–by Sebastian
About two years ago, I bought a Honda Civic. After I purchased the car, I would see other people driving Honda Civics and other Honda cars, and I would have a vaguely happy feeling about them. I had never felt that way before about Hondas and Honda Civics, so it was odd. But I had joined the tribe, and it made me feel good to identify with the tribe, and see other people who were in it.
The comments to Jacob's post below reminded me of an issue that has bothered me for a while. Why is it that there are so many states where one side or the other are very rarely in play?
I have some very tentative thoughts about the issue:
Regarding Jacob's post, his flowchart is unnecessarily complicated for a vast number of voters. For them the flowchart is: Election Day——> Vote for the candidates from the party that you almost always vote for. Which leads to my first tentative proposition for understanding voting (in the US).
A) There are a large number of voters for whom political affiliation acts in a way that to an outsider seems tribal–they vote for the candidate with their political affiliation almost all the time, and barring enormous departures from their understanding of the norm, usually in demonstrated character–not in political belief or action–they will vote a candidate with that political affiliation. From the beginning of their political life to the end, they pretty much stick with the political party they were raised with.
B) Possibly related to A, there are also a large number of voters who will tend to vote like A) but exactly once in their lives will change their affiliation. If you could track their voting across their entire lives you would see very systematic voting for one party, a shift, and then very systematic voting for the other party.
For voters in A and B, votes do not have to go through Jacob's rubric.
Another very strong factor is:
C) Incumbency. If you really want to know which way a political race is likely to turn out, the very most important factor is whether or not there is an incumbent. If there is an incumbent, that candidate is MUCH more likely to win. See for example here [from opensecrets]:
You can see here that for the House, the reelection rate has only dropped below 90% once in the last 30 years. And even in recession years, since '64 it hasn't dropped below 85%.
The Senate isn't nearly as safe, but looking at the chart is still seems remarkably safe. Most of the elections are a very safe 85% or better (some reaching as high as the high ninties). Most of the less safe ones are the very high seventies. Only three elections show anything like competitive chances, and all of those were more than thirty years ago.
So for a vast number of races a comination of "Does your party have a candidate?" and "Does this political race have an incumbent?" answers the question of "Who are you voting for?".
Jacob's analysis only applies to the second question, and I suspect only in extreme cases of the economy sucking.
Now naturally, we tend to think that there are lots of good reasons why our preferred political party gets and keeps its voters throughout their entire lives. And we of course tend to think that there are lots of good reasons why our preferred political incumbent gets and keep votes. But if we are honest with ourselves, isn't there ever a nagging suspicion about that? After all, the other party seems to keep its voters throughout their entire lives in a very similar pattern. And incumbents I don't like seem to get reelected at almost exactly the same frequency as incumbents I do like.
This political season has been a profoundly disappointing one for me. I've been disenchanted (and that is putting it mildly) with the political affiliation I formed in my youth for quite some time now. And while voting has often felt like a choice between lesser evils, this year seemed even more so. Given almost any chance, I would have voted against Brown, but Republicans but up Whitman who was deeply ridiculous (note to people who think that just spending enough money will win a race against a strong opponent: it doesn't even work against a fairly weak opponent if you're awful). And by many accounts a paper bag could have beaten Reid, but Republican Tea Partiers put up Angle.
Is this a result of A, B, and C above? I'm not sure. But I am sure that analyzing US elections without keeping A, B, and C firmly in your mind, isn't going to be useful.
“(note to people who think that just spending enough money will win a race against a strong opponent: it doesn’t even work against a fairly weak opponent if you’re awful)”
It’s hard to assess the validity of this statement. What do you mean by strong? A strong opponent might be strong, in part, due to his campaign funding. Can you link to something supporting your assertions? I read David Brooks’s recent column about this topic, but if you have other data I’d be interested.
Meg Whitman outspending Brown and losing is not dispositive of the power of campaign funding.
Lastly, as someone clever on the internet (and I am darned if I can remember where I read this) pointed out, what matters is not only whether campaign funding wins elections, but also whether politicians believe it. If politicians believe campaign funding wins elections, regardless of the truth they will debase themselves for donors.
I know that is not the main thrust of your post, but I detected an anti-anti Citizens United sentiment and wanted to clarify it.
My best friend has a polisci phd and I’ll see if I can prod him to say something useful which I will relay here.
I think that Seb is mostly right. I don’t think his analysis conflicts with Jacob’s. That once in a life time party switch could be motivated by economics.
The depressing thing for me is the extent to which we are hostage to ignorance. There are far far toomany voters who are unifomred or misinformed about basic facts, the sort of facts for which there is no reason to be in dispute. Which President signed TARP into law? Which administration is responsible for the deficit? And so on. So to make a more complete picture of how elections are determined in the US I think Seb’s flowchart needs to be combined with jacob’s plus ignorance and the ability to minipulate ignorance needs to be factored in somehow.
