
Trump won for a lot of reasons that have nothing at all do with whether his positions were ideologically extreme or not. Moreover, I have not seen a single person arguing that because white nationalism can win an election, other kinds of formally unacceptable platforms that don't resemble it at all can win as well.
Why are these political moderates you speak of not a "special interest" group? After all, according to your formulation they're standing home because their interests aren't being catered to. Why does doing nothing more special than having political views which are located roughly in the middle of the ideological spectrum of the day grant them the imprimatur of legitimacy?
Moreover, you also complain about putting more "indifferent" or "ill-informed" voters into the voting pool, with the presumption that this will make things worse, not better. People who are sitting out elections are by definition one of the two.
... 2004 was a base election, dude. Bush didn't win by tacking to the center; his platform only seems centrist because the political landscape has changed in the past twelve years. It's just that the base-turnout strategy of the Bush team was focused on religious fundamentalists rather than on racists.
Race and gender issues are worker's issues if you're a worker who is not white and also a man.
This is just flat-out wrong.
Let's assume that the exit polls are correct. They may not be. They may be very wrong. This election was a polling failure on many levels, and while exit polls are generally more accurate than other polls because you know you're getting people who have actually voting on account of how you just saw them come out the polling place with a sticker on, there's still a lot of room for error there and maybe we shouldn't jump to conclusions. I notice a lot of your cites in this post are from snap election post-mortems; a lot of those numbers have already started changing. But let's take them as accurate for the sake of this argument.
Let's also assume that you're "the party of workers" by getting workers to vote for you. I'm not entirely on board with that assumption, but let's also assume that.
How are we defining workers here? Are we using income? Usually people whose income is comparatively low but are in fact working are considered part of the working class. Is it people who make less than 50k a year? Well, Democrats won those voters.
But 50k is median household income, not median personal income. That's closer to 30k. Maybe you need to be making under that in order to truly be a worker!
... nope, Democrats won those voters too.
Now, you might say "Democrats margin there is far slimmer than it should be for a party that considers itself worker-friendly." There's something to that... but your contention is that the Republicans have become "the party of workers." But those workers seem quite repelled by the Republicans, as many of those workers are more compelled to vote "neither" before they'll vote for a Republican; Democrats are getting above 50% in those demos, whereas Republicans struggle to crack 40%. There's a big gap there.
People, of course, vote for many different reasons, not just on their pocketbooks or socioeconomic status. But the contention that the Republicans are the party of workers seems unsupported by the actual voting practices of workers. You could, of course, argue that the Republicans policies are far, far better for workers, it's just that workers won't vote for them for other reasons. (I think you'd be wrong, but you could do that.) But as it stands now workers do not like the Republican party very much at all.
Applying game theory to politics is not always going to produce good data.
We're also talking about things like invidious discrimination, whether the cops can murder you in the street without consequence, whether you'll be allowed to exercise the franchise or not, and whether or not you'll be forced to bear the children of your rapist. Those are a wee bit more serious than minimum wage and tax brackets.
Hell, minimum wage and tax brackets are more serious than minimum wage and tax brackets, because economic policy is composed of many interlocking pieces and if you're attempting to implement policy that brings widespread prosperity, a goal that is, you know, of some importance, you need to get as many of those interlocking pieces right as possible. "Should we increase the minimum wage by 30% or merely 15%" doesn't sound like a salient moral issue until you realize that getting that number wrong might result in real people somewhere losing their jobs and/or not making enough to live on, and maybe you don't want to get something that important wrong.
Except that candidates don't have total individual control over their platforms. They have a lot of control, but those platforms are the result of coalition politics, which you seem to strongly endorse.
It really isn't. People haven't, ever, been motivated to share power. That's never been how democracy has worked. Not here. Not in any other country that's ever tried it as a political system. Even the sainted Founders (who I wish people would stop idolizing but that seems unlikely) after setting up their vaunted system of checks and balances instantly fell into vicious, deadly political infighting among each other, as you note. That happened here. It happened in Great Britain. It happens in every other democracy.
