Can't tell the players without a scorecard...

[jducoeur]

If, like me, you're trying to muddle through the primary process (which just for once is interesting enough to pay attention to), you may want to check out CNN's Delegate Scorecard. It's a bit opaque at first, but digging around in it does provide enough information to more or less understand what's going on. In particular, the Delegate Explainer page gives a concise overview of each party's policies.

Bear in mind, understanding does not bring happiness: now that I grok the superdelegate thing, I can't say I like it. But it does explain why the scorecard shows Clinton well ahead of Obama in the totals -- she starts out with a well-schmoozed collection of superdelegates who have already said that they are supporting her. And I don't have a huge amount of respect for the fact that delegate assignment is proportional unless you fall below 15% in a state, in which case you get nothing. Nicely designed to make sure that the edges of the party don't have a say in the convention, presumably in the name of orderliness. (OTOH, some Republican states are strictly winner-take-all, which I respect even less.)

That said, I was startled and ruefully amused to see that MA already has 11 delegates listed on one side or another. And the scorecard does drive home the plausibility of a split convention, with Edwards playing kingmaker if he stays in the race. The media has been making a huge deal about who "won" Iowa and NH, but the reality is that Clinton and Obama are separated by exactly one delegate in each -- that is, they are exactly tied in the delegates from the states that have actually spoken so far -- and Edwards really isn't far behind.

Oh, and it's worth noting, because nothing in the media would lead you to realize it: Romney is winning so far on the Republican side. Not even counting the unpledged delegates who have indicated support for him, he won outright in Wyoming (largely ignored), and came in a strong second in the other two states. Like I said six months ago, I still see him as the likeliest Republican candidate: while I personally think he's vile, he's a smooth operator and a skilled campaigner. And his lack of principles means that people don't tend to dislike him for *specific* things, as they do all the other candidates. (Yes, the Mormon thing hurts him a bit, but the times have turned ecumenical -- being avidly of *some* faith is, I believe, seen by many as more important than weakly of a specific one.)

The moral of the story seems to be: ignore the way the media is spinning this, and pay attention to the numbers. They want to make each state look winner-take-all (indeed, from the way they talk, you can scarcely tell otherwise), but the reality is *much* subtler and more interesting than that, especially in a messy race like this one...

Comments

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

As far as Wyoming goes - didn't the Republican party say they will not count WY's delegates due to their primary date switch?

[laurion]

Yes, that was part of the discussion recently on NPR.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Missed that amidst the far louder hoopla about the Democratic side and which states were being discounted. That does certainly weaken Romney, but it's still a damned interesting indicator. I'm very skeptical about the view of some pundits that he's suddenly all but down for the count...

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I had already noticed that the winner-take-all news media had turned an effective Clinton/Edwards tie in Iowa into Clinton being in third place, and an effective Clinton/Obama tie in NH into Clinton being in first place.

But OMG: Clinton already has 39 delegates from New York, and Obama already has 15 from Illinois, weeks before those states' respective primaries. It's good to be a Senator....

There used to be a "smoke-filled room" approach, in which party leaders would simply decide what one name they wanted to put forth in November, with little or no public input. This has a number of problems, including that the party leaders may seriously misestimate the appeal of various candidates to ordinary voters.

The opposite approach is a strict popularity contest within the party. This has problems too: one would expect it to choose somebody near the center of the party, which might be far enough from the center of the national voting population to lose the general election.

I guess this "superdelegate" thing is a compromise between the aforementioned two bad approaches. I'd still prefer eliminating the need for each party to pick a single nominee, and letting the voters decide among all the candidates in November using some kind of ranked ballot (Borda, or Condorcet, or IRB, or ...).

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I'm honestly beginning to think that people trying to follow the race is a large part of the problem. it allows people to be influenced not base upon policy, but upon some proclaimed status which doensn't directly relate to policy.

For the normal, individual voter, the state of the race is close to meaningless. You should go out and vote for who you want in your primary. You should go out and vote for who you want in the general election. You should give your volunteer time or monetary donations to those you like. The state of the race is not relevant to who you really want to win, deep down, if you had your druthers.

Following the race does not aid any of that. The only point to it would be strategizing (I like candidate A, but A looks unlikely to be able to win against C, so I'll vote for B instead, who while less preferable looks more electable). And if you hate some candidate within your party so much that you feel a need to do that, you're likely in the wrong party to begin with.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

The only point to it would be strategizing

Sadly, in our current election system, strategizing *is* relevant. In a more advanced system, such as hudebnik referred to above, simply "voting for who you like" can produce optimal results. In our current, one vote, winner-take-all system, it clearly does not, as your own example illustrates.