I pretty much agree. For my purposes the national Democratic party is a pretty lousy tribe, my local Democratic party eve more so. As a governing party, I prefer them to the overwhelmingly likely alternative, most of the time. But I’m an outlier.
The question then becomes why do people vote (or not) when they do (or don’t). I don’t believe that what happened this year was that a lot of people who voted Democratic before voted Republican instead; it’s that a lot of people who voted Democratic before didn’t vote this time, and a lot of people who vote Republican but don’t vote often did vote this time. That’s what we need to explain, and by “we” I mean “people who are smarter than I am, but not so smart that they can’t help me understand it.”
I think what Whitman demonstrated is that spending pots of money, when you are an unknown, can get you enough name recognition to get thru a primary. Which she did.
And then she proceeded demonstrated that, once people feel like they know you, you have to have something to say. And what her spending more pots of money in the general election campaign did was demonstrate things about her that cause a lot of people who originally expected to vote for her to vote against her.
Moral of the story: there is a point where more spending becomes counter-productive. Especially if you don’t have anything positive to say about what you stand for (as opposed to what is wrong with your opponent).
Julian: If politicians believe campaign funding wins elections, regardless of the truth they will debase themselves for donors.
Oh, it’s worse than that. They can just pretend that they believe that campaign funding wins elections as cover for soliciting bribes which they will directly and personally benefit from. The pretense that campaign funds are anything but personal slush funds is part of the problem here.
And yes, I think elections are really a pretty simple mixture of base-turnout exercises and a small percentage of switching voters. The economy is the most important factor in determining both of those, as a bad economy is dispiriting for supporters of the incumbent party and liable to produce a few switchers, while providing validation for opponents of the incumbent party. When the economy is good, supporters of the incumbent feel validated and energized, and the opponents are the dispirited ones and a few of them switch.
One of the advantages of being a dirty foreigner is that I don’t have nearly as strong an identification with the Democrats as a lot of Americans seem to (although I was a big fan of Bill Clinton). So when they disappoint, I’m not wounded to the heart; it’s what they do.
The effect of the Labour Party’s betrayal on Iraq was much more significant. I think if I had the same degree of lifelong attachment to the Democratic Party I think I’d see the last 2 years as a similar betrayal. You work and work to get Democrat control of the Presidency and Congress, and they pass up the opportunity to do anything significant with it.
But like I say, if the economy was better it wouldn’t matter.
1- Our first-past-the-pole, district driven voting rules create conditions for a system dominated by two parties that position themselves as binary opposites around some central political divide.
2- Tribalism predominates within x iterations with some small defections based on whatever expedient fluctuations need be made in what constitutes that central divide, changes in circumstances, etc.
3- Realizing 1 and 2 the parties aim at the swing voters who notice this attention and feel superior.
4- Apply Jacob’s statement for all swing voters.
5- Discard all voices who disagree with the paradigms reflected in the defining central divide. They are noise.
“Oh, it’s worse than that. They can just pretend that they believe that campaign funding wins elections as cover for soliciting bribes which they will directly and personally benefit from.”
Or incumbents could pretend to believe that campaign funding wins elections, as cover for deny their challengers the threshold funding necessary to get their message out. Since they can get their bribes through other routes that are less scrutinized, such as getting relatives no-work jobs with regulated corporations.
I can’t speak for “people”, but only for myself. I have never voted for a Republican. That makes me pretty “tribal”, I suppose.
But there’s an alternative explanation: the other “tribe” has never offered me, in particular, a candidate who was less objectionable than the Democrat in the same race. I have voted for Dems I did not especially like, but it was because the competing Republican was, in every case, worse.
The closest I ever came to bucking “my tribe” was a race for governor here in MA long ago, in which a dour conservative Dem named John Silber was running against a puckish patrician Republican named Bill Weld. Had I been eligible to vote in that one, I might well have voted for the Republican like the majority of “tribal” MA voters did.
I don’t vote for Democrats because I agree with them. I vote for Democrats because they agree with me. Not completely, not on everything, but more than any Republican who ever sought my particular vote ever has.
Maybe if I lived in a different state, or in a different time, I’d be less vulnerable to suspicions of tribalism. But I honestly cannot think of any Congressional race this year in which I could have voted for a Republican. Odious as some of the Dems may have been, I cannot think of one whose Republican opponent was not worse.
–TP
“Odious as some of the Dems may have been, I cannot think of one whose Republican opponent was not worse.”
Though I see that you are limiting it to races you could have voted for, tribal voting almost certainly engineered the outcome of the Florida vote this year, ensuring a much more conservative win than would have been likely otherwise in the Crist/Rubio/Meeks race.
Also, it seems likely that the tribalism of the near one-party states may lead to a self-perpetuating case of strong candidates from the other side either joining the party, or going to another state (or even more likely, not entering politics). This can even be partially engineered by powerful incumbents, see Reid’s maneuvering to get Angle as his opponent.
