Even though a glance at my Substack likes will show I'm probably politcally right of you, nevertheless I hope the Republican candidate gets ground into the dust.
Oh, for sure, there are lots of stories about local elections being decided like this. Although, that said, an individual vote still doesn't matter in a very close election. I get that it *could* had things been a little different, but that's sort of the point - even in very close elections, it doesn't actually matter.
Which isn't to say don't vote, or that voting doesn't matter at all. It's just...kinda weird?
Why should our actions only "matter" if our individual contribution on it's own makes the difference? I get being 1 vote of thousands isn't glorious, but being glorious isn't the only thing that "matters". Just because I can't do something on my own doesn't mean I shouldn't contribute. We don't all need to be heroes all the time.
For sure, that was sort of my point. It was that the ostensible purpose of voting is to add a point to your team's score, but tons and tons of people vote knowing that the score won't really change if they do or don't vote. And I think part of the explanation behind that has to be what you're saying - they want to contribute, even if their contribution is, in some technical sense, meaningless.
On one hand, yes - no single vote has ever tipped the scales in a Presidential election.
On the other hand, it's...yes, individual votes matter - because what makes the pile of sand so big is people collectively deciding that they too will join in. And if everyone adopted the 'My vote wont tip the scales, why bother'...we'd have a 0-0 score at the end.
It's like a Sports game - the only way to score is to play, and by voting, you've added one more point to your team's score.
And that does matter, in a small way, because its not just who wins - but by how much. Winning with 60% of the electorate (which seems impossible today) represents a much bigger mandate to govern than winning with 50%+1
And at smaller, downballot races - well, we've had numerous examples of where that 1 vote mattered. Where if that person who stayed home had gone, it would have been a coin flip. Where if they'd brought a likeminded friend, it would have changed the outcome.
Which is to say, vote - and I too hope it's for Kamala, because Trump is profoundly unfit to be President. Here's hoping enough of America agrees for it to matter.
All of this seems even more true today. It does seem like a bunch of people in places like California and New Jersey didn't vote because they thought their vote wouldn't make a difference. And though no single vote would've mattered, a lot of people not voting probably changed the popular vote margin a good bit - and that does seem like it's going to matter in how the next four years go.
It definitely matters. In CA, we just failed to ban slavery, which is mind boggling to me - but when you look at how turnout and voting patterns changed, suddenly it's not that surprising, since we're in a general backlash against anything "Progressive" because it's the easy scapegoat for things like why the streets of downtown SF literally stink.
As the saying goes, all politics is local - the economy may be great at the macro scale, but at the scale of people trying to make ends meet, things are pretty dogshit - easy example, I've been out of work for a year, I know I have a competitive resume for jobs I'm trying to apply for, and I still see a 95% or so rejection rate at the pre-interview stage.
All the evidence I've seen so far is people voted based on that above all else - Trump went "Shit sucks and its the fault of <Scapegoats>", Dems failed to counter message with "Shit sucks and its the fault of billionaires" because, well, they're in bed with em.
Yeah, I'm sure that there will be plenty of various postmortems about what happened in all of this, and I'm sure that story will be a big part of it. The one thing that I'd add to it (which is starting to become conventional-ish wisdom at this point, but not quite) is that a lot of is also social media. Politics feel like they're also becoming increasingly digitally local, where your opinions are determined by the corner of the internet that you exist in. You can't really digest the entire economy, so you digest what's happening in your neighborhood - and I'd argue, also what's on your TikTok feed.
I think that works for those of us who are online a lot.
But I also feel what this election (And elections globally this year) have revealed is for a lot of the population, they don't really pay attention to politics. Their votes are "Is my life good RN? Vote incumbent. Is my life bad/worse? Throw incumbent out."
Realizing that a lot more people simply don't pay attention, like, at all, was both eye opening and depressing
That's actually where I think things have changed a lot. Though there are a lot of people who don't pay attention to politics, social media makes politics unavoidable. It used to be that if you either cared about the news and read the newspaper, so you knew about Richard Nixon, or didn't care, so you didn't read and didn't know anything. Now, you can not care, but you'll still know a lot about Trump because political memes are everywhere on Twitter and Tiktok. There are now low information voters, but there aren't un-opinionated voters.
Huhm - I suppose I agree with that, somewhat. Maybe it's that it's shifted so basically there's a huge mass of "I hate them both" voters now, and so in the end they sort of revert to "If good, I hate the occupant less than the challenger, if bad vice versa?"
