The basic mechanics of a US election
I mentioned I might make a post on this, and with the political commentary on my flist heating up, I figured now was a good time.
So, I'm in this class this semester with Clay Shirky. The entire point of the class is to analyze the impact of new media (especially social forms of media) on the election. Clay's a great guy to be studying this with since he's A) really smart, B) really good at social media stuff, C) a political junkie, and D) learned a tremendous amount from the Dean campaign four years ago. I'm going to give an abbreviated sketch of his lecture from our first class meeting because it was, without a doubt, the best simple explanation of the way campaigns work in the US I've ever seen.
First of all: this is a simplification. It's built upon the assumption of a two-party system and doesn't discuss the nuances available when you get third-party candidates. However, the principles here can, with only slight variation which I'm sure you'll be able to extrapolate, help with third-party stuff.
First you have to understand the electoral college. It is crazy-cakes. I won't go into the history of why (but reading the Federalist Papers will clue you in), but the system is one of the biggest safe-guards both for and against democracy ever put together. What's scary is that it works so well. Here are the basics: each state gets some votes, it's roughly (not going into details on the small-state advantage) based on population. Most states (we'll ignore the few exceptions) are winner-take-all. If you get 50.01% of the votes in that state, you get all that state's votes for the presidency. If you get 270 votes from the states, you win.
With that out of the way, let's look at our populations:
We see here a population divided into five categories. From left to right (intentionally): Members of the Democratic party, voters who lean Democrat, independents, voters who lean Republican, and members of the Republican party. Of course the distribution of the population isn't actually like in this chart. These five categories are not, in fact, evenly distributed. If you look at polling data you'll see an ongoing trend that looks more like this:
More and more people each year will self-report as independents rather than as members, or even supporters, of one party or the other. At first glance this is a good thing! Less polarization! More consideration of the real issues and a point-by-point analysis before voting. The destruction of the dominance of political parties! HURRAY!
Unfortunately if you look at voting exit poles you see something a bit different:
Yep. While more people self-report as independent, there is a growing trend that most voters strongly identify with one party or another. What this means is that most of those "independents" are actually "apathetics". They don't identify with one group or another because they can't be bothered to make a decision about their government. They're a giant and growing group of "don't know, don't care".
The problem is that in any US election a lot of people don't vote. A lot. The most reliable voters are the ones most fervent for your cause. This leads us to the first major political strategy you have available in a US election: rallying the base. You take the people who are most likely to be fervent for your cause and you whip them up. Check out Obama's big hope speeches as a great example of this. Look at all those excited people!
Because even members of a party will fail to vote. Or some percentage of them, anyway. Rallying the base seeks to make that percentage as low as possible by getting people excited and mindful and out to the polls. Because the reality is: if you don't have the votes, you don't win. No matter how much people may want you to. So rallying the base looks like this:
Both sides do it, do it for the same reasons, and employ a lot of the same tactics. There's a lot of inspirational speeches ("Here's what we'll do if we win") and doomsday speeches ("Here's the awful thing that will happen if we don't win!") from both sides. The sad fact is that the doomsday speeches tend to be more effective so we see a lot of them from both sides. "Four more years of Bush" is an example, as is "He doesn't have enough experience".
But the base you rally has some fuzzy edges. There are, after all, those people who lean your way but aren't convinced. That leads us to the second political strategy: swaying the independents.
Both sides seek to sway votes to their from that undecided (and generally apathetic) independent center. You can see this from both candidates: they've toned down the extreme rhetoric of the primaries in order to make more centrist promises hoping to sway people to their side.
Here's where things get interesting, actually. In a two-party winner-takes-all system like the one we have in the US it turns out that any vote your opponent doesn't get is literally a vote for you. -1 vote for one side is equal to +1 vote for the other. And swinging someone from one side to the other is a two-vote swing. This means that when you're swaying independents you can aim at two groups. You can aim to get the group that leans your way to vote for you or you can get the group that leans your opponent's way to not vote. Statistically these two things are the same.
Recognizing that a vote not cast for your opponent is a vote cast for you brings us to the third political strategy: suppressing your opponent's base.
