Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

The list of things I've already brought up that Gbaji has forgotten about could probably fill a third politics thread.

especially when you post them all twice

It's not artificial though. It requires the formation of two large parties, each of which has the capability of obtaining a majority of the EC votes to win the election. It's that majority requirement and the WTA condition that force two large parties. Take that away, and you wont have just two large parties anymore.



I disagree. If you eliminate the requirement for any sort of majority (whether EC majority or popular vote majority), you will see both parties fracture into smaller, more focused, parties over time. Because you've created a circumstance where, for example, the social agenda Democrats can win control without having to appeal to the blue collar worker Democrats. Or the small government Republicans can win without having to appeal to the religious right Republicans. And vice versa in all cases, and frankly almost certainly a number of other factions and ideological "sides" that would crop up that we're not even considering right now.

I think it's monumentally foolish to think you can so dramatically change the victory conditions for the election and not see an equally dramatic change in how the parties themselves form and operate.

What you would almost certainly see under the sort of systems you're proposing is the rise of a number of smaller parties, each with a narrower focus then the two existing major parties we have now. This would result in one of them holding the White House, but without anything close to a majority support in terms of their party platform. We'd also see a similar change in Congress, where no single party would hold a majority of seats. Which in turn would result in alliances of parties after the fact (and outside the direct influence of voters) which would form voting blocks to pass legislation (perhaps often changing shape from one issue to the next). This is what I mean by "negotiated". You're actually taking even more power out of the hands of the voters in this sort of scenario.

That's certainly "different". But I don't think it's necessarily "better". And yes, it'll result in a greater percentage of our policy and legislative decisions being made behind closed doors as negotiations between multiple different political parties and factions and fewer being made as a result of platform positions that had to be clearly stated prior to the election and on which the voters got to make their voting decisions. I'm just not seeing how this actually increases voter enfranchisement. Not even on paper.



You're declarations aside, I did read your earlier statements about this, and did respond to them. The problem with ranked voting is it even more increases the odds that whichever candidate actually wins the resulting election does so by being at best the 2nd or 3rd or even 4th choice of a large percentage of the population. How on earth is that better? It certainly does not improve the issue of voter enfranchisement at all. It makes it worse. Sure, on paper your vote mattered, but only in that you got someone you didn't really like elected because you listed him low on your rank (but he was in the list, so you technically voted for him, right?). That's totally absurd.

And you're still failing to see the biggest problem with this. You're still operating under the assumption that political parties under such a system will be similar to how they are in the US now. But that's not the case. You'll have 8 or 10 different major parties, each of which is running exclusively on a relatively narrow set of issues that matter most to them (and their voters). Under our current system, the two major parties have to make an effort to adjust their platform in order to appeal to enough voters in enough geographical regions to win a majority of the EC votes. They have to appeal to a large swath of people. In a ranked system, they simply don't. Period. Someone is going to win, no matter how narrow their platform is. Worse, it'll likely be the party with the narrowest platform, and not the broadest. Why you ask? Let me explain.

It's generally much easier to get voters to vote *against* a candidate than *for* them. So out of a field of say 10 candidates, you might rank the first one or even two based on the narrow set of issues that candidate holds that you care about a lot (and are likely a member of his/her party as well). But the rest are likely going to be ranked based on how much you disagree with them (so number three would be the one you dislike the least out of the rest, etc, etc). This is because most people think in terms of what they want most first, then settle on "well, at least he's not going to do <something I don't like>". So, in a field of say 10 candidates, those who run on a wide platform of positions on a number of issues don't really increase the odds that their platform will perfectly match the desires of voters much, but will dramatically increase the odds that their platform will contain something that a set of voters will seriously dislike, resulting in them being far down the list on most people's rank (and thus less likely to win).

As a result, the candidate who runs purely on a single or small number of issues and nothing at all other than that will actually have the best chance of winning in a ranked system. Which means that the voters will actually have the least likelihood of having a clue what that person will actually do once in office. Which again, leads us to a system that is massively worse than the minor disenfranchisement of our existing system. Sure, your "vote mattered", but in an election where nearly every single candidate is actively working to minimize the number of things he's stuck to in terms of campaign promises so as to maximize his chance of winning. Which leads, once again, to the wheeling and dealing and negotiating after the election is over to determine how our government actually rules.

Which IMO, is not in any way an improvement. Heck. The run off system is better (but takes more time and costs more money). And it's still less "good" IMO than the two party system used in the US. Again, it really depends on what you want your representation to look like, and how you want political parties to align with that representation. I happen to think that a system that forces the parties to each have to appeal to and comply with the wishes of approximately half of the voting population to be far superior to one where the party in power may win with a platform representing only a small percentage of the population in nearly every case, and more or less just being the least bad choice for the rest of the population.

Want to know how to achieve 100% voter enfranchisement? Have just one candidate on the ballot, right? But does that mean that the one candidate that everyone voted for actually represents what the voters want? Not at all. So concocting a system where everyone ranks candidates, so that whomever wins is at least to some degree the "choice" of the people, is equally contrived. You're solving a problem on paper that doesn't really solve the problem in the real world. I don't think that's a good idea.

I'll also point out that ranked systems work much better in systems in which a prime minister is elected rather than a president. Because, again, you're going for a "least bad" solution from the get go, and the parties form factions which then form a government and choose the PM. In a system like the US, where the president is elected completely separate from the legislature, such systems simply do not work because there's no assurance that the person with power in the executive branch of government is even remotely a consensus person (even parliament systems requires a consensus of the legislature, acting as representatives of the people in this case, and once again, requires an actual majority of said body).

Investing executive power in someone using any sort of non-majority based system is just a really really really (add a lot more "really" here) bad idea.