Probably one of the dumbest ways to elect a leader. Electoral college has far outlived itscusefulness, if it had any to begin with. Especially since I am in a swing state and I'm so sick of all the political ads.
The Electoral College made sense when states were the central entity in the US political system. The original system was that states voted on the president, but people's votes only mattered with the state's consent.
At present all of those assumptions have been wrong for at least one generation. The political system changed, even if many laws didn't catch up.
I'm currently living in Pennsylvania, so yeah, I've never thought I'd miss bad commercials for AT&T and Toyota, but I miss the bad commercials for AT&T and Toyota.
This is a great read. I am curious given your background what your thoughts are on the vote counts that have resulted, particularly in the battle ground states. It doesn't add up to me given what happened in prior elections and the momentum for Kamala. There are a lot of theories running around by people that I don't think have any idea what they are talking about.
Thanks, I appreciate that. On the results, I'm certainly no expert here, but I don't know of anything that would make me suspect the results. Prior to the election, people do a lot of very granular modeling - county by county, and in some cases, precinct by precinct - about how they think it'll turn out. The actual results favored Trump a bit more than the models expected, but in a pretty uniform way across lots of counties and precincts, and in ways that were somewhat demographically similar (eg, rural voters turned out X% more than expected, or whatever). To fraudulently create that result, you'd have to not only somehow cast 10% more votes than expected in thousands of precincts, you'd have to choose those precincts such that they'd match some consistent demographic pattern. That'd require some massive operation to pull off, and one that would surely leave behind some trail of evidence. Nothing like that has emerged at all, so it seems very hard to believe that it existed.
(That said, I think there are legitimate questions about the legality and the effect of things like Elon Musk running these lotteries to effectively buy votes. It's an election integrity problem, but one of a very different sort than stuffing ballot boxes or what people typically mean when they question if the results were real.)
I realize this is pulling the conversation back in the direction of data... but I'm curious of your opinion on traditional polls vs prediction markets (like polymarket). Do you think the prediction markets will become the new standard at some point? Also - I noticed that polymarket was the number 4 app and Kalshi (election betting) the number 1 app on the iOS app store free apps charts. That is pretty wild.
I honesty don't know what to make of all the prediction market stuff. Obviously, it got this year "right," though the polls (that Iowa one notwithstanding) were generally decent. Though my very uneducated guess is that, in say 2028, there won't be a ton of confidence in either. People are getting harder and harder to poll, and anecdotally, it seems like pollsters are having to do more and more statistical gymnastics to weight responses. But prediction markets are seem like they're basically meme markets that can be heavily swayed by GME-style Reddit stuff.
I don't know that I'd quite say that. People probably trust the market for treasury bonds as being "right," and it probably is. I think it's more that prediction markets seem to attract weird very online meme-y stuff, and that's a market with all sorts of strange incentives and herd behavior. It's not that it's dumb money, but it's weird money.
For sure; I think the story is different for smaller local elections. But event still, I think you can read stories like this in two ways. One is that elections can sometimes be very close! The other is, even in close elections, the choice one person makes inside of a voting booth still didn't technically matter.
Though also, I think this highlights something else, which is most elections *can't* be decided by one vote. If it gets down to being very close, there are recounts and cured ballots and all of that. And if the tallies after that turn it into a 10-vote-or-fewer margin, it's probably ends up in a courtroom anyway.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, as did the people who lost by one vote. Losing a governorship by 0.0047%, or 133 ballots is a big deal. What if those 133 people decided to stay home? Every vote matters. Just ask Al Gore. :)
It's interesting how each of the 2 trillion votes cast has been both meaningless and world-changing at the same time.
As America's disillusionment with the state of politics grows, is it time we incentivize voter participation? $100 tax credit for those who vote? Or, would that muddy the magic of democracy...
The funny thing is, then someone would probably run on a platform to make it more, and someone would say that we need to cut it because of the deficit, and it would become the weirdest orobourous of incentives in history.
Even though a glance at my Substack likes will show I'm probably politcally right of you, nevertheless I hope the Republican candidate gets ground into the dust.
In my little municipalities there have been several votes decided by a handful of voters. We don’t just vote on the top of the ballot!
Oh, for sure, there are lots of stories about local elections being decided like this. Although, that said, an individual vote still doesn't matter in a very close election. I get that it *could* had things been a little different, but that's sort of the point - even in very close elections, it doesn't actually matter.
