2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.
The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.
That is literally not how it works. That’s how people think it should work, but when you see that it doesn’t, you have to turn back and review your premises and your model. I know the way you think it should work and how you want it to work, but when it doesn’t work you need to revise.
The problem is this - the feedback loop is insufficient and the correlation is unclear. If you are directly negotiating with someone, then you can play Ultimatum. If you are one of a hundred million people casting a vote for one person or another, you cannot. Perot cost Bush I the election, and Nader cost Kerry the election. Neither party decided that they needed to move in the direction of the spoiler candidate. They’re especially not going to do so for 3p candidates who pull in the low single digits, even if they lose by low single digits, because they’ll think they can get more by moving towards the center.
You can vote however you want, but don’t base it on a theoretical foundation that has less than zero application to the scenario you’re modeling. It really, honestly is a minimax choice, and if you are truly an ally for those of us in marginalized communities, you have to recognize it.
I’m not being a right winger here - I’m a member of the DSA and this is in line with what they (and people like Chomsky) advise. But I’m not talking about even that angle. I’m just talking minimax and BATNA. If negotiations fail (ie we didn’t get Bernie), the best alternative is Hillary. At least Roe wouldn’t have been overturned and we wouldn’t have states suing to make ten year olds give birth to their rapist’s babies.
So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.
I do not mean this to come off as blunt as it sounds, but I’m trying to be both clear and concise.
What you’re talking about is not how game theory works. What you’re doing is taking the most basic, highly abstracted representation of a generic idea and expecting it to correlate with reality. It’s the same thing people do when they ascribe some kind of wish fulfillment to the free market or to evolutionary dynamics. It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy. Here’s the main issues you’re running into when you try to play Ultimatum with something the size of the Democratic Party:
We as voters aren’t playing Ultimatum. Instead, we are playing minimax as an emergent strategy to defend the rights of marginalized populations.
Thank you for your detailed input!
You got me 😁. I love drawing supply-and-demand curves. Seems pretty hopeless then if to even begin to understand how to vote “correctly” you need 5 years of game theory PhD. Hearing someone say “just trust me bro, the optimal strategy is that one” is not good enough. Voting was supposed to be for the masses…
I could get onboard with ranked-choice voting. My city used IRV for our latest mayoral primary election, and even though none of my ranked candidates won, I felt extremely satisfied that at least my voice was finally being heard. When a literal police-mayor got elected (winning primary by only 7000 votes), I had the comfort of full knowledge that this was not due to any spoiler effect on my part, but solely simply due to more people voting for him. If we’d campaign for ranked-choice voting in federal elections - presidential primaries and general - we can eliminate all the above hand-wringing. The Democratic party should be totally on board with this since they could finally get the Green protest vote.