2020, the election campaigns have begun

[classicdrogn]

Mainly because the conservatives don't give a shit for reaching across the aisle, as far as I can see, and immediately take the hardest possible opposite stance to whatever the current liberal agenda is perceived as being. No one gets worked up about about moderates in general though, so being at an extreme is the only way for either side to get air time and mindshare. And I think it's probably time for another of my periodic breaks from this forum, because I'm getting too pessimistic and snappish about it again.

[robkelk]

Nope.  The only way you get the system back into equillibrium is to choose defect.  Repeatedly.  Push an agenda through that minimizes your rivals while hopefully helping the country.  We need to do this until these people learn the lesson that you cannot treat your fellow leaders like shit day in, day out and expect love and respect in return.

Guys, let me ask a serious question here, why is it when people on the left talk about "Reaching across the aisle," its always the Conservatives who are expected to give up what they want and the Liberals who demand to get everything they want. We see this every damn year come budget time no matter who controls what office.

It appears we're playing Jeopardy! here. Labster gave an answer, and then Rajvik asked the matching question.

Edit: Rob, no offense, but if the United States had a third party to, as you put it, force a balance, what we would end up with is a congress that really didn't get anything done, kinda like the British house of Parliament over Brexit. Also, we arguably do, it's unofficial but the Establishment party has been the one running the show for years, handing off the reigns of power back and forth between the "existing" parties back and forth. The thing is that the American people on both sides have grown tired of "Business as Usual" that is DC politics and said, "NO, we're going to the extremes now, piss off."

Congress would only be deadlocked for as long as people refused to compromise.

Which, if the comments here are an accurate reflection of your politics, would be a long time... but eventually your politicians (on all sides) would learn the skills that most kindergarten children quickly figure out.

[nocarename]

Rob, there are a lot of flaws in the Westminster Parliamentary system family, but the fact that you can't be the government and not have a budget is probably the pivotal benefit here compared to the American system.

I'm not sure what happens if things start deadlocked and stay that way on any sort of ongoing basis in the US, but it surely would be more complicated than passing things off to the party with the next highest seat count and letting them have a goal at putting together a coalition. Lots of people with obligations and no way to meet them.

If I was an evil mastermind I would see how many payday and car loan companies I might be able to start around DC if I thought something like that was coming. It sure would be an easy way to compromise everyone essential enough that they had to keep working without being paid in US Federal service.

[Labster]

Nah, it happens on both sides, you're just not noticing it because of your bias. Perhaps it's more subtle on the liberal side. The liberal caucus, by its nature, has much more room for internal dissent. Take the race for President -- a lot of the language is put in terms like do you want a idealogue, or someone who is more electable towards the center. But of course, there's not so much evidence that the relatively centrist candidates are more electable.

Obamacare, for instance, was a major attempt by Obama to reach across the aisle and get conservatives to help on health care. It was a market-based solution based almost entirely on Romneycare in Massachusetts. The party activists were calling for a public option, or maybe single-payer like Medicare, or even a few at the far left calling for a government takeover like the National Health Service in the UK. But Obama reached fairly far from liberal ideology to get conservative support for the ACA, it's just that we now have so little in common that conservatives saw it as an utter betrayal than an attempt to cooperate.

[Black Aeronaut]

Because we don't think the things we want are unreasonable...

• Fair wages
  
• Funding for community college up to the associate level
  
• Reformed immigration - such as offering the deportation of people that have overstayed their visas in exchange for a legitimate path to citizenship.
  
• Actually treating people humanely, even if they are not US Citizens, instead of damn-near committing war crimes.  (And no, you do not have to be at war to commit crimes against humanity.  By all rights, there should be several people heading off to The Hague.)
  
• A universal healthcare system (Which, by the way, will probably be LESS EXPENSIVE than what we have now - a fact that many Republicans tend to gloss over.)
  
• Equal rights for LGBTQ peoples
  
• Ending needless trade wars
  
• Fixing our most recent fuck-up pertaining to Syria
  
• Reversing the current administration's damage to environmental protection (No amount of pandering is going to save the coal industry.  It's been on the way out since the 80's when natural gas started to become a viable alternative.)
  

None of these things are unreasonable, I think.

Republicans, on the other hand...