Lieberman belies your analysis. He was an incumbent who lost the primary, ran as an independent and got 70% of Republican voters. So he counts in your chart but for the exact opposite reason.
Sebastian, as I have previously identified myself as a “congenital Democrat” I suppose I fall into your “tribal” category, although all my experience as a political junkie reinforces my grandmother’s advice that “the Republicans are only for themselves.”
I do take heart from the California results, as both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina spent personal fortunes and lost. How Carly thought that her experience as a business leader at HP was a positive qualification I’ll never understand.
It’s trite to say that democracy is the worst system possible except for all the others. I am worried, though, about the current trend of undisclosed, unlimited spending. Poison has been poured into our ears for a long time now. My own view is that the cure is full disclosure, with criminal penalties to enforce it. That will probably never happen, alas.
What motivated voters this year?
I think this has something to do with it.
From DaveC’s link:
But now, once again, things have changed. For the first time in memory, the suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington.
The guy’s got an interesting take on things, but “under conscious and sustained attack” appears to consist of two things:
1. Mass transit
2. Lower greenhouse gas emissions
He also seems to have a morbid fear of being forced, somehow, to live in a small house.
If that’s what folks are digging their heels in about, we’re screwed.
Not that I doubt it’s what they’re digging their heels in about, I’d find that totally believable.
But if that’s where folks are drawing their line in the sand, there is no freaking way we are ever going to deal with the stuff – the much, much more critical stuff – that really does pose a danger to the robustness of our nation, economically and in every other way.
I think it’s a bit ironic, that he has a picture of Los Angeles on his masthead. LA is mostly suburban.
Its downtown is inhabited by a financial district where only the wealthy can afford to live.
Why can’t he just say, the place where, primarily white-middle class people live, (and this includes the whites who are working-poor, but think they are middle-class).
@ Tony P
I had a real problem with the Silber/Weld election. I knew of Weld as a transitional GOBP, between the Saltonstalls, Volpes and Sargents with whom I grew up, and the Reagan/Bush/Atwater leading to Gingrich crowd. On the other hand, i was personally acquainted with Silber – I am a Boston U alum, from before his tenure, and I find “dour” is about the nicest thing one could say about him. He was one nasty-ass piece of work, hateful and anti-semitic.
Before that, and before your time. there was the Ed King – “Reagan’s favorite Democrat” – interregnum. Liberals wanted to punish Mike Dukakis in the primary (he got caught in a budget squeeze), so gave Cambridge Mayor Barbara Ackermann 10% of the primary vote. King finished first, with a plurality. The liberals, Dukakis+Ackermann, had a majority, but King got the most votes. It was awful.
THAT’s the election that taught the lesson: firebaggers (or their teabag cousins) can only destroy, they cannot build or support.
You’ll notice the “bottom up” teabaggers mostly lost; the ones who won were already nominated, for the most part, when Palinpalooza anointed them (cf. Rubio).
@ Tom M
I think Lieberman makes Sebastian’s point exactly. In your own words, He was an incumbent…
From DaveC’s link:
“Whenever possible, the Clintons expressed empathy with suburban and small-town voters. In contrast, the Obama administration seems almost willfully city-centric. Few top appointees have come from either red states or suburbs; the top echelons of the administration draw almost completely on big city urbanites—most notably from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They sometimes don’t even seem to understand why people move to suburbs.”
I wonder if he considers Inglewood or Compton or Gardena…the suburbs?
Again, this is a case where terms are distorted to hide tribal/racial differences.
I think Joel Kotkin is a bit dishonest about who he thinks lives in “real” suburbia.” He cherry picks his “multi-racial” suburbs…and they are not as new as he thinks. Many suburbs experienced white-flight, much like the urban centers, however as soon as most of the white folks left, those suburbs were then understood to be “urban”. Compton, being the most infamous.
Some books are reviewed, conserning the “suburban” ideal:
Suburbia Reconsidered: Race,Politics, and Property in the Twentieth Century
Books reviewed:
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African Americans in Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Andrew Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
I’m either not as tribal as many of you, or perhaps I’ve simply done the “switch once” thing.
I started out as a Republican, sort of. I grew up in a Republican household (pictures of Ronnie, etc). I had (and still have) some libertarian inclinations, though my Ayn Rand phase came and went pretty quickly.
Once I was able to vote, I made an effort to vote 3rd party when possible. Thus, libertarian and green votes for President in 1996 and 2000 respectively (I knew in both instances that CT was solid for the Dems). Downballot I’d typically pick some of this, some of that.
I had some general beliefs about the major parties:
Republicans: fiscally conservative (perhaps to the point of being overly harsh at times), conservative on foreign policy (no silly global cop/save the world nonsense), business-oriented, socially conservative (a turnoff, but the New England versions weren’t hardcore on that).