Which isn't to say don't vote, or that voting doesn't matter at all. It's just...kinda weird?
Why should our actions only "matter" if our individual contribution on it's own makes the difference? I get being 1 vote of thousands isn't glorious, but being glorious isn't the only thing that "matters". Just because I can't do something on my own doesn't mean I shouldn't contribute. We don't all need to be heroes all the time.
For sure, that was sort of my point. It was that the ostensible purpose of voting is to add a point to your team's score, but tons and tons of people vote knowing that the score won't really change if they do or don't vote. And I think part of the explanation behind that has to be what you're saying - they want to contribute, even if their contribution is, in some technical sense, meaningless.
On one hand, yes - no single vote has ever tipped the scales in a Presidential election.
On the other hand, it's...yes, individual votes matter - because what makes the pile of sand so big is people collectively deciding that they too will join in. And if everyone adopted the 'My vote wont tip the scales, why bother'...we'd have a 0-0 score at the end.
It's like a Sports game - the only way to score is to play, and by voting, you've added one more point to your team's score.
And that does matter, in a small way, because its not just who wins - but by how much. Winning with 60% of the electorate (which seems impossible today) represents a much bigger mandate to govern than winning with 50%+1
And at smaller, downballot races - well, we've had numerous examples of where that 1 vote mattered. Where if that person who stayed home had gone, it would have been a coin flip. Where if they'd brought a likeminded friend, it would have changed the outcome.
Which is to say, vote - and I too hope it's for Kamala, because Trump is profoundly unfit to be President. Here's hoping enough of America agrees for it to matter.
All of this seems even more true today. It does seem like a bunch of people in places like California and New Jersey didn't vote because they thought their vote wouldn't make a difference. And though no single vote would've mattered, a lot of people not voting probably changed the popular vote margin a good bit - and that does seem like it's going to matter in how the next four years go.
It definitely matters. In CA, we just failed to ban slavery, which is mind boggling to me - but when you look at how turnout and voting patterns changed, suddenly it's not that surprising, since we're in a general backlash against anything "Progressive" because it's the easy scapegoat for things like why the streets of downtown SF literally stink.
As the saying goes, all politics is local - the economy may be great at the macro scale, but at the scale of people trying to make ends meet, things are pretty dogshit - easy example, I've been out of work for a year, I know I have a competitive resume for jobs I'm trying to apply for, and I still see a 95% or so rejection rate at the pre-interview stage.
All the evidence I've seen so far is people voted based on that above all else - Trump went "Shit sucks and its the fault of <Scapegoats>", Dems failed to counter message with "Shit sucks and its the fault of billionaires" because, well, they're in bed with em.
Yeah, I'm sure that there will be plenty of various postmortems about what happened in all of this, and I'm sure that story will be a big part of it. The one thing that I'd add to it (which is starting to become conventional-ish wisdom at this point, but not quite) is that a lot of is also social media. Politics feel like they're also becoming increasingly digitally local, where your opinions are determined by the corner of the internet that you exist in. You can't really digest the entire economy, so you digest what's happening in your neighborhood - and I'd argue, also what's on your TikTok feed.
I think that works for those of us who are online a lot.
But I also feel what this election (And elections globally this year) have revealed is for a lot of the population, they don't really pay attention to politics. Their votes are "Is my life good RN? Vote incumbent. Is my life bad/worse? Throw incumbent out."
Realizing that a lot more people simply don't pay attention, like, at all, was both eye opening and depressing
That's actually where I think things have changed a lot. Though there are a lot of people who don't pay attention to politics, social media makes politics unavoidable. It used to be that if you either cared about the news and read the newspaper, so you knew about Richard Nixon, or didn't care, so you didn't read and didn't know anything. Now, you can not care, but you'll still know a lot about Trump because political memes are everywhere on Twitter and Tiktok. There are now low information voters, but there aren't un-opinionated voters.
Huhm - I suppose I agree with that, somewhat. Maybe it's that it's shifted so basically there's a huge mass of "I hate them both" voters now, and so in the end they sort of revert to "If good, I hate the occupant less than the challenger, if bad vice versa?"
A sort of Internet-Age Low-Info, I guess.
Probably one of the dumbest ways to elect a leader. Electoral college has far outlived itscusefulness, if it had any to begin with. Especially since I am in a swing state and I'm so sick of all the political ads.
The Electoral College made sense when states were the central entity in the US political system. The original system was that states voted on the president, but people's votes only mattered with the state's consent.