• Pander to white supremacists using dog whistle tactics
  
• Pander to incels and anti-feminists by removing women's reproductive rights
  
• Seek to further gerrymander voting districts in an effort to consolidate power
  
• Remove programs that promote education and pander to for-profit education (who can pick and choose who can attend their schools by sheer dint of choosing where to set up shop)
  
• Would rather ignore the mental health problems we have, even though doing something about it JUST MIGHT cut down on the mass shooting that are driving the Democrats up the fucking walls
  

Sure, there are a few extremist voices out there among the Democrats, but the Republicans only have themselves to blame by refusing to compromise early on when the demands were so much less than what they are now.  For example, gun ownership.  There've been so many mass shootings that the movement to abolish the Second Amendment is actually picking up momentum.  And the more the Republican Party panders to the NRA, the worse this is going to get.

So, do you think the Republicans should compromise now?  Or wait until the Democrats have the supermajority they need to knock down the econd Amendment?

[hazard]

Amending the USA Constitution would require ratification by a majority of its states (not sure the size of the majority required).

However, just the fact that the Republicans are gerrymandering to remain in power regardless of any other issues should disqualify them from any office and should be considered grounds to bar them for life from the right to vote in both the active (being allowed to cast a vote) and passive (being allowed to be voted for) sense. It cannot be overstated just how much damage gerrymandering can do to any form of democracy.

[Labster]

Hazard, the gerrymander has a long an illustrious history in the United States. Just like voters choose their representatives, the representatives too have a right to choose their voters.

What changed is that it used to be done with pen, paper, and guesswork. But with the advent of GIS software and massive sets of statistics, we no longer had to deal with primitive methods without voter metrics. As 2010 was an good year for Republicans, they got the first crack at new census reapportionment and the power of big data. No longer would an elected have to suffer from poorly targeted districts -- now they only see voters that are relevant to their interests.

But here's the thing -- in the decade 2000-2010, Republicans were trying to remove the power of districting from Democrats, alleging unfair districts. In 2010-now, Democrats are alleging the same thing -- but the districts are somehow worse. But both sides are guilty. Disqualifying the entire government from staying in power sounds like a recipe for more Donald Trump types to me.

[robkelk]

I don't know what keeps your election-oversight bureaucrats busy between elections in the USA, but up here in Canada, part of Elections Canada's job is to re-draw the boundaries after each census - and Elections Canada answers to the sovereign, not to the politicians. (I understand in the USA, the sovereign is The People.)

We can help you set up a similar system if you want...

[Matrix Dragon]

Now now, the gerrymandering isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[hazard]

Hazard, the gerrymander has a long an illustrious history in the United States.  Just like voters choose their representatives, the representatives too have a right to choose their voters.

What changed is that it used to be done with pen, paper, and guesswork.  But with the advent of GIS software and massive sets of statistics, we no longer had to deal with primitive methods without voter metrics.  As 2010 was an good year for Republicans, they got the first crack at new census reapportionment and the power of big data.  No longer would an elected have to suffer from poorly targeted districts -- now they only see voters that are relevant to their interests.

No.

Voters have the right to choose their representatives. Representatives represent their voting block to the best of their ability. If they don't like their chances, they can choose to try and represent a different voting block however the election system works with that. With FPTP systems, that's by moving to a different voting district. Being able to choose what issues are definitely going to be victorious in a given voting district weakens democracy however, because now those voters are irrelevant.

But here's the thing -- in the decade 2000-2010, Republicans were trying to remove the power of districting from Democrats, alleging unfair districts.  In 2010-now, Democrats are alleging the same thing -- but the districts are somehow worse.  But both sides are guilty.  Disqualifying the entire government from staying in power sounds like a recipe for more Donald Trump types to me.

Yes, both sides have done gerrymandering.

Any and all officials that have gerrymandered for the sake of remaining in power should have their right to vote removed. You don't have to gerrymander to remain in power when your party program is popular enough, and you might have to gerrymander to properly represent the people. I mean, if the simplest map that could be drawn favours 1 party over another to an extent that it warps the proportional representation as counted by votes cast in an election, it may be necessary to gerrymander the map to more accurately reflect the result of the election. If there's an election and party A and B both get about 50% of the votes, but 60% of the seats go to one party and the remaining 40% to the other, you've got a problem. Especially if that is a result you see time and time again in elections in that district.