And if you hate some candidate within your party so much that you feel a need to do that, you're likely in the wrong party to begin with.

??? Where does "hate" enter into it? I may *prefer* A to B, or B to C, but who says I hate any of them?

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Sadly, in our current election system, strategizing *is* relevant.

In the theoretical system, strategy can be relevant, yes.

However, I have yet to see an analysis that suggests that in the practical world, anything more fine than "I don't want to vote for Nader, since I know he cannot win, and that means I'd effectively steal a vote from Gore" has predictable impact. Especially with the tiny, diluted, filtered value of a single vote in the current system.

The problem is akin to a signal-to-noise issue: strategy requires (1)information about the current state of the race and (2) an accurate model of how the other voters will behave (rationally or irrationally, what kind of strategies *they* will use in return, and so on). The first can sometimes be gotten, if you work hard. The second, however, is not available. Strategy in the current system is guessing - the current performance of pollster predictions demonstrates that rather nicely, I think.

If we cannot predict what the next "Cabbage Patch Doll" or "Beanie Baby" will be, we cannot effectively strategize individual votes for elections.

I may *prefer* A to B, or B to C, but who says I hate any of them?

Oh, come on! Let's not get that nitpicky on word usage. We are talking about the case where your dislike of a candidate within your own party is so great that you are willing to abandon voting for your own favorite to vote against the other guy. This calls for dislike above mere "preference".

winnability?

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

What about all the talk about "winnability" while candidates are running for primaries? Their argument is "forget about which candidate of our party you like the best; I'm the one who can actually beat a candidate of the other party." I doubt so many candidates, campaign managers, and media analysts would spend so much time on "winnability" if they didn't think a significant number of primary voters would use this sort of "strategic" reasoning.

Yes, successful strategic voting requires both accurate information about the current state of the race, and an accurate model of how other voters will behave. Thought experiment: what if neither one was "accurate", but the voter didn't know that? Then the voter would be likely to try to vote strategically anyway, right? In reality, most voters are drowning in "information about the current state of the race", however accurate and unbiased it may be, and our "model of how other voters will behave" is the simplistic one that they'll vote the way the latest poll said.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Waitaminnit. You mean the C in question is supposed to be in the same party as A and B? I don't think I've ever heard of people following the strategy you describe in *that* case. It doesn't even seem to make sense. The whole point of the "electability" idea is that you want a candidate who can beat the *other* party's candidate, not another nominee from your own party.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Sadly, in our current election system, strategizing *is* relevant.

Not so much for the individual. The chance your vote is going to make a difference is stunningly small, per the normal public goods problem. That really leaves you free to vote for whomever you like, for whatever reason pleases you.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

It's true that the chance your vote will change anything is stunningly small, but if this doesn't dissuade you from voting in the first place, why would it dissuade you from voting strategically?

Furthermore, since fewer people vote in primaries than in general elections, the chance of your primary vote making a difference in selecting the party's candidate may be significantly greater than the corresponding chance in November.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

For myself, it's because I derive a personal benefit from participating in the process - it makes me feel like a citizen. Now it may turn out that people who hold such views are going to expend additional effort strategizing about it, but that requires a lot of additional effort: not only do you have to form opinions about who will do better against whom, when that is fuzzy information at best, you should probably also analyze the likelihood that your take on the information is wrong. If that likelihood turns out to be high, then I think you're back to just voting for the candidate you like.

Furthermore, since fewer people vote in primaries than in general elections, the chance of your primary vote making a difference in selecting the party's candidate may be significantly greater than the corresponding chance in November.

I disbelieve. Ten times virtually nothing is still itty-bitty.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

... if you hate some candidate within your party so much that you feel a need to do that...

I think it's much more common to strategize about winning the general election in November: I like candidate A from my party, but A looks unlikely to be able to win against C from the other major party, so I'll vote for B instead, who while less preferable looks more electable.

[jducoeur]

Yaas. Certainly that dynamic is heavily in play this year, where "beating Hilary Clinton" is one of the most important election issues for a non-trivial number of voters...

[jducoeur]

I'm honestly beginning to think that people trying to follow the race is a large part of the problem. it allows people to be influenced not base upon policy, but upon some proclaimed status which doensn't directly relate to policy.

That's fair, but the fact is that the media *are* quite obsessed about the whole thing -- if you watch the evening news at all, it's impossible to avoid their "analyses", and potentially be biased by them. So I think it's at least an improvement to be looking at more accurate data, which tends to look a lot less catastrophic. (Personally, I found it a fine antidote to the "Obama LOSTLOSTLOST" that was all over the news yesterday.)

