It looks to me more like wishful thinking for viable candidates closer to your views. You're fooling yourself that these viable candidates are out there somewhere, that we're just using the wrong tools to find them.
It's not my views which matter. I was referring to the views of the voters.
The views we're talking about are yours, namely that Clinton's loss indicates the Democrats have a flawed selection process ("Yes, it's the radar I am criticising!"), pretty much the same process as the Republicans, who won.
Two things wrong here.
A) I was responding to you saying something about I was wishing for a candidate closer to my views. My response was that I was talking about the electorates views - not my own. The radar should be optimised to finding a candidate capable of winning the most votes in the election. Whether or not that happens to be a candidate more in line with my views is immaterial to this point
B) I am not saying that Clinton's loss indicates the system is flawed. I am saying the system is flawed, and this might have contributed to Clinton's loss.
Have these alternative selection procedures you keep talking about demonstrated any superiority in selecting a candidate for the main election. I mean, is there evidence from countries that have implemented such procedures.
I don't think your standard is reasonable. I'm not saying empirical evidence is unreasonable, of course, but the kind of evidence you'd need to answer the question as worded would require running the candidate selection twice in parallel with the same candidates, and then running the election with potentially two different sets of candidates to create a proper comparison. This doesn't seem reasonable for official elections.
However, I was proposing a methodology known as
Approval voting. It is used in the US in the following political contexts: Green Parties of Texas and Ohio, the Libertarian Party of Texas, and the US Modern Whig party. It has also been used in the selection process of Secretary General of the UN.
quote:
Approval voting advocates Steven Brams and Dudley R. Herschbach predict that approval voting should increase voter participation, prevent minor-party candidates from being spoilers, and reduce negative campaigning
quote:
One study showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) — it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin as the top two to proceed to a runoff.[35] Le Pen lost by a very high margin in the runoff, 82.2% to 17.8%, a sign that the true top two had not been found. Straight approval voting without a runoff, from the study, still would have selected Chirac, but with an approval percentage of only 36.7%, compared to Jospin at 32.9%. Le Pen, in that study, would have received 25.1%. In the real primary election, the top three were Chirac, 19.9%, Le Pen, 16.9%, and Jospin, 16.2%.A study of various "evaluative voting" methods (approval voting and score voting) during the French presidential election, 2012 showed that "unifying" candidates tended to do better, and polarizing candidates did worse, via the evaluative voting methods than via the plurality system.
From the wiki - the 2002 study is
Approval Voting : An Experiment during the French 2002 Presidential Election by Jean-Franois Laslier and Karine Vander Straeten
Also, you keep talking about Clinton as if she were the only one with negatives. Sanders had negatives, too.
I think you already covered them.
Say the Democrats used a procedure that resulted in the nomination of Sanders. Sanders would have lost in the electoral college bigger than Clinton, and he would not have won a majority of the popular vote. That isn't a big endorsement for your "alternative procedure" that you so obviously hope would have made Sanders the Democratic nominee.
Well you making up the results is not an endorsement obviously. And your result is possible, of course. However, it would mean that, despite Sanders getting more people who say they would vote for him in the Primaries, less people voted for him. This would not be impossible, but it would be unusual if Sanders had the support to win using Approval voting but did much worse in primary election.
You were repeating your point about the Democrats needing to find "candidates more optimally". I expect you'll keep ignoring that Clinton only lost the electoral college because of where 0.05% of the popular vote was cast, and that you'll keep arguing that the electoral college result that was determined by such a minuscule difference means Clinton wasn't the best candidate and that the Democrats need better selection procedures, but you haven't been able to argue your position in a way that makes sense to anyone.
Nope. I'm going to argue that the voting system used in the Primaries is not optimal and can result in nominating someone who would have a lower approval across the party than someone else. If that was to have been the case in 2016, even if the difference was small, it may have cost the election - but the data to verify this doesn't exist - as the other voting system was not used.
I will argue that Clinton's popular vote margin was very small. Small enough that the electoral college winner and the popular vote winner can conceivably differ.
But the number of people who vote does not go up all the time.
It goes up all the time. Not every time. A person that goes out 'all the time' is not literally always out. They just go out a lot. The margin remains more informative.