In that case, gerrymandering the map so both parties get about 50% of the seats, or even more preferable, as many seats as possible are uncertain and thus to be fought for in the election is the right decision. But ensuring that the results of the election are properly reflected in the officials elected by that election is the only form of gerrymandering I would consider proper.

I don't know what keeps your election-oversight bureaucrats busy between elections in the USA, but up here in Canada, part of Elections Canada's job is to re-draw the boundaries after each census - and Elections Canada answers to the sovereign, not to the politicians. (I understand in the USA, the sovereign is The People.)

We can help you set up a similar system if you want...

The Dutch election oversight bureaucrats aren't that busy between elections as far as I can tell. We use paper ballots and every election is list tranferable vote. Unless you try to interfere directly at the ballot box, the options available to mess with an election are decidedly more limited here than in some other places.

[Labster]

We changed the voting method in our city recently. The city got sued for not having enough minority representation with at-large elections (where the whole city elects 3 candidates), so I tried to ask for Single Transferrable Vote. I was told that the only legal method to produce more minority representation is district voting, first-past-the-post. Of course this is completely nuts as STV ensures majority rule and minority representation, while district plurality vote ensures... nothing. But it's the law!

It's awfully funny how the law gets chosen to protect entrenched interests even while it's working to protect underrepresented minorities.

[Rajvik]

Labster please explain how the STV works, i honestly have not heard of it.

as for district voting, it is a matter of getting people to get up off their asses to vote, if people don't see any inherent need to change things, or to defend how things are, they aren't going to get out and vote

[Labster]

It works great, thanks for asking.

Er, okay.  It's a very simple system for the voter, but a complex system to tally.  I have done an STV election by hand with only 9 votes and it got pretty crazy fast.

But fundamentally, every person submits a ballot ranking some or all of the candidates in the race.  Ranking more candidates never hurts the chances of the candidates above them (unlike in Borda Count).  Simple, right!

Now onto the math.  Depending on the number of candidates to be elected, a threshold of voters needed to elect people is calculated.  The simplest case, where you only elect one candidate, is normally called Instant Runoff voting; in that case threshold is 50%.  When you elect more than one seat at a time, it's called Single Transferrable Vote; in this case threshold is  100% ÷ ( seats + 1 ) -- two seats is 33.33% (repeating, of course), three seats is 25%, and so on.

Cool, on to the counting process!

1. Now we take all of first ranked votes and add them all together.
   
2. If any candidate has more votes than the threshold, that candidate is elected.  (If you're using fractional transfer -- which you should -- any excess votes given to that candidate become fractions of a vote for the remaining candidates.  So if we have a three-seat race where one candidate gets 30%, this means that they got 5% too many votes.  So each remaining ballot becomes worth 1/6 of a vote, and can go on to electing another candidate.)
   
3. If no candidate meets threshold, all of the votes of the candidate who got the least votes, and redistribute them to the next ranked candidate.  Or put another way, the lowest vote candidate loses, and is disqualified from winning -- readd each ballot as if that candidate didn't exist.  Go back to step 1.
   
4. Have enough candidates met threshold yet?  If so, stop.
   
5. Are there any ballots that no longer have a candidate?  If so, throw them on the "exhausted pile".
   
6. Are the number of remaining seats equal to the number of remaining candidates?  If so, elect everyone still not removed from the election, then stop.  (This is possible when people do not rank the entire ballot and too many ballots fall into the exhausted pile.)  Otherwise go back to step 1.
   

It's fairly complex, as I've written software to run an election. But I've seen the results of several of these election in practice, and they always tend to produce a good mix of representatives.  The usual mix from an election of 6 in my student senate was 3 from slate A, 2 from slate B, and one independent.  IRV is fine and all, but you really get more varied representation from electing more than one at the same time with STV.  So if you have a district that's 15% Green, 15% Libertarian, 33% Democrat, 25% Republican, 12% independent when electing 6, you have a very good chance of electing 1G/1L/2D/2R or 1G/1L/3D/1R.  Under the first-past-the-post system we have, you have a very good chance of electing a slate of all Democrats.

So that's what I mean, the majority party gets more or the most seats, but the minorities also get seats.  Majority rule, minority representation.  There are known issues about strategic voting in STV -- particularly in trying to influence the order that candidates lose -- but Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says that we can't have a perfect voting system.  But we could still have a better one.