Both sides employ tactics to discourage their opponent's bases from voting. Sometimes this is just PR: making speeches about how awful it would be for that guy to win, even if you support hs policies. Sometimes it is legal but morally sketchy: like trying to strike people who have had their homes foreclosed on from the voting rolls. Sometimes it's downright illegal: knowingly directing people to the wrong polling place, physical intimidation, and the like.
The fourth political strategy is... there is no fourth strategy. Those three strategies are the entire array of options that will have any impact on who gets elected in the US. All successful campaign moves are some variation or combination of these three. Anything that isn't is doing nothing.
Those three strategies, in a two-party system, give us six nice little arrows. The whole thing put together looks like this:
If you see a piece of political action, it is either applying pressure to one of these six arrows, or it is doing nothing. It's brutal in its simplicity and brutal in general. There are a lot of historical reasons for us having the system we do, and there are in fact plenty of good reasons for it that persist today. But whatever the reasons, this is how it works.
It is extremely important to remember that all candidates from all parties engage in all three strategies. No one "takes the high road" here. There isn't really a "high road". While the suppression strategy looks pretty dirty at first glance, thinking about it you'll see that it's at least structurally legit. If I know that someone will never vote for me, it's not crazy or even evil to suggest that they protest the other candidate as well and simply vote "I've given it a lot of thought, and you all suck" by staying home.
One very important thing to note here is that all of these arrows are oppositional. Any voters you excite I can suppress. Any voters I sway my way you can sway your way. Neither side can take an action that the other side doesn't have a response to. This leads to the insane escalating spending problem: if you're dumping money into an excite the base campaign in a closely-contested state, then I'll want to dump money in to suppress your base, countering your work. It's not, of course, a direct money battle, but in the modern media landscape money is a huge deal. It's not "whoever spends the most wins", but if you spend the most by a big enough margin you have a much better shot than if you're the one totally outspent.
And there you have it. It's rough, and it does overlook some important nuances, but it's accurate. I put this together because I found it informative, and I feel like a lot of political posts I see are made in a sort of vacuum. I'm hoping that this gives some context to this whole campaign thing, and that people can use it to get a better idea of why various political moves have been made.
Even my political babbling is meta,
Ana
So, I'm in this class this semester with Clay Shirky. The entire point of the class is to analyze the impact of new media (especially social forms of media) on the election. Clay's a great guy to be studying this with since he's A) really smart, B) really good at social media stuff, C) a political junkie, and D) learned a tremendous amount from the Dean campaign four years ago. I'm going to give an abbreviated sketch of his lecture from our first class meeting because it was, without a doubt, the best simple explanation of the way campaigns work in the US I've ever seen.
First of all: this is a simplification. It's built upon the assumption of a two-party system and doesn't discuss the nuances available when you get third-party candidates. However, the principles here can, with only slight variation which I'm sure you'll be able to extrapolate, help with third-party stuff.
First you have to understand the electoral college. It is crazy-cakes. I won't go into the history of why (but reading the Federalist Papers will clue you in), but the system is one of the biggest safe-guards both for and against democracy ever put together. What's scary is that it works so well. Here are the basics: each state gets some votes, it's roughly (not going into details on the small-state advantage) based on population. Most states (we'll ignore the few exceptions) are winner-take-all. If you get 50.01% of the votes in that state, you get all that state's votes for the presidency. If you get 270 votes from the states, you win.
With that out of the way, let's look at our populations:
We see here a population divided into five categories. From left to right (intentionally): Members of the Democratic party, voters who lean Democrat, independents, voters who lean Republican, and members of the Republican party. Of course the distribution of the population isn't actually like in this chart. These five categories are not, in fact, evenly distributed. If you look at polling data you'll see an ongoing trend that looks more like this:
More and more people each year will self-report as independents rather than as members, or even supporters, of one party or the other. At first glance this is a good thing! Less polarization! More consideration of the real issues and a point-by-point analysis before voting. The destruction of the dominance of political parties! HURRAY!
Unfortunately if you look at voting exit poles you see something a bit different:
Yep. While more people self-report as independent, there is a growing trend that most voters strongly identify with one party or another. What this means is that most of those "independents" are actually "apathetics". They don't identify with one group or another because they can't be bothered to make a decision about their government. They're a giant and growing group of "don't know, don't care".