The reason democracy is a big deal isn't because it motivates people to share power. Indeed, most democracies are explicitly set up to deny power-sharing; whatever political coalition can assemble a majority in their legislative chamber (most countries only have the one) gets to do whatever the heck it wants.
The reason democracy is a big deal is because it provides a mechanism and social norms for the peaceful transition to another government when the current one loses legitimacy, and provides a commonly-agreed upon method (elections) for measuring that legitimacy.
That's huge. That's a big deal. Autocratic forms of government are capable of producing "good governance" to a greater or lesser extent; they often don't but they can. There have been terrifyingly effective Kings and Emperors and dictators and oligarchies and juntas, some of which did some actual good works for the polities they ruled.
But what they're shit at is transferring power peacefully. Most of them don't include any kind of mechanism for that at all. Those that do make some attempts to include those mechanisms often see them become degenerate and captured. (It was very rare that there'd be a vote to see who'd be Party Chairman in the USSR that hadn't already been pre-determined, usually at gunpoint.) If a King has lost legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects, well, tough shit; your options range from bad (palace coups) to worse (long, bloody uprising) to wishful thinking (hoping he'll die in his sleep and his son will do a better job.) This has, historically, been a major cause of a lot of bloodletting; it is hard to build a stable, prosperous nation-state when it needs to have a civil war of some sort in order to effect a change in the national policy.
Democracy is really really great at transferring power peacefully, though. It might transfer that power into the hands of complete incompetents. But it can just as easily transfer that power back out, assuming it doesn't enter the failure state of "transfers power into the hands of people who abolish democracy."
That's its great strength. Not motivating people to share power. It's really bad at that.
Other democracies also function in this way, except that they remove the "some power to block them from doing anything." Canada and the UK aren't even proportional representation systems; they're FPTP, as we are, only if you win, you actually get to govern.
Our political failures, such as they are, might in fact be cultural as opposed to pure institutional failures.
Only nominally.
Proportional representation leads to more than two parties in the strictly formal sense.
What it doesn't do, however, is lead to more than two coalitions. You still need to assemble a governing majority, which requires dealmaking and compromise to get to 50+1%. Smaller political parties understand this, which means they usually align themselves broadly along one ideological axis or the other, which they then pledge to join with post-election.
The major difference between proportional representation systems and FPTP systems is that in the former, the coalition mostly forms after the election. In the latter, the coalition mostly forms before the election.
But it still forms, and there's still usually only two of'em.
You elide the process by which a vendor is chosen to go forth completely here. You do address it later on, but in a way that implies its an illegitimate means of coalition-building.
Your ice-cream vendor analogy is illustrative and effective, but it assumes vendors in a vacuum. It doesn't address the process by which what sort of vendors exist is decided.
Compromise at the level of the assembly absolutely occurs when there are two parties. It simply occurs on an intra-party basis. This is especially true in the US, where the Senate is basically unwhippable and the House is only marginally whippable. Why is this a less legitimate method of obtaining compromise than doing it on an inter-party basis?
All candidates that had to negotiate a contested primary are compromise candidates. The compromise is intra-party rather than inter-party.
This sort of assumes there isn't, you know, a genuine ideological rift in the country, and also that political coalitions that are widely separated from each other (a fact that's been the case in every democracy ever) is somehow abnormal.
This doesn't just stretch the analogy, it breaks it.
The company absolutely gets to choose the vendors. All of the stockholders and stakeholders in the company have a vote, and they pick who the vendor is. People who aren't in the company do not, usually, get to be involved in that.
Assumes "best for the company" automatically and always means "most customers."
... you don't?
Reliably re-elected representatives are in many ways very good for political parties. Legislating, contrary to popular belief, isn't something any idiot off the street can do. It takes time to learn and do well. People who have been in office for a long time generally learn a lot about working the system and generally deploy that knowledge to the benefit of their political party.
Also, most politicians hate running tight campaigns. It's soul-sucking work. They dodge it whenever possible.
