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GeekNights Thursday - Hurricane Sandy
Tonight on GeekNights, back online from hurricane Sandy, we bring our relatively comfortable hurricane Sandy experience. We would have returned on Tuesday, but Scott is unable to bike in slightly cold weather. In the news, Rym finally gets Scott to talk a little politics as he officially endorses Barack Obama for the US Presidency. You should also check out Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog. NBC has some difficulty with the Creative Commons, Scott made a nice time lapse of the hurricane,
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Comments
The Libertarians are more than twice as popular, with a whopping 1.14% of the vote in 2010.
There are plenty of people I would fully back if their positions alone were what mattered, but it's a waste in every sense of the word to actually put my own resources behind them on the national stage. The best case is no harm done, the worst is another Al Gore election.
Voting for Jill Stein is pretty-much voting for Mitt Romney if you live in a contested state. It's a symbolic gesture at most in a non-swing state, but would be disastrous if enough people did it in one.
So, no matter how great a third party national candidate's positions are, it would be crazy to actually vote for one under the current rules of the game. There's no revolution coming, so that won't change it. There's certainly no real electoral reform coming: the people who write the rules also play the game.
I call myself a radical techo-progressivist, but I'm also a pragmatist. Blunting the current ultra-conservative revival in this country is probably the most important political goal of the next eight years. Fail at that, and not only will the third parties continue to be nonviable, but we'll have to contend with actively regressive policies that will hamstring the next decade or more of social progress.
Failing to vote for one of the candidates that actually has a shot, whether through voting third party or not at all, falls halfway between the two options. Claiming that this is equivalent to voting one way or another is misleading.
Of course, if you think in broader terms and consider gains other than attaining public office, then it is not really a zero-sum game. For example, it should be clear enough that (sane) third-party candidates do not run on any real hope of actually becoming president; rather, they do it for the other political benefits they stand to gain from running for the office.
Therefore, given that only two candidates that have a realistic chance of winning, if you fail to vote for the one you would rather have elected (either by abstaining or voting third-party), that is one less vote the "bad guy" has to get to win.
Rendering the election effectively zero-sum.
Edit:
Didn't see you posted before me. You are correct in that the game-theoretical analysis only applies to winning the election. There are other tangible benefits to getting exposure on a national stage. Not all elections are necessarily zero-sum however: proportional representation enables multiple people to win.
Also, PR systems are still zero-sum. Multiple people can win, but the total number of seats remains the same. The total winnings are the same if 3 parties get 10 seats each or if 2 parties get 15 seats each.
Granted, one might argue that the utility of 15 seats is not 1.5x the utility of 10 seats, but you could equivalently argue that the value of a seat is different for different candidates.
This is what happens when you have proportional voting.
Perot was a different case. His popular opinions were effectively co-opted by both parties, and he was by almost all expert accounts a spoiler for both Bush and Clinton equally. It was a very different, but still interesting, situation.
As Rym said Ross Perot was most successful at this, but other parties are not unsuccessful. Republicans have pretty much absorbed the Constitution Party and Democrats have taken up the environmental issues of the Green Party.