The problem is that in any US election a lot of people don't vote. A lot. The most reliable voters are the ones most fervent for your cause. This leads us to the first major political strategy you have available in a US election: rallying the base. You take the people who are most likely to be fervent for your cause and you whip them up. Check out Obama's big hope speeches as a great example of this. Look at all those excited people!
Because even members of a party will fail to vote. Or some percentage of them, anyway. Rallying the base seeks to make that percentage as low as possible by getting people excited and mindful and out to the polls. Because the reality is: if you don't have the votes, you don't win. No matter how much people may want you to. So rallying the base looks like this:
Both sides do it, do it for the same reasons, and employ a lot of the same tactics. There's a lot of inspirational speeches ("Here's what we'll do if we win") and doomsday speeches ("Here's the awful thing that will happen if we don't win!") from both sides. The sad fact is that the doomsday speeches tend to be more effective so we see a lot of them from both sides. "Four more years of Bush" is an example, as is "He doesn't have enough experience".
But the base you rally has some fuzzy edges. There are, after all, those people who lean your way but aren't convinced. That leads us to the second political strategy: swaying the independents.
Both sides seek to sway votes to their from that undecided (and generally apathetic) independent center. You can see this from both candidates: they've toned down the extreme rhetoric of the primaries in order to make more centrist promises hoping to sway people to their side.
Here's where things get interesting, actually. In a two-party winner-takes-all system like the one we have in the US it turns out that any vote your opponent doesn't get is literally a vote for you. -1 vote for one side is equal to +1 vote for the other. And swinging someone from one side to the other is a two-vote swing. This means that when you're swaying independents you can aim at two groups. You can aim to get the group that leans your way to vote for you or you can get the group that leans your opponent's way to not vote. Statistically these two things are the same.
Recognizing that a vote not cast for your opponent is a vote cast for you brings us to the third political strategy: suppressing your opponent's base.
Both sides employ tactics to discourage their opponent's bases from voting. Sometimes this is just PR: making speeches about how awful it would be for that guy to win, even if you support hs policies. Sometimes it is legal but morally sketchy: like trying to strike people who have had their homes foreclosed on from the voting rolls. Sometimes it's downright illegal: knowingly directing people to the wrong polling place, physical intimidation, and the like.
The fourth political strategy is... there is no fourth strategy. Those three strategies are the entire array of options that will have any impact on who gets elected in the US. All successful campaign moves are some variation or combination of these three. Anything that isn't is doing nothing.
Those three strategies, in a two-party system, give us six nice little arrows. The whole thing put together looks like this:
If you see a piece of political action, it is either applying pressure to one of these six arrows, or it is doing nothing. It's brutal in its simplicity and brutal in general. There are a lot of historical reasons for us having the system we do, and there are in fact plenty of good reasons for it that persist today. But whatever the reasons, this is how it works.
It is extremely important to remember that all candidates from all parties engage in all three strategies. No one "takes the high road" here. There isn't really a "high road". While the suppression strategy looks pretty dirty at first glance, thinking about it you'll see that it's at least structurally legit. If I know that someone will never vote for me, it's not crazy or even evil to suggest that they protest the other candidate as well and simply vote "I've given it a lot of thought, and you all suck" by staying home.
One very important thing to note here is that all of these arrows are oppositional. Any voters you excite I can suppress. Any voters I sway my way you can sway your way. Neither side can take an action that the other side doesn't have a response to. This leads to the insane escalating spending problem: if you're dumping money into an excite the base campaign in a closely-contested state, then I'll want to dump money in to suppress your base, countering your work. It's not, of course, a direct money battle, but in the modern media landscape money is a huge deal. It's not "whoever spends the most wins", but if you spend the most by a big enough margin you have a much better shot than if you're the one totally outspent.
And there you have it. It's rough, and it does overlook some important nuances, but it's accurate. I put this together because I found it informative, and I feel like a lot of political posts I see are made in a sort of vacuum. I'm hoping that this gives some context to this whole campaign thing, and that people can use it to get a better idea of why various political moves have been made.
Even my political babbling is meta,
Ana