Democrats: want to help the poor and thus big spenders, socially more liberal. Well-intentioned, perhaps, but bumbling. Applicable to foreign policy as well (see: Bosnia/Kosovo). I loathed Clinton personally (his voice was the main issue – to me it’s smarmy as hell), but did respect his ability to compromise with the GOP and produce (modest) surplusses.
Then came the “War on Terror,” tax cuts coupled with spending increases and the invasion of Iraq (including the blatantly obvious near total lack of an occupation/reconstruction plan) Then revelations about torture. Iraq was the biggest deal for me: it was obvious they wanted war, they didn’t really care about the evidence supporting their casus belli except its utility in getting their war, and they were breathtakingly ignorant and arrogant about what was likely to happen after our military crushed the pitiful remains of Saddam’s.
I watched it in stunned disbelief at first, which turned more and more to anger. That disbelief doubled when Bush was reelected. How could we fail to fire that administration, I thought? I noticed the tactics employed by the GOP in the campaign and, for the first time, cared about their toxic propoganda. I also had started to notice just how socially reactionary the party had become. I noticed how their supposed concern about spending did not extend to large chunks of the budget.
Thus the GOP in its current form is dead to me. The things I thought were plusses aren’t. The things I thought were negatives remain, and are worse than I thought.
Voting GOP in a national-level election is almost inconceivable (shut up Inigo) to me at this point. Local is different, but even then I need a really compelling reason. CT’s budgetary situation is dire enough that I did, in fact, vote Republican for state rep & state senate this year. Threw one vote to a libertarian (SecState, an office where I think a 3rd party candidate would do a lot of good) and the rest Dems.
Could I switch back? Well, I’m not exactly a huge fan of the Dems, despite being registered D (I want a say in primaries). But the GOP would have to change so significantly on several of its core issues… I just don’t see it. It would be great if they proved me wrong.
But now, once again, things have changed. For the first time in memory, the suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington. [b]Little that the adminstration has pushed—from the Wall Street bailouts[/b] to the proposed “cap and trade” policies—offers much to predominately middle-income oriented suburbanites and instead appears to have worked to alienate them.
FAIL, right off the bat. TARP was a bipartisan policy pushed by the Bush Administration. Yes, Obama supported it too, this is just dishonest and makes me question whether this was written in good faith (as opposed to simple partisan hackery).
And then there are the policies that seem targeted against suburbs. In everything from land use and transportation to “green” energy policy, the Obama administration has been pushing an agenda that seeks to move Americans out of their preferred suburban locales and into the dense, transit-dependent locales they have eschewed for generations.
I like the scare quotes around green here. That said, there could be something to this. I live out in suburbia (perhaps exurbia?). I’m a 1/2 hour drive from work. My town has 3k people in it, and I’ve got nearly 6 acres of land. I’m aware that the green movement thinks our national (and local, probably) policies have overly favored choices that people like me have made. My impression was that they believe this was mistaken and that the incentives should be changed. Even if those incentives were changed, however, I find it difficult to imagine that I or my way of life is “under sustained attack.” You gotta be kidding me.
Yet fundamentally the attack on suburbia has less to do with market trends or the environment than with a deep-seated desire to change the way Americans live.
Oh please. This is nutty.
This.
I think reducing things to being “tribal” elides a lot of important motivations and steps in the decision-making process.
My father worked with Ford’s re-election campaign. We had elephant motifs here and there in the house, and for the majority of my early childhood I had an aging bumper sticker on my dresser with a picture of a dejected-looking cartoon peanut with a fishing pole in the water, with the caption of “Retire Jimmy”. All the ingredients were there for me to become a tribal Republican.
The thing is, by the time I’d left high school it was blatantly obvious to me that the principles underlying the GOP were anathema to me. The Bush years reinforced that lesson in pretty much every imaginable way.
Pick an issue, and the GOP either hates what I represent or is ideologically opposed to things I think are important. I’m sure there’s some proverbial moderate, competent Republican left in some local election somewhere who could conceivably earn my vote, but the fact is that the GOP has never–not once, not ever–given me a candidate I would want to vote for.
And now, with the level of deliberate ignorance and outright mendacity that defines Republican candidates at pretty much every level, there’s just no justification for voting Republican. It’s indefensible at this point.
So I’m a straight-ticket D voter. It may resemble tribalism, but it’s a simple consequence of the fact that the Republican party’s stated and demonstrated agenda is anathema to what I believe to begin with, and has only become more unacceptable as they become more and more untethered from reality.
The Democratic Party is–by and large–politically naive, spineless, and much too far to the right for my preference. But the Republican party is offering nothing as an alternative but ignorance, dishonesty, nihilism, and a sustained attack on my rights and the rights of those I love.
It’s not much of a choice. But it is a choice, and right now it’s the only one we have.
