Election 2007: Dems surf the wave

The real question is what will politics and governance be like in the U.S. after the collapse of the Republican Party is complete and the U.S. has only one relevant political party. If Virginia is in play for the Democrats, then the Republican nominee for president has no chance of winning.

In 2016, the presidential race will be decided in the Democratic Primary. What will politics be like when the presidential successor is choose in February 2016 but no inaugurated until January 2017?

***To be fair, it’s hard to read too much into the results.***

And yet, it is important to remember that every tsunami begins with just one drop of water.

Can all you Reskunklicans hear the sound?

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It is the sound of doom….

neil, neil, neil…here Steve goes and gives us a little something to smile about, and there you are with the pail of cold water. Did you not sleep well? Have a fight with Mrs. Neil? Just wake up cranky?

I’ve had elections where I wondered why I bothered to vote, knowing that whatever or whoever I was voting for – or against – either didn’t have a chance, or was so popular there was no way it would fail – but I did it anyway. I always do it. As corny as it sounds, I believe that voting is the responsibility we accept for the privilege of living in a democratic society, and that it is the only way to make sure it stays that way. I can call and write and e-mail my various representatives, I can write letters to the editor, talk to my friends and neighbors and co-workers, I can put a sign in front of my house, can volunteer to work on campaigns – but it all comes to the vote.

I want that vote to mean something to the outcome of the election, whether I am voting for state, local or national candidates, or for state and local referenda and bond issues. Even if it doesn’t really make the difference in the outcome, it makes a difference to me. It connects me, binds me, to this country that I love. I vote for America – the America I want, the America I need. It vests me in whatever the outcome is – and I am constantly amazed at how many people not only do not vote, but have never voted. I just don’t get that, neil.

You can laugh at me, deride me for having feelings about voting, if it makes you feel better. In the 2006 cycle, I volunteered to be an election judge and was assigned to my home precinct for both the primary and the general elections. Those were long, long days, that started at 6:00 am and ended well after 10:00 in the evening. But it was gratifying and heartening and uplifting to see people taking their responsibility seriously.

You can mock me and the meaning of the vote all you want, but I never feel more of an American that I do when I’m voting and participating in the process.

“To be fair, it’s hard to read too much into the results.”

True, alas. We’re still saddled with Dear Leaders Pelosi and Reid, who somehow always manage to snatch cowardly defeat from the jaws of any victory.

Ed Stephan wrote:

“To be fair, it’s hard to read too much into the results.”

True, alas. We’re still saddled with Dear Leaders Pelosi and Reid, who somehow always manage to snatch cowardly defeat from the jaws of any victory.

Uh, we won?

Something is going good for us? How about reading that into the results?

What will politics be like when the presidential successor is choose in February 2016 but no inaugurated until January 2017?

We’ll worry about that if it ever happens. Frankly I’d rather have just one genuinely secular constitutional party than to have two, if one of the two is run by hardcore theocratic authoritarians. My strong hunch is, however, if the Republicans ever do completely implode, that the remaining Democratic party would fission. This is too diverse a country for a single party to hold together while in power – the forces pushing apart would be too strong

A single vote, YOUR single vote, doesn’t matter.

If you really feel that way, I have no idea why you are following a political blog. If none of our votes matter, then nothing we discuss here means anything. So why bother paying attention?

The value of your single vote is really an enigma.

As long as people think a single vote counts then a single vote doesn’t count.

However, if everyone believes that a single vote doesn’t count then a single vote is critical.

Even if you voted in Florida in 2000 your vote didn’t count. Does it really matter that Bush won by 537 votes or by 538 votes.
We all know that more people actually voted for Gore in Florida. Unfortunately, gore didn’t ask for a statewide recount.
We all know that many more people thought they voted for Gore. Unfortunately, the butterfly ballot was used by all sorts of people who voted a straight Democratic ticket and then voted for Buchanan for President.