At present all of those assumptions have been wrong for at least one generation. The political system changed, even if many laws didn't catch up.
I'm currently living in Pennsylvania, so yeah, I've never thought I'd miss bad commercials for AT&T and Toyota, but I miss the bad commercials for AT&T and Toyota.
ditto. go birds
This is a great read. I am curious given your background what your thoughts are on the vote counts that have resulted, particularly in the battle ground states. It doesn't add up to me given what happened in prior elections and the momentum for Kamala. There are a lot of theories running around by people that I don't think have any idea what they are talking about.
Thanks, I appreciate that. On the results, I'm certainly no expert here, but I don't know of anything that would make me suspect the results. Prior to the election, people do a lot of very granular modeling - county by county, and in some cases, precinct by precinct - about how they think it'll turn out. The actual results favored Trump a bit more than the models expected, but in a pretty uniform way across lots of counties and precincts, and in ways that were somewhat demographically similar (eg, rural voters turned out X% more than expected, or whatever). To fraudulently create that result, you'd have to not only somehow cast 10% more votes than expected in thousands of precincts, you'd have to choose those precincts such that they'd match some consistent demographic pattern. That'd require some massive operation to pull off, and one that would surely leave behind some trail of evidence. Nothing like that has emerged at all, so it seems very hard to believe that it existed.
(That said, I think there are legitimate questions about the legality and the effect of things like Elon Musk running these lotteries to effectively buy votes. It's an election integrity problem, but one of a very different sort than stuffing ballot boxes or what people typically mean when they question if the results were real.)
I realize this is pulling the conversation back in the direction of data... but I'm curious of your opinion on traditional polls vs prediction markets (like polymarket). Do you think the prediction markets will become the new standard at some point? Also - I noticed that polymarket was the number 4 app and Kalshi (election betting) the number 1 app on the iOS app store free apps charts. That is pretty wild.
I honesty don't know what to make of all the prediction market stuff. Obviously, it got this year "right," though the polls (that Iowa one notwithstanding) were generally decent. Though my very uneducated guess is that, in say 2028, there won't be a ton of confidence in either. People are getting harder and harder to poll, and anecdotally, it seems like pollsters are having to do more and more statistical gymnastics to weight responses. But prediction markets are seem like they're basically meme markets that can be heavily swayed by GME-style Reddit stuff.
ya - great point about markets. It is almost like which ever people trust more its more likely to be wrong?
I don't know that I'd quite say that. People probably trust the market for treasury bonds as being "right," and it probably is. I think it's more that prediction markets seem to attract weird very online meme-y stuff, and that's a market with all sorts of strange incentives and herd behavior. It's not that it's dumb money, but it's weird money.
Ya - right - I was just speaking of meme prediction markets
working on a better way than elections - https://democracycreative.substack.com/?utm_medium=web
We may need this sooner than later, it turns out.
Actually Benn, one vote can make a difference. You should read this excellently written and in-depth article about the Washington election process.
How WA’s close 2004 governor’s election shook voters’ faith — and drove reforms | The Seattle Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/how-was-close-2004-governors-election-shook-voters-faith-and-drove-reforms/
For sure; I think the story is different for smaller local elections. But event still, I think you can read stories like this in two ways. One is that elections can sometimes be very close! The other is, even in close elections, the choice one person makes inside of a voting booth still didn't technically matter.
Though also, I think this highlights something else, which is most elections *can't* be decided by one vote. If it gets down to being very close, there are recounts and cured ballots and all of that. And if the tallies after that turn it into a 10-vote-or-fewer margin, it's probably ends up in a courtroom anyway.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, as did the people who lost by one vote. Losing a governorship by 0.0047%, or 133 ballots is a big deal. What if those 133 people decided to stay home? Every vote matters. Just ask Al Gore. :)
You know, suddenly losing by 133 votes sounds pretty great.
It's interesting how each of the 2 trillion votes cast has been both meaningless and world-changing at the same time.
As America's disillusionment with the state of politics grows, is it time we incentivize voter participation? $100 tax credit for those who vote? Or, would that muddy the magic of democracy...
The funny thing is, then someone would probably run on a platform to make it more, and someone would say that we need to cut it because of the deficit, and it would become the weirdest orobourous of incentives in history.
That would be like trying to pay me $100 to eat a restaurant that only serves bad food.
When you're complaining about the bad food, I'm pretty sure there're a lot of starving people in China. Just eat and enjoy