(And no, a third party is not an option, not with the way our system is set up. Rail against that system if you want, try to change it by all means, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that a vote for a third party in a national election is anything other than an irresponsible waste of your franchise that amounts to a vote for the more objectionable candidate of the two major parties.)
…but don’t delude yourself into thinking that a vote for a third party in a national election is anything other than an irresponsible waste of your franchise that amounts to a vote for the more objectionable candidate of the two major parties.
I think that depends on which elections you vote third party. I do it sometimes when I know there’s no chance that the better major-party candidate (D) will lose. I guess technically, you could still call it a vote for the more objectionable candidate, if there is one, but it’s an inconsequential one for the purposes of the election in question. I usually do it to send a message, however small, that I don’t like the constraints of the system.
In local and county elections, I will often vote Republican, knowing the Republicans have no chance of winning, just to (try to) keep the Democrats in line by diminishing their perceived security, however slightly, living in an area long dominated by Democrats at the local level. (This time around I voted Republican for town committe in earnest, and one of them won. There just has to be some opposition to the long-standing good-old-boy network, and nutty Republican ideas don’t apply on a municipal level the way they do on a state or national level.)
Then, of course, there’s always the poisoning of the close Republican primary race, voting in that one instead of the safe (or non-) Democratic primary to set up a more favorable general election. Evil, no?
No, I don’t think it does matter which. I did very specifically say “national” elections, so while I appreciate your examples of municipal elections, they’re not really germane to my point. The larger the pool of the electorate, the greater the degree to which Duverger’s Law affects the outcome.
At the national level, the kind of protest vote you describe is really irresponsible, even if you think it has no chance of affecting the outcome. It doesn’t send any kind of a message–and on the off-chance that someone in power does take notice of the number of “protest” votes, they will read into them whatever message they are already inclined to believe, not the message you intended, since there is no field on the ballot for indicating /why/ you voted a certain way. It does nothing but make you briefly feel better about voting at all, when in actuality it’s about as meaningful and effective as protesting the construction of a bridge by scuffing your shoes on the pavement as you walk across it.
The only chance it actually has of having any effect is if enough people cast “protest” votes in order to cost the favored party the election–at which point you’ve just shot yourself in the foot for the sake of an act of pique. And anything short of actually swaying the election one way or the other is just pissing in the wind.
from the Wall Street bailouts to the proposed “cap and trade” policies
I remember when “cap and trade” was the conservative, market-oriented Republican alternative to Big Government mandates.
What was that, ten years ago? Five years ago?
Good times.
I’m still waiting for someone who will push the good old Overton window in the other direction.
Something like “cap it or we’ll pull your damned license”. Or, “cap it or we’ll build one in **your** backyard”. Or, “cap it or we’ll burn the MF down”.
Now *that* is someone would get my enthusiastic vote. It’s putting a smile on my face just to think about it.
My tribe is very very small indeed, it seems.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll vote for Dems and hope for the best.
At the national level, the kind of protest vote you describe is really irresponsible, even if you think it has no chance of affecting the outcome.
WTF?
Your state is totally safe in an election for the Dems. You vote Green, in an effort to get them enough votes to trigger election fund or somesuch (local laws vary, I imagine). This is irresponsible?
No.
“Then, of course, there’s always the poisoning of the close Republican primary race, voting in that one instead of the safe (or non-) Democratic primary to set up a more favorable general election. Evil, no?”
There are indications that Reid worked to make Angle his opponent. It worked for him personally, but considering that she almost won, was it worth risking that she’d be the Senator instead of one of the more normal (fairly mid-stream) Republicans that have been put up for election in the past.
“I don’t vote for Democrats because I agree with them. I vote for Democrats because they agree with me. Not completely, not on everything, but more than any Republican who ever sought my particular vote ever has.”
I wonder about this though. Not in a “you’re a liar, you don’t know what you’re talking about” kind of way. More in a “How do we perceive things” kind of way. Maybe this is just an artifact from the way I came to severely dislike the Republican Party over the course of the past ten years after being generally aligned with them earlier.
Maybe I’m just identifying personal weaknesses and projecting them. So instead of projecting, initially, let me just catalog my faults.
At times in the past, I have discounted the evils done by what the tribe I identified with. I have done this for various reasons. These reasons include such things as: I thought they were better than the other major alternative on issues important to me, I thought the evils were being done for a good cause, I thought the they were overreacting (for example on security) but that the overreaction was understandable. I empathized with the reasons for making the things I could see were mistakes, and I could see how I could make some of them. The long and the short of it was that I minimized (in my own mind, and sometimes in my arguments) the shortcomings of my side. Conversely, I maximized the shortcomings of the other side. I failed to empathize with the reasons they were making mistakes. I did not give them the benefit of the doubt when they overreacted. I did not give them the same leeway that I gave my tribe.
Now pretty much the torture issue finally broke my affinity with my former side. I couldn’t let the dismissals keep building, I couldn’t ignore it, and I didn’t think the alleged gains were any where near the obvious costs.