The other downside is larger districts when electing multiple candidates, but you do not need to reach every voter.  You just need to reach out to your threshold worth.  So it's entirely possible to elect someone who only advertises on Spanish-language media, if that accounts for a threshold in the population.

Anyway this is all a pipe dream because any voting other than district voting is bad for minorities under the law, QED.

[Dartz]

How it works in Ireland

Although it has occasionally resulted in a party getting an overall majority - normally the result is either one of the two major parties and a junior party in coalition government - or a rainbow coalition of multiple parties - or a combination of the above involving some independant TD's. Currently, we've an odd situation of a minority government that's being propped up to hold over through Brexit but an election is likely in the near future.

[Labster]

Yep, that looks like the same procedure but with smaller words, and more of them. Note the relative sanity of the Dáil compared to Parliament next door or Congress across the sea. And I see you get 3-5 seat districts.

[Labster]

Another candidate list update:

1) Elizabeth Warren
2) Kamala Harris
3) Julián Castro
4) Jay Inslee
5) Cory Booker
6) Michael Bennet
7) Bernie Sanders
8) Pete Buttigieg
9) Joe Biden
10) Eric Swalwell
11) Bill de Blasio
12) Steve Bullock
13) Beto O'Rourke
14) Kirsten Gillibrand
15) Deval Patrick
16) Andrew Yang
17) Marianne Williamson
18) John Delaney
19) Amy Klobuchar
20) John Hickenlooper
21) Tim Ryan
22) Michael Bloomberg
23) Tom Steyer
24) Tulsi Gabbard (was 15)

One last entry in the race, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.  Who?  Right.  I slotted him in at #15, which is the place formerly occupied by Tulsi Gabbard.  In my ratings, she's been demoted to the very bottom of the list.  It's just that, the more I hear her talk, the more I think that she's probably a Russian asset.  She has strange issue combinations that seem like they're designed to drive a wedge through the Democratic Party, and to attack the leaders.  The fact that she worked at her family's gay conversion clinic doesn't help matters either.

Our two billionaires are racing up the polls because of how they are bankrolling their own campaigns.  Steyer's ad spending dwarfs all his competition, combined.  Bloomberg is spending about double that.  I actually like Steyer better than Bloomberg, but I am really not going to set up an election to trade one political novice billionaire for another.  And if one of them wins... it basically means we'll never see poor people elected president again.

For everyone else, the race is coalescing around a Final Five: Bernie, Biden, Buttigeg, Klobuchar, and Warren.  All white people there, you racists can finally relax.  No one really wants to go hard on the attack, because all candidates would rather beat Trump than win personally.  (Except Tulsi, and yeah...)  We lost quite a few candidates recently, many of whom we would have thought would be popular and viable.  Elections are weird.

We are two weeks and two days from the Iowa Caucuses.  Finally: Real votes from real voters who can afford to take the evening off work, and then tell everyone in town exactly who they voted for, and then elect a person to go represent them in the county seat, and repeat the process.  "Fun"!    Iowans expect to meet candidates in person, because they're just worth it, which means that the Senators in the group are going to lose out.  They'll be stuck in Washington DC doing an impeachment trial, where they can't talk and have to sit there for weeks.  Advantage: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigeg, and Mike Bloomberg.  Mixed: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both have great ground games.  Disadvantage: Amy Klobuchar.

[Matrix Dragon]

she worked at her family's gay conversion clinic

Dear madam, kindly fuck off. No love, everyone else.

Also, I'm seeing a lot of the 'if my nominee doesn't win, I'm not voting for anyone' cropping up again. Fucking idiots.

[Rajvik]

It's just that, the more I hear her talk, the more I think that she's probably a Russian asset

Really Labster, your going with that bullshit talking point, if anyone on that list is a "Russian" asset, (read Soviet/Communist) then it's going to be Sanders, you know, the guy that has touted socialism as a good and wholesome thing, why don't you read up on it

https://reason.com/video/why-bernie-sand...ll-matter/

[Matrix Dragon]

And if Russia was actually socialist or communist in the actual meaning of the words, that would fucking matter.

[robkelk]

Besides, "socialist" doesn't mean "communist" anyway. Anybody saying that they're the same thing either is lying or has been lied to.

[Matrix Dragon]

Or is in hilarious amounts of denial.