Edited, Dec 22nd 2016 4:03pm by gbaji

I'd be a week late if I tried.

So since we're kicking Russians out of the country over the whole cyber-attack thing, I guess I should ask what exactly they did. All I've heard is the "interfering with the election" line, but I've yet to hear any details of exactly what it is they're accused with doing. You know, what did they hack? What did they accused of doing to manipulate the election, etc.

Can anyone enlighten me, or perhaps point me to the details?


Edited, Dec 29th 2016 1:45pm by someproteinguy

Huh, well I guess that makes, not much more than I'd heard at least.

A mixture of "it's classified" and run-of-the-mill spy stuff. Still not sure whether I want to take the leap of faith and assume anything that makes this a big deal is still classified, or if I want to dismiss it as extra political hype around a rather run-of-the-mill foreign espionage incident.

Anchor Megyn Kelly to join NBC after 12 years with Fox News

Obviously bribed by the opposition to say bad things about Trump in exchange for getting her own show after the election was over!

Supposedly Fox offered her $20mil to stay, well more than the other offers. I think a bigger part is that O'Reilly was hostile to her about her being public with Ailes sexual harassment and the network sided more with O'Reilly as their primary star than with Kelly. Made more sense for her to bail and get treated well at NBC than to be treated like a well-paid pariah at Fox.

Yeah. It's basically the same stock stuff that we've known the Russians (and others) have been doing all along. IMO, the real question isn't whether or not there are hacks out there (cause there are, all the time), or whether systems at the DNC were compromised (cause they were, and probably constantly are given that this is a private political party and is going to have security equivalent to your local PTA or something), but whether the data in question was obtained by Wikileaks from the Russian government with the claimed intention of affecting the US presidential election.

I've said all along that this seems ridiculous to me. Only a very contrived cart-before-the-horse kind of logic can support any case for *why* the Russians would want Trump in office instead of Clinton in the first place, much less why they'd essentially give up potential leverage on a likely future US president just to obtain that different result. It's a great theory from the point of view of an upset Democrat looking for someone to blame for Clinton's loss, but makes absolutely zero sense from Putin's point of view. What does he gain? We could put on our and speculate that there's some kind of super secret deal between Trump and Putin of Trilateral Commission scale or something, but that would be pure conspiracy theory with nothing to back it up. Outside of that kind of bizarre speculation, we're left with.... nothing. You give up a known entity likely to win the white house, with which you already have a good record of being able to push around to get what you want (she gave them the reset button, remember?), and over which you have some juicy dirt which you could maybe use as leverage directly, or worst case scenario, just time to release when it may damage her popularity back home enough to lose support for any actions she might take on the foreign policy stage to oppose you. And in return you get... A more or less unknown entity in the White House. Who is a complete wildcard. Who is arrogant, egotistical, and classic type A alpha male personality. That's objectively the very last thing someone like Putin would want to have to deal with.


So yeah. Not seeing this at all. The whole thing smells like a massive case of wag the dog. Make up a ridiculous scenario. Repeat it over and over. Double down on it (ejecting Russian diplomats is a great example). Heck. Push it even more (maybe propose sanctions or tariffs or something serious). Make it so big and so loud that most people wont even stop and question the starting assumption in the first place (cause there's no way we'd do all of that stuff if there wasn't something behind it, right?). The goal isn't about punishing the Russians for hacking. We've known about this for years. They've been caught doing it many times, and the Obama administration has more or less done nothing about it (kinda like the rest of his foreign policy). This is entirely and solely about building the narrative that Trump owes his victory to foreign hacking, so as to de-legitimize his presidency. Which, I'm assuming, the Democrats hope they can use to scramble back into power, or at least blunt some of the policy decisions that they are dreading. For Obama personally, this is about making the guy who's likely about to tear his legacy apart look as bad in the public's eye as possible, so as to associate his actions against Obama's actions with negativity, and thus in reverse associate Obama's with positivity (and hey, there's still that victim angle to play as well).

Or at least that's what I'm speculating. There is that whole bit of Assange just coming out and straight up saying that the Russians didn't leak the files to him. But hey, maybe he's part of the conspiracy too!

Just because the Russians habitually and continually run hacking operations against US political, government, and business targets, does not mean that the documents Wikileaks released came from them by way of that hacking. You don't have to run any kind of sophisticated hack for a leak like that to happen. In this case, it could just have easily been a disgruntled Sanders supporter at the DNC, with access to the email server, who just copied the evidence of collusion between the DNC, Clinton campaign, and some in the media to a thumb drive and mailed it to Wikileaks. Stuff like that happens, even on servers that are also the targets of Russian hacking. And given that the nature of most of the damaging stuff was about questionable stuff going on during the primary, this may even be a very likely explanation of how Wikileaks got the files.

But the wag the dog narrative works better, so that's what we're going to see. It's getting almost laughable really. Not sure how much father the Democrats can go down this rabbit hole before even they realize how absurd they're being. And don't get me started on Obama more or less burning the house down on his way out (seriously? Abstaining on that UN resolution against Israel? That's beyond just petty).

Edited, Jan 4th 2017 5:55pm by gbaji

The guy hiding from rape charges in an embassy seemed like a credible source!

Vaginas are scary.

Which is why God invented Duct Tape.

Anyway, it seems Mr. Clapper is going to tell us next week why this hacking thing is all so scary and important. So I suppose I can withhold judgement until that point. It's not as much fun as throwing stones blindly, but probably more prudent.

I kind of assumed he was just going to continue sending threatening tweets to companies doing business there until enough of them backed down. Then once it reached a certain threshold he'd claim victory and say that was payment for the wall.

Thus emboldening a new generation of twitter trolls.