This is a good idea but is currently unconstitutional, and also has the problem that it concentrates power in whoever is creating the algorithm.
... they do that now! Using primaries!
Both Eugene and Joseph McCarthy were never a nominee for President, and the heydey of their political careers occurred in the years before primaries were widespread. You are correct that primaries started being introduced around the turn of the 20th century; but they were uncommon until the 70s, especially ones for President.
I also reject the idea that either of them, or George McGovern, were "extreme" even by your own definitions. Joseph McCarthy was well within the political mainstream of his time, as was George McGovern, as was Eugene McCarthy.
The reason to be in favor of proportional representation is because it is far less likely to produce Condorcet failures. Minorities and radicals currently have strong voices within both political coalitions; its just that those fights take place in the form of intra-party struggle.
This assumes that that's the only variable changing.
The mass movement of people to big cities actually produces fairly stunning Condorcet failures on a pretty regular basis because it allows districts to be drawn that cram a ton of voters for one party into a handful of districts. It is actually, ironically, better now than it used to be; back before districts had to be roughly uniform in population (a recent innovation) you used to have shit like how Texas used to do things.
Digression:
Here's a neat series of maps of how Texas has historically drawn congressional districts. Click on the most recent one. You'll notice there are a ton of districts packed into very small areas around Dallas and Houston. Those cities aren't shown on the maps but it's pretty easy to tell where they're at. (You'll also notice a lot of districts trying to cuddle up to the Houston suburbs, elongating their shapes oddly. There's a reason for that too, which I won't go into.)
That makes sense, right? Houston and Dallas have a ton of people, so of course they'll have a lot of districts.
Not always the case. Click on any post-Depression, pre-1966 maps there. You'll notice, suddenly, that Harris County only has the one congressional district in it. That isn't because Houston had a lot less people in it compared to the rest of the state then. It's because the Texas lege had taken (unconstitutional) steps to keep the political power of city dwellers as minimal as possible. The political institutions of Texas at that time didn't like the big cities. So they decided to keep them as powerless as possible.
Trumps are inevitable in any democracy. Andy Jackson was basically Trump. So was Woodrow Wilson. A handful of others. The main distinction between Trump and previous Presidents in his mold is that Trump is massively crude. But that's more an aesthetic difference than anything else.
A Constitutional convention is more likely than you think, but the odds of it having good results is... not good.
(The Republican Party currently controls almost enough state legislatures to unilaterally call one. The results of such a convention would probably resemble YA dystopian fiction more than they would radical democratic notions.)
Which is one of the many reasons to take the exit polls with a GIANT grain of salt.
People have done post-election polling on latinos that, if I'm recalling right, looks more like the pre-election one than the exit polls do.
And the reason for this might be simple; if you want to know what latinos are doing, the best way to do that is to ask tons and tons of latino people and only latino people what they're doing. This will produce a fairly accurate picture!
What will get you a less accurate picture is doing exit polling that might be off because you haven't picked a representative sample of precincts (perhaps your Florida polling is hauling in too many wealthy Cuban-Americans in certain Miami-Dade precincts, for example) and then teasing the latino data out of all of that.
Why are the states a more legitimate level for moral policymaking than the federal level or the local level?
Historically speaking, this has resulted in an awful lot of states instituting terror regimes against significant parts of their populace, regimes that would likely still exist to this day without massive and ongoing federal intervention.
"Letting people in other states live the way they want to" sounds great until you confront the fact that for some people "live the way they want to" means "I'm allowed to be a fully equally member of society" and for other people "live the way they want to" means "I am allowed to reduce those who do not meet my standards to second-class citizens and deploy the power of the law against them to that end."
We, in fact, bother the Amish an awful lot. They're forced to adhere to many, many laws they would rather not, because they're still citizens of the State of Pennsylvania and the United States of America and bound by its authority.
What's commonly regarded as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy was marked by anti-elitism and the drawing of as many members of Athenian society into democratic participation as possible, tho.
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I'm really bad at following logic, if you weren't aware. :B Can't stand the stuff.