Now I understand that we always fight the last war. I don’t really have a political tribe, and I hate to admit how uncomfortable that is. But having gone through that, it is really clear to me that a lot of people, very intelligent people, and still including myself, let tribal associations short circuit things.
There is a humility about human knowledge that I first came across in some C.S. Lewis essay or another, though I think it is attributed to Churchill: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
Is it really likely that the tribe we identify with is right so very often? And that the other major political tribe, with adherents much like us, discounting their side’s problems and over estimating the other’s–is it really so likely that we are almost always right and they almost always wrong?
No, I don’t think it does matter which. I did very specifically say “national” elections, so while I appreciate your examples of municipal elections, they’re not really germane to my point.
Those weren’t intended to address your specific point, thus separate paragraphs not discussing third parties. I should have made that clearer.
Your state is totally safe in an election for the Dems.
That’s what I’m talking about. It happens. Maybe I’m throwing away my vote in such a case, a vote with little meaning, so I’m not sure how it can be “really irresponsible.” Mileage varies, I suppose.
Can you expand on Duverger’s Law and its application to your point, Catsy? I wasn’t previously familiar, and after scanning the the Wikipedia entry, I’m not sure how it applies.
On social issues, Sebastian, I think it is indeed likely that “our tribe” is “right” and the other “wrong” consistently because those tend to be fairly simple yes/no things.
So if you decide the answer is “yes” and one side is consistenly, unswervingly “no” (or vice-versa)… yeah.
On economics, climate change, healthcare wonkery (here I mean debates about the best way to deliever/pay for healthcare to all, not whether it is moral to do so in the first place), and stuff like that I can see your point. And those are issues on which I personally am far more likely to be interested in the “other tribe’s” ideas… when they have any.
Is it really likely that the tribe we identify with is right so very often?
Within the actual spectrum of available political options in 99.9% of the US, I don’t think there’s really all that many opportunities to choose between “right” and “wrong”.
There are opportunities to choose between “I like this better” and “I like this worse”.
Essentially, the option is to choose between a relatively constrained set of what are more or less social norms.
There are occasional exceptions. The debate over slavery, frex. Some folks would say the debate over abortion is one, which prompts me to say I’M ONLY MENTIONING IT AS AN EXAMPLE.
I’d include Iraq in that list. Which prompts me to offer the same caveat.
But in general we argue about whether the top marginal tax rate should be 35% or 39%. Or what marginally larger or smaller mix of incentives the government should offer to encourage folks to get health insurance. Or, like, whether we should build a new high school.
Sometimes there is “truth” and “falsity” at the level of specific points of fact. But the preference for Republican or Democrat representation is generally more a matter of sorta liberalish vs kinda more conservative, rather than a matter of “truth”.
The larger the pool of the electorate, the greater the degree to which Duverger’s Law affects the outcome.
I should also add that, however Duverger’s applies, the largest pool I can be in is that of my state, since we don’t have national elections, really, given the number of states that are winner-take-all in the Electoral College. (Not that I didn’t think you already knew that, but…)
To expand on my point about discounting problems on our side and hyping the other sides:
Take the targeted assassination of US citizens issue. If Bush had defended that policy in court, hidden behind the state secrets doctrine, and generally given indication that he was going to continue the policy once it came to light, there would be a variety of reactions.
But when Obama does that, it seems to me that there a variety of reactions that are not in step with what I expected when the news came to light.
I’m not saying that there was *no* reaction, or that the news was *ignored*. But I am saying that the reaction seemed very muted and not very long lasting.
And that is something I find interesting. Yes, I’m sure part of it is that you trust Obama more. But having gone through the disaffiliation with a tribe, I wonder things like: how much of the trust is because he is trustworthy, and how much is just because he is on ‘my’ side? Does the muted reaction suggest that at least part of my outrage or lower outrage is/was based on in-group out-group issues in my head rather than my analysis?
I want to be super-clear, this isn’t an attack on either side as being more or less rational. Well maybe it is suggesting that we are all less rational than we like to think, and that we should be careful to guard against it.
HSH:Can you expand on Duverger’s Law and its application to your point, Catsy? I wasn’t previously familiar, and after scanning the the Wikipedia entry, I’m not sure how it applies.
I just glanced at the Wikipedia article and it’s actually pretty well-written–the “How and why it occurs” section in particular is very informative and uses good examples to illustrate.
As to how it bears on my point…
Duverger’s Law–something of a misnomer, as it’s not so much a law as an observation and set of supporting principles–describes the relationships between party and electoral systems and how those relationships affect the ability of third parties to emerge and succeed. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think this paragraph from the Wiki article sums it up better than I could:
The tendency of Single-Member District Plurality voting (what we have in most parts of the US) to favor the two major parties and exclude third parties is not absolute, but statistical and logical. One consequence of this is that the larger the pool of voters in a given election, the greater the statisical likelihood is that the voting patterns will reflect Duverger’s observations by diluting and averaging the effect of outliers.