If you live in a state like Utah your vote can never count for President because if Utah is decided by a single vote then the Democrat will already have over 500 electoral votes. Your vote will never count in Maryland because if Maryland is close then the Republican already has over 400 electoral votes.

Yes, your vote on the Supreme Court counts every once in a while but how many of us are actually on the Supreme Court?

I’ll throw a little cold water on the happy glowing coals by pointing out in Oregon, the measure to provide children’s health care by increasing the cigarette tax was resoundingly defeated.

http://news.opb.org/article/voters-snuff-out-cigarette-tax-childrens-health-care/

Interesting.

So, neil – if no one votes, who wins?

It may come as a surprise to you, but the presidential election is not the only election that ever occurs, or the only election that matters. There are elections to the city and county councils, to the state legislature, elections for governors, for state attorneys general. There are county and state bond issues, and state and local referenda. There are Congressional elections. All of those matter, and all the votes count. There is no state or local electoral college, neil.

Not all laws and regulations are promulgated at the national level, neil – quite a few of them happen at the local and state level, so it matters whether there are Republicans or Democrats sitting in the local councils and state legislatures, because we are all affected by the decisions made there.

I’m sure you think your pronouncements are deep and insightful, but I can assure you that the rest of us don’t share that opinion; the champions of voter suppression are not here, neil.

OK

Here is a challange

How many races were decided by a single vote yesterday?

How many races have you ever voted in where you were the deciding vote? (If you candidate lost by 1 vote then you were not the deciding vote. You were the deciding vote if your candidate won by a single vote.)

I can answer the questions.

there was not a single significant race decided by a single vote yesterday.

No one reading this has ever been the deciding vote on any significant election.

Prove me wrong!!!!!!

neil, give up on this inane argument will you? You’re looking at the results of the voting, looking at the margins of victory and deciding that since no races were decided by a single vote, that means no single vote matters.

We don’t know what the vote totals will be, we don’t know if it will be landslide or a squeaker – that’s why people who care about these kinds of things vote – because they don’t want to be sitting at home, wondering if their single vote – together with the single votes of all the other people who didn’t think their vote would matter – could have made the difference.

Suppose Candidate A lost by 1,000 votes. Further suppose that 1,501 voters like you stayed home. Suppose 250 of them would have voted for Candidate B,. and the rest – 1,251 – would have voted for Candidate A. Had they voted, Candidate A would have won by 1 vote. Whose vote was it? Yours? Someone else’s? There is no way to know that, so what this means is that the race was won or lost on the single votes of every person who chose to sit the election out.

It’s like saying, “why should I save this $10 bill – ten dollars isn’t going to do me any good.” But if you put away $10 every day, it will make a difference over time.

Just stop, please – these arguments you are making have me wondering if your mother knows you didn’t go to school today.

For Neil, @1:

Before the Polish elections a couple of weeks ago, after individual campaigning ads weren’t permitted in the MSM (the last week is “silent” on TV, radio and and in the press, to give people time to think), the main TV station ran some “public service ads” on the subject of the upcoming elections. One of them — a cartoon — showed a man saying “I won’t vote; my vote doesn’t matter”. Then, in a nother corner, a woman saying the same thing. And a couple of other men, etc, etc, etc. Until the entire screen was crowded with people saying “my vote doesn’t matter”. After the fade out, the text said something about the cumulative value of all those individual, “doesn’t matter” votes and directed you to go to the polls on Sunday.

I expect very few big elections are actually won by a single vote but those single votes can add to a critical mass just big enough to kick someone people are pissed off with out on his or her posterior. Vide Poland.

libra:

I agree that if a huge majority of the people didn’t vote because they thought their vote didn’t count then the few people who voted would have their votes count.

However, since we have hundreds and sometimes thousands and sometimes millions of people voting then a single vote doesn’t count.