[Dartz]

It's just that, the more I hear her talk, the more I think that she's probably a Russian asset

Really Labster, your going with that bullshit talking point, if anyone on that list is a "Russian" asset, (read Soviet/Communist) then it's going to be Sanders, you know, the guy that has touted socialism as a good and wholesome thing, why don't you read up on it

https://reason.com/video/why-bernie-sand...ll-matter/

Russia is as much a socialist state as I am a fish. Russia is far more likely to back the big business - the bribers and crooks and gangsters in suits.

Modern Russia is a kleptocracy at best. Lead by 'businessmen' who enforce their financial empires through the state apparatus like state sponsored gangsters. It's big-money, shiny-suit- gold-chain, 'strong and hard' state. It's not even a right-wing state.

More than that, Russian influence online is measureably pushing both sides of the debate to further and further extremes to create just the sort of paralysis and chaos that's been happening in the US and UK.

[Bob Schroeck]

Not to mention socialism used to be a Christian ideal. I could tout the commune-like structures of early Christian groups, but I can also point at the Utopian Socialist movements of the 19th century.

[Rajvik]

But Bob, the thing about those Utopian Communes is that they understood that socialism only works for a short time and only in small rural communities where they don't really require any outside input/imports. Thats why the Amish are as close to working socialism as you will find.

Modern socialism on the other hand, is the first step to either communism or national socialism (aka naziism) the difference being in whether or not they try and expand to other areas or try and isolate themselves behind their national borders. Both use pogroms and purges to "purify" their believers and use them as informants to find others to purge.

Yes Dartz, they are a bunch of kleptocrats, but the current head kleptocrat is a former KGB department head who seems to be trying to put the old USSR back together, maybe not for an actual soviet state setup, indeed probably not, but more for his own power structure.

look, none of you agree with me, i get that, and i'll try to talk what i feel is sense into the lot of you same as you try to talk what you feel is sense into me, but we are not going to agree on everything. As far as the election go i think the DNC has realized that they need to get all their lame ducks off the field as fast as possible so that when they lose, the moderates can look at the kooks in the base, the sanders and occasio cortez types and say "Look, you can't move that fast, you have to take time and win them over slowly. Anticipate the occasional retrenching like what happened with Trump, and just keep slowly pushing further and further."

[hazard]

Modern socialism on the other hand, is the first step to either communism or national socialism (aka naziism) the difference being in whether or not they try and expand to other areas or try and isolate themselves behind their national borders. Both use pogroms and purges to "purify" their believers and use them as informants to find others to purge.

2 things.

1) The difference is not whether they look inward or outwards. Both look outwards, if for different reasons. The difference is in who they consider responsible for their misfortune. Communists generally hold the rich responsible for abusing their workforce and exploiting their production for the gain of the rich while leaving the workforce with nothing, while nazis generally hold some paradoxically weak/strong outside group responsible for corrupting and enslaving the noble and strong inside group.

2) Lack of tolerance for dissenters is not indicative of national socialist or communist governments. It is indicative of totalitarian governments, and the most prominent totalitarian governments in the past century have been communist or nazi run. However, there were certainly plenty of such governments who were neither communist nor nazi run, especially in the former colonies. For that matter, the few theocracies we can see form over that same span of time definitely have totalitarian traits as well, and neither the communists nor the nazis liked religion much.

look, none of you agree with me, i get that, and i'll try to talk what i feel is sense into the lot of you same as you try to talk what you feel is sense into me, but we are not going to agree on everything. As far as the election go i think the DNC has realized that they need to get all their lame ducks off the field as fast as possible so that when they lose, the moderates can look at the kooks in the base, the sanders and occasio cortez types and say "Look, you can't move that fast, you have to take time and win them over slowly. Anticipate the occasional retrenching like what happened with Trump, and just keep slowly pushing further and further."

Actually, the right wing has been pretty successfully pulling the USA further towards the political right for the past 40 years or so if you look at things. What we're seeing here is not a retrenchment on the right, it's a retrenchment on the left. And given how Clinton won the popular vote last time around and how Sanders is leading in number of donations done and total amount donated despite having by far the smallest amount donated on average per donation I'd give him good odds on winning the popular vote against Trump by an even greater margin than Clinton did.

Whether or not that translates into him winning the presidency or being an effective president is a different question, mostly because of the USA's fucked up electoral system and the manner in which it's manipulated to benefit the people in control.