I upvoted this post—it is a good stab based on the easily accessible public information and a look at relevant theory.
Hypothesis 5 is the path to victory here. The core problem is that (almost) everyone is wrong about (almost) everything, and the least wrong people do not form a group. Some examples:
Moderates do not exist. By this I mean there is not and never was any such group of people. The existence of moderates is a mistake in tabulating the results of political surveys. The mistake looks like this: you might have a survey with multiple responses, and one person responds:
Q1. How do you feel about gay marriage? A1. Gay people should have civil unions rather than marriage
Q2. How involved should the government be in the economy? A2. Government should keep taxes low
But another person responds with:
Q1. How do you feel about gay marriage? A1. Gay people should not be allowed to get married, or adopt, or teach children
Q2. How involved should the government be in the economy? A2. Government should heavily tax the rich and important industries should be nationalized
Since both answers for the first person were conservative, the surveys marked that person as “very conservative.” The second person, with one extremely conservative answer and one extremely liberal answer, got marked as a moderate. It turns out if you graph the policy preferences of people who are moderate, undecided, or independent, they land all over the ideological map.
But most politicians, pundits, campaign staffers, and voters believe in moderates.
Money does not win elections. The narrative is straightforward here: the side with the most money usually wins, so money most be what caused victory. The best natural experiments for this are repeated contests between the same two people, and when we look at these contests we find that the effects of money are very weak: the number I remember is doubling the money brought 1% more of the vote and halving it cost 1%.
The alternative explanation based on this is the more likable/popular candidate receives more political donations. This one passes the smell test: if we invert these stories, it would be very weird if the actually-more-popular candidate systematically got less money, and it would be wild if the person who got more money systematically lost the election.
But most politicians, pundits, campaign staffers, and voters believe money wins elections.
Americans are not politically engaged. This one is something that campaign people understand, but the other groups mostly ignore in practice: a huge chunk eligible voters don’t vote. Campaigns target the populations that do vote, and policy is heavily influence by what is popular in campaigns.
The key insight here is that both parties in the US tend to enforce this rather than try to expand the electorate. While the blue team is notionally friendlier to this idea than the red team, what they do in practice is try to increase the participation rate of groups which they already expect to support them. This is why voter turnout is the conversation: the default election strategy is to identify the groups of likely voters and that are likely to support your side, then try to get the number of them that show up on election day as close to 100% as possible. At the same time, it is common to try and reduce voter turnout for the opponent. This is the mechanism of negative advertising—it drives people to stay home and not vote at all.
But most politicians, pundits, and voters believe campaigns are trying to persuade the public to vote for them instead of the other person. This is similar to the mechanism of the primaries hypothesis above, but primaries are explicit to party membership and activity.
Some issues are more relevant than others. The word political scientists use for this is salience. In elections, no candidate is ever evaluated by the public on the basis of all of their positions; instead, there are usually a few issues the election becomes “about”, and the candidates which are better positioned on those issues tend to win (subject to the turnout considerations above). This one also passes the smell test—even the smallest elections encompass a wide range of issues, and I definitely expect attention bandwidth to be a limiting factor.
This is why messaging is so important—if a side can keep messaging discipline, then what the message is about is more likely to be what the election is about. I think this is also what drives a lot of those “X is really about Y” style arguments—these look to me like bids to increase the salience of one issue at the expense of another.
But, most politicians, pundits, and campaign staffers tend to act like the stuff they care about should be the issues of the campaign. This is much like your echo chamber hypothesis above.
All of this is compounded by all the usual problems like how difficult social research is, statistical incompetence, professional biases, etc.
In summary, I feel like the true model is a model of everyone else’s models being borked.
I upvoted this post—it is a good stab based on the easily accessible public information and a look at relevant theory.
Hypothesis 5 is the path to victory here. The core problem is that (almost) everyone is wrong about (almost) everything, and the least wrong people do not form a group. Some examples:
Moderates do not exist. By this I mean there is not and never was any such group of people. The existence of moderates is a mistake in tabulating the results of political surveys. The mistake looks like this: you might have a survey with multiple responses, and one person responds:
Q1. How do you feel about gay marriage?
A1. Gay people should have civil unions rather than marriage
Q2. How involved should the government be in the economy?
A2. Government should keep taxes low
But another person responds with:
Q1. How do you feel about gay marriage?
A1. Gay people should not be allowed to get married, or adopt, or teach children
Q2. How involved should the government be in the economy?
A2. Government should heavily tax the rich and important industries should be nationalized
Since both answers for the first person were conservative, the surveys marked that person as “very conservative.” The second person, with one extremely conservative answer and one extremely liberal answer, got marked as a moderate. It turns out if you graph the policy preferences of people who are moderate, undecided, or independent, they land all over the ideological map.
But most politicians, pundits, campaign staffers, and voters believe in moderates.
Money does not win elections. The narrative is straightforward here: the side with the most money usually wins, so money most be what caused victory. The best natural experiments for this are repeated contests between the same two people, and when we look at these contests we find that the effects of money are very weak: the number I remember is doubling the money brought 1% more of the vote and halving it cost 1%.
The alternative explanation based on this is the more likable/popular candidate receives more political donations. This one passes the smell test: if we invert these stories, it would be very weird if the actually-more-popular candidate systematically got less money, and it would be wild if the person who got more money systematically lost the election.
But most politicians, pundits, campaign staffers, and voters believe money wins elections.
Americans are not politically engaged. This one is something that campaign people understand, but the other groups mostly ignore in practice: a huge chunk eligible voters don’t vote. Campaigns target the populations that do vote, and policy is heavily influence by what is popular in campaigns.
The key insight here is that both parties in the US tend to enforce this rather than try to expand the electorate. While the blue team is notionally friendlier to this idea than the red team, what they do in practice is try to increase the participation rate of groups which they already expect to support them. This is why voter turnout is the conversation: the default election strategy is to identify the groups of likely voters and that are likely to support your side, then try to get the number of them that show up on election day as close to 100% as possible. At the same time, it is common to try and reduce voter turnout for the opponent. This is the mechanism of negative advertising—it drives people to stay home and not vote at all.
But most politicians, pundits, and voters believe campaigns are trying to persuade the public to vote for them instead of the other person. This is similar to the mechanism of the primaries hypothesis above, but primaries are explicit to party membership and activity.
Some issues are more relevant than others. The word political scientists use for this is salience. In elections, no candidate is ever evaluated by the public on the basis of all of their positions; instead, there are usually a few issues the election becomes “about”, and the candidates which are better positioned on those issues tend to win (subject to the turnout considerations above). This one also passes the smell test—even the smallest elections encompass a wide range of issues, and I definitely expect attention bandwidth to be a limiting factor.
This is why messaging is so important—if a side can keep messaging discipline, then what the message is about is more likely to be what the election is about. I think this is also what drives a lot of those “X is really about Y” style arguments—these look to me like bids to increase the salience of one issue at the expense of another.
But, most politicians, pundits, and campaign staffers tend to act like the stuff they care about should be the issues of the campaign. This is much like your echo chamber hypothesis above.
All of this is compounded by all the usual problems like how difficult social research is, statistical incompetence, professional biases, etc.
In summary, I feel like the true model is a model of everyone else’s models being borked.