The upshot of this is that the United States will never–as the system now exists–have a functional, viable third party that can compete and govern on equal terms with the two major parties. Instead, when a third party becomes large enough to compete with the two major parties, it will a) replace one of the two major parties, as happened to the Whigs, b) siphon votes away from the major party with the ideology or agenda closest to its own, leading both to defeat, or c) form a coalition within one of the major parties, such as the Tea Party Republicans or Blue Dog Democrats.
But in the end, there will still be no more than two major parties. It is a structural reality of our system. Let me reword the Wiki quote above and see if that makes it clearer:
There are ways to fix this short of constitutional amendments moving us to a proportional representation system. IRV has a lot going for it, but has its own flaws. I think it’s a better option than what we have now, it’s just not a silver bullet.
Rob:
Yes.
It’s all about the math. Even if you’re in a “safe” district, there comes a point where enough third-party votes can and will tip the election to one major party or the other. And that will happen long before those third-party votes have sufficient numbers to allow the third party to actually win that election.
Getting the numbers to qualify the third party for debate inclusion or election funds or any other advantage normally accorded major parties is an exercise in futility, given the way our political system works. To the extend that it makes that third party more effective, it only works to weaken the major party that is closer to the third party’s ideology than the other, by siphoning away votes.
If you don’t like it, work to change our system.
But don’t fool yourself into thinking that strengthening any liberal third party at the national level does anything other than weaken the Democratic Party and make GOP victory incrementally more likely. And that, yes, is fundamentally irresponsible if you actually care about any kind of liberal agenda, in whatever form that takes for you.
The first two paras in my comment above should be blockquoted, as they belong to hairshirthedonist.
Thanks, Catsy. I read further and got to the vote-splitting part, which seems like a corollary, given the general description of the “law” itself. I’ll consider giving up on my protest votes, however carefully I might choose them. (I mean, I never would have considered voting for Nader in 2000, if you know what I’m saying.)
To be clear, I’m not saying that Greens or any other liberal third party should abstain from being involved in our political system, or give up their agenda.
But until our electoral system is dramatically overhauled to remove the structural and mathematical advantages enjoyed by the two major parties, they should work within the Democratic Party in order to advance their agenda, rather than sabotaging the chances of both liberal parties by attacking them from without. The Blue Dog Democrats and their ilk in the Senate are about as divergent form the Democratic Party’s agenda as the Greens are, albeit to the right rather than the left–but by getting elected as members of the major party closest to their beliefs and forming a coalition of like-minded individuals, they wield power far in excess of their numbers.
They got destroyed in this election, but that was in part because they ran to the far right and governed like Republicans, joining Republicans in pushing extremely unpopular positions like attacking health care reform and obstructing the process. The Greens have the advantage of having a lot of ideas that are broadly popular with Americans, they’re just unelectable at the national level on their own. Brand them as Green Dog Democrats (or some such) and run with the same ideas, and they’d be a lot more successful without having the spoiler effect on close elections.
And that is something I find interesting. Yes, I’m sure part of it is that you trust Obama more.
I can really only speak for myself.
I don’t trust Obama. IMO he is far more conservative, as Americans construe conservatism, than I am.
I particularly don’t trust him regarding the bundle of issues that bear on his use of state secrets privilege to suppress legal review of how military and intelligence personnel have acted during both his and Bush’s administrations.
I voted for Obama because I believed, net/net, that he would be much better for the nation than John McCain. I still believe that, emphatically.
But I have a lot of issues with Obama, and I don’t have uncritical trust in him. Ditto Clinton, for that matter, for many of the same reasons.
If you exclude outliers like, frex, Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, the range of political representation at the national level runs from, say, Russ Feingold to maybe Jim DeMint. Something like that. With Obama sort of slightly to the left of center within that range.
That’s actually a fairly limited ambitus, and there are whole categories of issues of public interest that are virtually never discussed, even within that range.
Where are the southwest cities going to get water from in 25 or 50 years, frex? That’s a pretty freaking huge issue, and I haven’t heard a single person on the national stage even mention it.
That’s just one example.
So, no I don’t trust Obama, and I think his positions on executive privilege suck. I found Bush marginally worse, because Bush was responsible for instituting torture as an explicit US policy, but all I’m saying there is that Bush broke that particular ice.
I agree with russell.
I can sure appreciate Obama’s place in history, but in the end he is the nice and polite manager of a dying, but deadly, organization. And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout the Democratic Party.
Catsy,
I disagree with you. CT is *extremely* safe for the Dems in most elections (note: this time I didn’t mess around, because things were closer). I’ve voted Green, but I’ve also voted Libertarian. My vote is not necessarily “safe liberal” anyway, you have to realize. I’m generally liberal leaning, but that holds more on social issues than on economic policy/budgeting. So am I siphoning a vote away from the major liberal party or the conservative one?