By decade the average - just counting the Presidential winner as a proxy:
2010s: 65 million
2000s: 60 million
1990s: 46 million
1980s: 49 million
1970s: 44 million
1960s: 39 million
1950s: 35 million
1940s: 27 million
1930s: 26 million
1920s: 18 million {women can now vote}
1910s: 8 million
To say it is 'the second largest in history' as if comparing it to historical data is meaningful is silly. Comparing Clinton's popular vote to Woodrow Wilson's makes no sense with absolute numbers. Wilson got 14% of the popular vote and 3% of the popular vote margins. Much better comparison. Clinton did not do as well as Wilson in either of his elections, and Wilson's 1916 victory was rightly called 'narrow' and 'razor thin'.
By decade Clinton's popular margin was 2nd of two, though it was close.
the population isn't increasing all that fast, certainly not enough to diminish the significance of Clinton's vote total.
She managed to beat both of Dubya's numbers, and got beat by both of Obama's. Trying to compare her to Bill Clinton's results is clearly wildly inappropriate given the disparity in numbers (though he got a 9% and 6% margin), and it just gets less meaningful as you go back. So yes, that does diminish the significance of the way it is worded.
You shouldn't keep offering arguments that have been shown fatally flawed. You only believe "the method of selection is non-optimal" in ways that meaningfully affect elections because Clinton lost based upon flawed reasoning.
No, I'm basing it on the mathematics of voting systems. It's certainly
arguable, but I'm not basing my opinion of selection methods on the Clinton loss. Only pointing out that Clinton's loss being as marginal as it was, given the opposition from a fairly significant group of traditionally Democrat voters who expressed they would not vote Democrat this time round - makes this a potential occasion where the selection method might have made a difference.
This supposed candidate of whom you speak couldn't possibly be a Democrat
I'd have voted Sanders, who while arguably independent, was a Democrat in this case. The candidate would not need to be as left as Sanders to get my vote. I'd vote for a candidate that split the difference between Clinton and Sanders, or even someone a little more to the right than that.
That doesn't mean nobody could satisfy you, that's not what I mean. But it does mean that any candidate satisfactory to you has no chance of winning in the general election
Which either means I'll either be voting for a DNC loser or not voting for a {potential} DNC winner.
I can't stop saying what is true, and it makes no sense to shift the focus to your 50-100 year timeframe just because it's pointed out that your hypothetical protest vote in 2016 was contrary to your own best interests.
It makes sense if that is where I judge my best interests lie. You judge your best interests to be in the election in front of you. And that's fine, you can go right ahead.
You didn't explain anything.
Except why I vote the way I do. Which was the thing I was seeking to explain. Just because you disagree with the explanation does not make it not an explanation.
You *do* have interests today, one of them is wanting to come to the US
I do. But my voting strategy is not based merely on them. It is also based on longer term interests.
Now I know you say you put more emphasis on your long term interests than on your short term interests, but you personally have almost no long term interests in the 50-100 year timeframe, because during most of that timeframe you'll be dead.
I'm fine with this. If I die, and my country is in a better position politically than when I was born, I consider that a victory, politically.
It wasn't something I forgot. I was trying to track back why you were reintroducing it into the conversation.
Because it was on of your expressed views, which was one of the things we were discussing...your expressed views.
c) is dumb. Remember all the science predictions of the 1950's of rocket cars and personal flying packs? Well, looking 50-100 years out politically has just as much accuracy.
If my vote was a prediction, then yes you'd be right.
It is not a prediction. It is a statement made, on that day, for the direction I want the nation to go in.
I think "scare tactics" is the wrong term. I'm against them, but I think all the Democrats were doing was accurately characterizing Trump. That's not a scare tactic, that's just the truth. And looking back on what the Democrats said about Trump during the election anyone can see that it was the truth.
Appealing to fear does not have to be lying. One can say, "Don't walk on that ice, it may break and you'll get cold and wet, possibly even die", without lying.
But anyway, I don't know why you're singling out the Democrats. The Republicans used the same strategy. And that's pretty much the tack taken by the five currently living former presidents, including the Republicans, when they gathered recently in support of hurricane victims.
I'm not suggesting only Democrats do it, it's just that we were talking about Democrats at that point in time. If business as usual is the best method for insuring Trumpesque candidates don't get into power, then that's unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
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