Voting Strategy
In the US, we have a lot of political problems. I don't mean problems with general policy (which we have plenty of), but systemic problems regarding our political system.
We have first-past-the-post voting, voter disenfranchisement via the electoral college and gerrymandering, basically legalized bribery through lobbying, inconvenient voting, and just a generally uneducated populace with regards to how the political system works, and what candidates can and can't feasibly do.
A common sentiment I've seen on sites like reddit is that you're just a rube if you vote for the Republicans or the Democrats, and everything would be better if you stopped being a sheep, and voted for your more ideal third party candidate.
More specifically, people have pointed out how far right the American political center has moved, and they blame people for voting for candidates like Barrack Obama, who, from a global perspective, is a center-right politician, even though he's in our left, Democratic party.
I can understand why one would think something like this. It seems intuitively sound to think that voting for a further left third party candidate would shift your political system further left, because the will of the people, and the Democrats losing parts of their base or whatever.
The problem is that it doesn't make any sense strategically.
For a strategy to be good, it has to exist in reality, where rules that apply are applied to predictions, and many scenarios are considered and accounted for, instead of just the best case.
In a best case scenario, yes, if we want to shift our politics left, and everyone did their research and voted for their best fit politician that they probably never heard of outside of their research, and they voted in all of their primaries and voted for all of their local representation, we could have a government that better fit the desires of the people. Maybe.
This is similar to communism, which sounds great on paper, but doesn't account for the fact that it's a system made of people, who have limited ability to give a damn about things.
You end up with weird stuff like single issue voters who vote every chance they get, because their research is so easy, turning our country red even though these days they seem to have the minority position. Amplified by out of control rent-seeking, which kills the free time available to the working class to spend on protecting their interests, because they have to work constantly to survive.
In any case, I just wanted to address shifting right, and how it's actually exascerbated by people who vote for far left candidates.
This is slightly modified from some comments I made on reddit:
In a first past the post voting system, the system generally settles on two viable candidates, generally from the two major parties.
When you have a unified right, because of faith and single issue voters, etc., and a fragmented left (which gets more and more likely, the further right the center shifts), the right is able to win elections that they wouldn't be able to win if the left were unified.
Consider if you had a population of 100 people, everyone voted, and everyone voted Republican or Democrat. Either candidate would need an absolute majority of 51 votes to win.
Say three people decide that their Democrat candidate isn't left enough, and they vote for some more left wing third party of your choice. This takes 3 votes that would have been Democrat, and essentially throws them out, since the three votes aren't enough to win. Now the right only needs a simple majority of 49 votes to win, even though the left is an absolute majority.
Now the Democrats are in a position where they need to gain more votes, and they can shift left to appeal to the 3 guys who switched to the more left party, and risk alienating their near center voters, or they can try to appeal to the 49 people on the right by shifting their position a little further right. The potential gain is 16 times greater by shifting right.
Which seems like a better strategy?
The main point is that if you stick to two parties, the absolute majority wins, and things will generally shift slowly in that direction, as one party finds itself unable to win on their current platform.
The problem with chasing the far left is that the bulk of what will swing elections is the center, and moving further left without momentum risks alienating the center. Think of a bell curve. You'll have a higher concentration of the population in the middle of the spectrum.
If you take a look at this table, you'll see that in the 2012 presidential election, 25% of voters identified as liberals, 35% as conservatives, and 40% as moderates: US Presidential election 2012 voter demographics
To win elections, you need to get as much of that center as you can, and hope that your base will play a sound strategy, with respect to the realities of the flaws of a first past the post voting system, and not waste their votes on third parties.
As an aside, I think we're near a tipping point, where the right made a deal with the devil with the Tea Party, and are becoming too radical to sustain popular viability, and they're risking imploding in the near future, at which point they'll be unable to win elections. At that point, they'll be forced to shift left, or risk being replaced by the Dems, at which point a third, far left party, or more moderate right party, may be able to take their place as the dominant second party.
As a further aside, I think we're past the point where voting is our most effective option for effecting our desired social change. Wealth is concentrated into too few influential hands, and things are moving too fast for government policy to keep up. I think decentralized labor organization will be key going forward.