US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3830

On December 11 2022 00:58 ChristianS wrote:

Both the recall process and the open primaries are nightmares actually IMO. The recall process is a yes-no “do you want to recall this person?” vote, and a “if yes, who should replace them?” with a bunch of candidates.. If Yes gets over 50%, then the candidate with most votes replaces. That means if 49% wanna keep the current governor, and a bunch of other candidates get <10% but one guy gets 11%, the one guy with 11% wins. I have no love for Newsom and wouldn’t have minded recalling him, but it was just too likely we would get some weird wingnut with support in the teens as governor, doing who knows what kind of damage.

The “open primaries” were a change about a decade ago. I voted for them, I’m a little sorry to say. The problem is that if you only send the “top two” to the general election, regardless of party, a well-organized minority party can try to split their votes evenly between two candidates, and if the other side splinters their vote too much they wind up without a candidate in the general. In several cases you wound up with Republicans representing 60-40 Democrat districts because the Dems tried to have, you know, a primary with a bunch of candidates, while the Republicans ran exactly two people.

So it seemed like it would promote more fruitful intra-party competition over which policies and candidates were best, but it actually created a lot more tactical voting for the individual, and incentive at the high level for party leaders to step in and dictate a race (“Okay, you and you, go ahead and run. Anybody else tries it, we will bury you.”)

It’s a shame, it was a neat idea.

On December 11 2022 03:30 Gorsameth wrote:
Wait, so the people who vote to keep the current governor don't even get to vote on who will be the next if that fails?
What logic is that?

That is not a vote between A B C or D, its a vote between A vs B,C and D combined.

Edit: And yes as Kwark says that way your probably often better off always voting for the recall and voting for the next best candidate even if you really like the current governor.

On December 11 2022 03:47 Simberto wrote:
The US system seems less like a system designed to find the people who best fit what the public wants, and more like a game system, on all sides.

On December 11 2022 04:40 GreenHorizons wrote:
It's amazing how many times the conversation circles back to the longstanding realization that US politics needs changes its system is fundamentally unable to make.

Perhaps more bewildering than amazing is how frequently people purporting to want said changes refuse to reconcile that into their prescriptions.

Instead we get the same old carousel of arguments until we arrive back at some variation of " The core problem is simply that the people who would be in a position to push for any change in the election system are the people who have won at the current election system, and who thus have no interest in changing that system."

But basically no one ever integrates that into the prescriptions they give on their next trip around the carousel.

I don't expect everyone to become radical revolutionary socialists overnight but it'd be nice if the conversation ever got around to real considerations of how to address the inexorable problem of the US system being fundamentally incapable of reconciling this recurring realization.

On December 11 2022 04:54 Simberto wrote:
I think the main view on that is that there is simply no way to change the system.

I also have the advantage of not being in the US and in a country with a functioning election system, which means that i can change even less about it, but also don't have to worry about it as much.

On December 11 2022 04:57 Gorsameth wrote:
There is a gap between 'the current situation is not great' and 'the complete unpredictable and dangerous gamble of a revolution is worth the risk' that you always keep ignoring.

Its amazing how many times you've gone in that exact same circle without reconciling it.

On December 11 2022 03:33 ChristianS wrote:
I remember having conversations with Republicans when the top two thing was first proposed, where they were basically like “the Democrats don’t even want us to have a candidate, they want to lock us out completely.” I thought that was off-base at the time, because if the Democrats have such a majority they can get two different candidates with more votes than your one guy, what’s the point of having your guy in the general? It does bias statistics like the “national popular vote” a little bit but those statistics don’t actually matter. I’m still not sure what scenario they’re imagining in which the top two system would bias representation against the minority party.

I still think general elections between a Republican and a Democrat are a waste of time in solid red and solid blue districts. If the actual decision-making happens in the primary, it would be nice to find a way to put that decision in the general, since that’s the one people actually show up for and feel an obligation to research their vote some. I say this having had to choose between two Republicans this past cycle for my assemblyman - annoying, sure, but if my district is red enough what’s the point of sending some Democrat out to lose 70-30 or whatever? I think instead I was choosing between some J6er and someone who had, at least, never tried to overthrow the government by force. Low bar, but CA Republicans get pretty weird sometimes.

On December 11 2022 05:43 Introvert wrote:


Exactly the race I described, 2018 senate race. The thing to realize is that in a top two system both sides can split votes. Sure, dems could lose an "easy" race by having it split too many ways, but if there are simply fewer republicans than having more candidates pull at far fewer votes makes it easier to lock them out than having a much larger portion of the electorate split their votes. Obviously it's not going to happen that way every time and in red districts it will be biased the other way, but when you realize how lopsided the state is it makes sense. Easier to have your side get the top two if they represent 60% of the electorate instead of 40%.

Combine that with the gerrymandered map the "independent" commission has given us and it makes the problem even worse.


***

also, ranked choice voting is far more "gamey" than FPTP. Sure, the latter is more frustrating in that it's zero sum, but it's really not that complicated and the only gamesmanship is primary voters weighing the chance of winning against how aligned they are politically.

On December 11 2022 08:58 gobbledydook wrote:
I'd like to argue that FTPT is not the problem.
Gerrymandering is. The incumbent writing rules to favor themselves is clearly anti democratic.

On December 11 2022 09:01 Simberto wrote:


But FPTP leads to and enables all of the problems. In a proportional system, gerrymandering is simply not a problem.

On December 11 2022 04:53 ChristianS wrote:

In or out of context, I like this observation a lot. I have a lot of thoughts about it, mostly irrelevant to the current discussion, that I'm going to try to write up in a blog, but I just wanted to highlight it specifically.

On December 11 2022 07:53 ChristianS wrote:

But the 2018 Senate race is a perfect example of a race the Republican never would have won anyway! I get why it would mean more races without a Republican *running* but if the Republican can’t even take second in an open field, why would they ever win in the general?

The vote splitting aspect of it sucks imo, and gives a big advantage to whichever party does a better job consolidating support behind one or two candidates. But if Republicans rallied behind one candidate, and still took third, they’re not being denied any representation here. I get that it feels bad to not have anybody from your team make the playoffs, but if they couldn’t even make the playoffs it’s silly to pretend they would have had a shot at winning the whole thing, right?

For discussion purposes it’s a bit moot since we both don’t like the system, but the narrative about it being a Democrat plot to deny Republicans representation just seems unrelated to reality. Can you name a couple races Republicans actually would have won if they hadn’t been locked out?