If you are one of nine people voting then your vote counts fairly often. If you are one of 200,000 people voting then it would be very rare for your vote to ever count.

neil, i’ll only bother with this once, because you are being more than a bit of a troll on this issue, but here goes.

even you understate your own case by suggesting that there may be scenarios (plural) where an individual’s vote counts. as a pure matter of mathematics and causation, the plural is wrong: the singular scenario where an individual’s vote can be said with certainty to matter is a 1-0 vote.

if the vote is 3-2, we know that some individual’s vote mattered, but we cannot say it is yours — even if you were the last vote as, had either of the 2 ealier voters acted differently, your vote in favor of “x” would be meaningless. Each of the three votes is necessary, but none of the three votes is sufficient.

so, yea for neil, you win, right?

not exactly. in the philosphy of logic, this is a logical fallacy. it is, in fact, a great example of “Reductio ad absurdum” – reduction to (or arguing from) the absurd. It is a pointless MC Escher print of an argument. Because in the 3-2 vote example, while no individual’s vote “matters,” it is equally true that everyone’s vote matters.

in short, in a 70,000 to 30,000 election win, your argument is that none of the 70,000 “count,” because if any one person stayed home, it wouldn’t change the outcome. a stronger argument would be that 39,999 people’s votes don’t count (we just don’t know which people). but if everyone adopted your approach, no one – including the necessary 30,001 – would show up. which is to say that just as in the 3-2 scenario, everyone’s vote is important. arguing that no one’s vote is important when obviously votes collectively, made up of votes from individuals, are important is committing a logical fallacy by looking at pine needles when the relevant level of analysis is the forest; that is, you;ve reduced the problem to an absurd level.

the bottom line is that, even setting aside civic and personal virtues and the inherent value of rights and expression, voting matters both (1) as an exercise where the collective result is an individible whole and (2) because in any given election one does not know how close the result will be until after the fact – it may be the one in a billion election that truly does come down to one vote – and the inability to be certain in advance renders the act of casting that vote important.

Let’s assume you are on the Supreme Court where there are only nine votes.

How often would your vote count? -neil wilson

Every time you voted.

Your argument may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. For further review, please study Zeitgeist’s well thought out rebut above.

You’ve certainly destroyed the cliche that there is no such thing as a dumb question.

I couldn’t resist wading into these water once again…

Neil’s argument that one vote doesn’t matter unless it breaks a tie is foolish as plenty of other commenters have shown. A vote is a comment on how this society should function, just like the comments that are posted on this page and others. Using Neil’s analogy, because he is just one commenter among many his comments therefore don’t matter, so why is he even here posting his voice? That fact that they matter to to him is what gives his comments value, even if they are dead wrong. If your opinion matters naught among the sea of voices in this nation, feel free to keep them to yourself and stew in some passive-agressive isolation. Better yet, spread the gospel of not voting over at little green footballs — they may not feel like voting much anymore and would be more receptive to your viewpoint.

But maybe more to the point, if you don’t participate in voting in a democracy, then you lose your right to bitch about how things are going. If you won’t express your voice in a voting booth, save the rest of us the headaches and don’t express it elsewhere either.

actually, neil, i suspect it is the opposite. your basic premise is based on the odds of “making a difference” with your particular vote. so think of it like a lottery ticket – the odds are long that your vote is “the one.” but the vote takes the same effort/cost to cast no matter what the odds, just like the lottery ticket always costs the same $1.

applying principles of probability, the theoretical “value” of a lottery ticket is the likelihood of winning x the amount you would win. So if you have a raffle for $100, and they are selling 100 tickets, each ticket has a 1/100 chance of winning $100 – it would be rational to pay up to a dollar to buy a ticket; more than that and you;ve exceeded the theoretical value.

if one then assumes, as i do, that Republicans both have more to gain through tax policy, government contracts, etc than Democrats on average, and are more willing to abuse the levels of government to get what they want in economic policy, then this is comparable to the lottery jackpot being bigger for a Republican than a Democrat. If the number of votes case are the same (i.e. the probabilistic value of your one vote is the same) but the Republican payout potential is larger, then conservatives should vote more than liberals because the theoretical value is higher.