And if you hate some candidate within your party so much that you feel a need to do that, you're likely in the wrong party to begin with.

Actually, I think that might well be true of some Republicans at this point. But that mostly emphasizes that they are effectively several small parties trying to lump themselves together...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Nicely designed to make sure that the edges of the party don't have a say in the convention

Eh? The conventions have basically been irrelevant, save perhaps for having the VP candidate announced during them, for several decades now. Lots of talk, no actual impact on the candidate. I mean, theoretically the most important thing decided by the convention (not including the candidates, which have been done deals by the convention for the last 40 years) is the official platform. And when's the last time that was even mentioned during the actual campaigns? They're not going to put anything in said platform that'd be radically different from expectations, and the candidate can just ignore it anyway if they choose.

Admittedly, with the combination of Tsunami Tuesday and it coming so early in the nomination process and it likely no single candidate on either side will have gone on a commanding run by then, it is more likely than usual that a convention may decide a candidate. But other than that possibility, the conventions are basically irrelevant to anything real and/or significant.

[jducoeur]

The conventions have basically been irrelevant

Yeeesssss -- because the system is designed pretty specifically to lead to a clear coronation at the convention. One of the things that *causes* that coronation effect is throwing out the votes of the marginal candidates. Without that, the chances of someone coming into the convention with a clear majority would be significantly reduced, and the similarly the odds that the leading candidates would have to listen to and sway the fringes would be increased.

Whether this is good or bad can be debated -- like I said, it does make things orderly, and if orderliness is your priority, it's a positive. But it makes the whole thing less optimal as a democratic process, and forces the voters to have to do more "strategic" thinking, since voting for a fringe candidate (who will come in with less than 15% of the vote) is essentially throwing your vote away. If the system were more fully proportional, by contrast, the odds would be higher that voting for your first choice would have *some* effect, by increasing the likelihood of a contested convention where your views might get an airing...

Proportional representation

[metageek.livejournal.com]

If the system were more fully proportional,

The idea of a proportional system sounds good; but the only ones I've heard of in actual use are parliamentary systems. The problem with a parliament is that you don't vote for the person; you vote for the party. The MPs are then required to follow the party line, which means you can't change anything by voting in a different MP.

There are other possibilities, but I don't know if they've ever been tried. You could let people pick their representatives regardless of geography, and have each representative's power be proportional to the number of votes they received (with some sort of cap, to avoid having one representative who constitutes a majority). This would let people around the country who like Fringe Opinion X come together to vote for an Xist, the way a proportional parliament lets them vote for Fringe Party X.

One interesting idea would be to have referenda for everything, but let people delegate their vote to a proxy. They can withdraw their proxy at any time, and they can vote for themselves for any given vote, so feedback would be quick and cheap. Oh, and nobody can find out who your proxy is, so you can't sell your vote. (This last requires implausibly good software, unfortunately.)

Re: Proportional representation

[jducoeur]

That wasn't at all what I was talking about -- I'm just talking about the *Democratic Party convention delegates* being chosen fully proportionally.

At the moment, it's a sort of half-assed semi-proportional system, designed to be proportional enough to make people feel good, but with such a high barrier to entry that in practice only a few high-profile candidates stand a chance. The votes of anyone who doesn't get 15% in a given state are effectively thrown out.

If that barrier was removed, the odds would be higher that, come convention time, there wouldn't be a single clear winner, increasing the odds that the leading candidates would have to do some negotiations with the minor candidates to win their support. This would unquestionably be messier (and would have its own failure modes, I'm sure), but it would be more fully democratic in spirit, increasing the likelihood that the minor candidates (and their supporters) would at least be able to influence things a bit...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

(Yes, the Mormon thing hurts him a bit, but the times have turned ecumenical -- being avidly of *some* faith is, I believe, seen by many as more important than weakly of a specific one.)

It'll be interesting to see that tested. While the conservatives have been pushing the vague "people of faith" really hard, the people who care about faith as a political issue often care quite a lot about what specific faith a candidate is. (And in any event, it only really seems to be ecumenical as far as including people who will declare that Jesus Christ is their personal savior, which is stretching the term.)

[jducoeur]

(And in any event, it only really seems to be ecumenical as far as including people who will declare that Jesus Christ is their personal savior, which is stretching the term.)

Oh, sure -- but I think a Mormon can say that with a straight face. It's a pretty weird offshoot of Christianity, but that's still where it started.

Yes, there will be people who condemn Romney as a heretic. But given the choice between, say, him and the Libertine Liberal Baby-Eating Giuliani, I suspect many will get past that...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the "personal savior" bit doesn't just mean that you're a member of a Christian denomination, it means you're "born again," a distinction which is quite important to the people who believe in that. Romney says it on the campaign trail because he's good at pandering, but it's definitely not a part of Mormon doctrine.