Also, if the Dems win an election but notice that the Greens got a bunch of votes, doesn’t that indicate to them that their left flank is potentially vulnerable? That they might need to pay more attention to it?
That said, what work to change the system would you suggest?
As far as the Obama state secrets/assassination question, count me as one who sees him as exactly the equivalent to Dubya on that. Possibly a tad worse, if you score some points for being a fraud on the issue (candidate Obama vs. President Obama). That’s a huge mark against him for me. I’m not “more forgiving” of it… in fact, I may be less forgiving because I expected better.
But that’s just me. In general, I think your point holds.
I don’t buy the premise of this argument. When was the last time you actually voted for a Republican in a national election? Remember, I’ve got no real beef with third-party voting locally, where it has a chance of making a difference.
The only people who split 50/50 down the middle are people who are completely uninformed or underinformed about what the parties actually stand for and do in practice, whose vote pretty much comes down to a toss-up choice taken about as seriously as what they had for breakfast.
The differences between the parties are that dramatic.
From a fiscally conservative standpoint, your choice still comes down to a party that runs up debt like crazy and has no intention of finding a way to pay for it, and a party with sometimes-expensive ideas that does actually pay for it.
So unless you have any plans to suffer selective amnesia and vote Republican anytime soon, then yes–if you vote third party, you are siphoning a vote away from the one major party that you’re actually likely to ever vote for. The number of available votes in any election is zero-sum.
It should, and they should. But that is not in contradiction to anything I wrote.
Moreover, the problem with voting to “send a message”, as I noted earlier, is that there is no box on the ballot to write in an explanation of why you voted the way you did. That being the case, the message conveyed by voting numbers to any given person is going to be whatever message validates the beliefs they already held. This election is a perfect example of that: A majority of independents and moderates still went for the Democrats, and the Democratic losses were almost entirely the result of the intensity gap between the right and the left. Republicans were fired up, while Democrats were disillusioned by a perceived lack of spine and progress from their leadership. The reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that Democrats need to move to the left and shore up their base, correct?
Except that’s not the message that the people who need to hear it are hearing. The Blue Dogs are saying, against all evidence, that the Democrats need to move to the right. The GOP, of course, is bleating the same nonsense. The only people actively pointing out the obvious are the people who have already been saying the Dems need to shore up their left flank for years–in other words, the people who already believe it and don’t need to get the message.
You cannot send a message by voting that is any more complex than “I voted for this person rather than the others”. You can’t. It doesn’t work, any more than you can send a message by setting off a bomb or any other unexplained action with more than one possible cause.
I think I mentioned above that I’d like to see Instant Runoff Voting, for starters. It has its own flaws and there are ways to game it just as there are with the current system, but it is less stacked against third parties and allows you to vote strategically without the risk that your third-party vote will put Republicans in office.
It’s not a silver bullet. Much of the overwhelming disadvantages for third parties are structural, built into the fact that you only need a plurality to win elections and there can be only one winner per district. But it’s not hopeless.
In the meantime, I maintain that Greens and Dems both would be far more successful if the Greens ran as Dems to primary bad Democrats, and turn themselves into a caucus within the Democratic Party (like the opposite of the Blue Dogs) in order to move it to the left. It would bypass all of the structural disadvantages of third-party bids and give them a voice that both they and the Democrats need–and don’t really have now.
As for Obama on the above civil rights issues, this is my one major area of disappointment with him. I’d support a 2012 primary challenger if there was a credible one who was right on this issue and as good or better than Obama on other issues. But I don’t see that happening, and he’s still leaps and bounds better than anything the Republicans have on the field, including on this issue.
Summary: every voting system is flawed; there can’t be a perfect one; it’s a matter of picking your preferred flaws.
This may seem intuitive, but I’m told Arrow made it definitive.
“If you exclude outliers like, frex, Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, the range of political representation at the national level runs from, say, Russ Feingold to maybe Jim DeMint.”
Not any more.
Not that Feingold’s loss was a surprise, but it was still terrible; he and Bernie Sanders tend to be as close to representing my views least badly as Senators can go.
Not any more.
Crap.
Among other things said above, I do agree with Catsy on this:
KTHXBAI
Ruining effect: But also this!
I don’t buy the premise of this argument. When was the last time you actually voted for a Republican in a national election?
Hmm. For President, never, though I’ve only voted Dem in 2004 and 2008. I honestly can’t remember all my votes for House of Reps & Senate prior to, say, 2004. Prior to about 2002 I was a pretty low-info voter, though. I wouldn’t have agreed, then, that I was… but I was.
Moreover, the problem with voting to “send a message”, as I noted earlier, is that there is no box on the ballot to write in an explanation of why you voted the way you did.
True.