Politics is about keys to power and interest groups. The more keys to power you hold, the more likely you will win. Your positions win or lose you constituencies, leading to whether you win or lose office.
This is how politics works in every country. It is such a powerful concept that Keys to the White House is based solely on this concept from political science, and that is the best prediction system for who will win the presidential election ever designed.
But calling it a prediction system, while true, undermines the true understanding of what the system does. It’s a manual on how to win the presidency.
When looking at the country as a whole, there are thousands of interest groups, but when you distill it down to individuals, every individual will belong to multiple interest groups. I am a tech worker, renter, college graduate, and an investor, among others. Every individual is complicated. Since focusing on thousands of interest groups is impossible, politicians focus on the key issues for each interest groups and find the common threads which will win you the most interest groups in order to win the presidency.
The largest interest groups then distill down to several major issues which make up the Keys to the White House.
The second part is that when trying to find a position which the majority of people will agree with, you don’t necessarily need to go to the center on an issue. What ends up happening is you get policies which have very few supporters overall.
Let’s take the issue of abortion for instance, and go through a political strategy which works, and one which does not. While around 50% of Americans considered themselves pro-life before Roe v Wade was overturned, only around 20% of Americans believed abortion should be restricted in all cases. Source
The issue is that the Republican party position is pretty clearly pushing for the most unpopular position of abortion being banned in all circumstances. Around 50% of Americans support abortion only under certain circumstances, and this is where abortion law is ending up in most states. The question then becomes, what circumstance? 93% of abortions occur during the first trimester, which is still legal in 35 states. The 7% of abortions performed after the first trimester are almost always done for health reasons, not because the parents do not want to keep the child. So allowing abortions in the first trimester and then only allowing for health reasons after that point will make almost no difference in the amount of abortions done. It’s most politically convenient to just let abortion always be legal under all circumstances.
This brings us to the issue of whether people actually understand the issue being discussed. Media has amplified extreme voices who might not be the most qualified in the room to fully understand the issue. This leaves experts and people who actually understand the topic frustrated as ideas which have been debunked get spread around. A big role for politicians and the news media is to center and raise up voices who actually know what they are talking about. Challenge people in their positions and ensure that people actually understand what is going on. I think if more people understood these basic facts about abortion it would not be the major political issue that it is.
Abortion is one of the simplest major issues there is once you bring in these basic facts.
When it comes to even more complex issues regarding economics and foreign policy, the understanding of the average voter drops even further than the fairly straight forward facts about abortion. How much does your average voter in Toledo, Ohio know about the history of Ukraine? Does your average voter in Macon, Georgia understand the mechanisms behind how the European Union and Schengen Area work? I don’t think so. When news media does not educate voters about the complexities of such issues, it becomes easy to understand why people can start to think closed borders are good and that Ukraine is just a rogue oblast of Russia.
These foreign policy decisions, while more complicated than abortion, are still simpler than understanding the complexities of managing monetary policy, or designing health care systems. Monetary policy only has a couple tools, but understanding how those decisions impact the rest of the economy takes an entire college degree to fully understand and derive yourself. That is fairly simple compared to the design of a national health care system where there are many procedures and tradeoffs to consider.
Then once we surrender to the ignorant on these issues we end up with policies which end up being unpopular. Americans wanted peace in Afghanistan, but are dissatisfied with the outcome. The victory of the terrorists was so severe that American approval ratings dropped globally. This is the fallacy of populism. If you try to seek what people think they want, that can often bring you bad and unpopular outcomes.
If only politics was as simple as always following opinion polls with no thought as to the consequences of one’s actions!
Sometimes there are issues which are popular and obviously won’t have major backlash, generally among social issues when expanding freedom. Support for gay marriage only increased after Obama announced his support, with no negative side effects. Expanding freedom like this is usually very straight forward. People get more equal access, and life improves. No one is harmed.
But foreign policy and economics are different. They can often feel far away or abstract to many voters, and it is much easier to misinform people about issues that they never directly interact with. Society usually has to deal with feedback loops from these policies.
Popular misunderstandings of complex issues often lead to poor outcomes, but it also gets further compounded by our election system. Most places in the United States use a partisan two round first past the post election system at the state level, with those state votes aggregated into the electoral college for the presidency using a complex formula. Neither the primaries nor the general election for president are direct or ranked. So when people are voting for their ballot and they are choosing their candidate they are not just thinking “who is my favorite” but are predicting “who do I think will win the election.” If people are rational, and understand the perspectives of most voters this is less of an issue but the problem gets massively amplified by pluralistic ignorance. Instead of voting for their favorite they are voting for the candidate they believe will most likely get the most swing voters, leading to an undesirable outcome.
If that wasn’t bad enough, many politicians fall prey to pluralistic ignorance as well, taking positions which are overall unpopular with most voters, thinking it will convince the mythical swing voter to vote for them. This is how we end up with policies which are not just undesirable, but also unpopular. 45% of Americans believe we should support Ukraine, while 30% of Americans oppose supporting Ukraine, 24% have no opinion. Only 47% of Republicans think we support Ukraine too much. With a 15 point lead, you would think that sending Ukraine weapons to ensure they win the war would be a slam dunk. But given a combination of pluralistic ignorance combined by a fetishization of median voter fallacy we end up with restricting use of weapons, slow deployments, and other critical problems which threaten the security of the entire world. A destabilized world is obviously an undesirable outcome.
The media then amplifies the minority viewpoint which supports Russia in the war, making them seem like a bigger stance then they do. Politicians hear this and then try to court an illusion of a median voter who does not exist.
This combination of politicians drifting away from voters and voters voting against their interest has led to only 21% of Americans approving of Democrats in Congress. Chuck Schumer is being called to resign, even moderate Democrats are pushing for AOC to primary him in 2028, if he doesn’t resign sooner. Biden dropped out of the election, Harris lost, and Trump won with very low approval ratings. The system is clearly broken.
Conclusion
I have outlined three main problems here leading to undesirable outcomes for our country.
- Pluralistic ignorance
- Median voter mythology
- First past the post
These three issues coalesce, leading us to most Americans thinking the country is doing poorly, but understanding they are doing well individually. We get undesirable policy outcomes under all governments as a result. This has concluded to Donald Trump winning a second term as president.
All of this stems from first past the post. Even if we kept the electoral college, which we should obviously abolish, implementing ranked voting and eliminating primaries in legislative, congressional, and gubernatorial elections would improve the quality of politicians we get overall. We will finally be able to vote our conscience without worrying how others will vote. Aiming for the median voter will eventually become a losing strategy as voters will vote instead for candidates who offer real solutions.
Pluralistic ignorance won’t need to be such a major issue in voting anymore. It will no longer matter how you think other people will vote, vote your conscience and fill out your ballot all the way. I cannot guarantee it will work all the time, but eventually voters will realize that strategic voting is no longer mandatory. I can guarantee it will work more frequently than the system we have today, which is clearly broken.
To be clear, the system is not clearly broken because my preferred candidate lost. The system is broken because even within months after an election a majority of Americans disapprove of both parties and the new president had no honeymoon phase.
Ranked voting will ensure that the two party system will break and voting for unpopular policies will guarantee you will bleed votes in the next election. This will force politicians to think through the consequences of their actions, aiming not just for popular policies but also popular outcomes, or they will lose their seat which right now given how far the Republican has drifted to the right is often not a consideration.
Even removing money from politics won’t solve this issue as long as politicians and voters continue to misperceive what people think. People will continue to vote for the candidates they like less in order to prevent the worst candidate from getting into office.
Ranked voting fixes all of these problems.