If they don't get Huckabee and have to choose between Romney and a worse choice, there's always the third choice, which is staying home. Before the modern Religious Right, there was a strong strain in evangelicalism toward staying out of politics because it was an unclean business, and that could certainly reassert itself. Like I said, I'll be very interested to see if "person of faith" is enough to motivate religious voters.

[jducoeur]

Oh, absolutely. I'm very encouraged by the signs that American Christianity is starting to shake off the chains of the political right wing -- some by getting out of politics, some by recognizing that the priorities of the left are in some ways more in tune with them. I don't expect them to turn out in force in this election unless Huckabee is the candidate (in which case a lot of *other* Republicans will stay home).

Really, the Democrats had *better* win this election. Given how badly riven the Republicans are right now, it would be a sign of terminal incompetence if they don't...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Apparently the "superdelegate" thing was instituted after the 1972 campaign to keep the rabble from nominating someone like McGovern again. Needless to say, I don't like it at all (both in principle, and because the wise elders don't seem to be any better at picking good candidates than us rabble.)

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

Romney is winning so far on the Republican side.

Yep. As I said to DSR, "So what if McCain wins one state and Huckabee wins another. Romney being everyone's second choice makes him a bigger winner."

The delegate count confirms that. *sigh* Vile is a good word for him.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Except that the Race for Perceived Momentum is winner-take-all; second place counts for bupkes. I recall a Presidential campaign in which the Iowa caucus came out A, B, C, and the New Hampshire primary came out C, B, A. I happened to like candidate B, and was most annoyed when the press decreed that his campaign was effectively over because he hadn't taken first place anywhere, even though he had beaten each of the other two just as often as they had beaten him. Under a Borda count or a Condorcet count, it was a three-way tie, but under winner-take-all, it was a two-way tie. Why doesn't that reasoning apply to Romney?

Which is really more important: the (winner-take-all) Race for Perceived Momentum, or the (winner-take-some, others-determined-in-smoke-filled-room) Race for Delegates? Ultimately, the delegates decide the party nominee, but subsequent primaries are heavily affected by Perceived Momentum.

Helluva way to run a railroad....

[jducoeur]

There are some interesting feedback effects here. So long as it is at least perceived as a three or more way race, Romney can afford to coast along as everyone's second choice. That is, while the *first* choice keeps swinging back and forth, with second somewhere in the running each time, second can continue to do better than either of the firsts, because everyone continues to perceive the race as wide open. Being seen as the compromise candidate isn't a *terrible* situation, especially in a party that is so visibly split, although it's far from ideal.

As soon as it's down to Romney and one other person, the calculus changes quite a bit. At that point, he needs to be seen as the leader, otherwise he's the loser.

Or to put it another way: at the moment, there really is no clear Perceived Momentum on the Republican side. No one is a clear leader, and at least four candidates are seen as having a serious chance. So long as that's the case, Romney can afford his current position. (Although getting another outright win would help him a lot.) It's notably different from the Democratic race, where relatively few people think Edwards actually has a chance, so I expect his support to gradually dry up unless he does really well in SC...

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

So long as it is at least perceived as a three or more way race, Romney can afford to coast along as everyone's second choice. That is, while the *first* choice keeps swinging back and forth, with second somewhere in the running each time, second can continue to do better than either of the firsts, because everyone continues to perceive the race as wide open. Being seen as the compromise candidate isn't a *terrible* situation....

But that's exactly the situation I described from a previous election cycle. (I think Candidate B, who came in second in both Iowa and NH and was pronounced dead, was Paul Simon, which I guess makes it 1988.)

Our system does not favor broadly acceptable compromise candidates; it favors whichever candidate is the first choice of the largest voting bloc, no matter how vehemently the rest of the voters hate that candidate.

[jducoeur]

That's structurally true in the general election, but not so much in the primaries. Since the primaries are allocated proportionally (at least in many cases), a compromise candidate actually stands a halfway decent chance in principle. The only real problem for compromise candidates in the primary is that the *media* are so strongly programmed to talk in terms of winner-take-all that they bias the populace to believe in that. So people write a candidate off *much* more quickly than makes any real sense, simply because they've been *told* the person is "losing".

Mind, it only goes so far. Romney will have to take *some* states soon in order to be taken seriously by enough of the electorate. But with the lead so clearly split right now, there is no one with the momentum to knock him out. The current situation is very unusual in its absolute lack of a meaningful front-runner, in either party. (The media would like to claim otherwise, but they're basically lying: both races are totally up for grabs right now.)