I like this a lot and I think it’s worth serious effort to research some of the assumptions and obvious failure points (brought up by others here, although I think half of them are not addressing the core of your proposal)
I see a few other failure points mentioned, but no one has mentioned what I consider the primary obstacle—if membership in the New Center organization is easy, what prevents partisans from joining purely to influence its decisions? And if membership is hard, how do you find enough people willing to join?
The key idea that makes Bitcoin work is that it runs essentially a decentralized voting algorithm. Proof-of-work means that everyone gets a number of votes proportional to the computational power that they’re willing to spend.
You need something similar to proof-of-work here, but I don’t see any good way to implement it.
Not sure I follow. What prevents republicans from joining democrats?
I think the point is that you get peoples opt into the party and then show during elections that this party can indeed swing votes. That’s the proof of work.
Sorry, let me try again, and be a little more direct. If the New Center starts to actually swing votes, Republicans will join and pretend to be centrists, while trying to co-opt the group into supporting Republicans.
Meanwhile, Democrats will join and try to co-opt the group into supporting Democrats.
Unless you have a way to ensure that only actual centrists have any influence, you’ll end up with a group that’s mostly made up of extreme partisans from both sides. And that will make it impossible for the group to function as intended.
Here is another possible solution (which might be bad in other respects):
Maybe a formal declaration of membership only serves to increase the visibility of the group (by boosting numbers on their website). The actual position on issues cannot be “influenced”. Instead, the New Center platform preforms imperial surveys of the general population to find issues on which there is broad agreement.
Or: official bloc membership might get you a voice in determining which issues get put on the surveys. But ultimately the surveys determine the New Center position.
This would make it difficult to take over the New Center and make it a mouthpiece for non-moderates (albeit not impossible).
The short answer is the same thing that prevents the target audience from joining the reds or the blues and influencing them in the direction they would prefer: too much work.
But based on the idea so far, I claim this is a requirement for effectiveness. In order to get either party to change their behavior, they need to have a good understanding of what this group of swing voters want, and that requires getting an inside view.
It is much, much harder to persuade a group of people than it is to simply tell them what they want to hear. You will be encouraged to know that this is the formal position of virtually all political operatives, because their unit of planning is an election campaign and research shows that is too short a time to effectively persuade a population of voters.
It would also be super weird if when targeting disaffected voters in the middle there were no converts from the disaffected margins of either major party (who presumably will still naturally advocate for the things that drew them to the party in the first place, which is almost the same as a true believer in the party advocating). This too is a desirable outcome.
I don’t have time for this. Do you? Is/should it be a priority? I have other ideas which may or may not make it more probable (which I excluded from the post out of an abundance of caution).
No I don’t have time for this unfortunately. I suppose it’s probably worth at the very least publishing this on medium and posting to relevant subreddits.
Some of the other comments have reminded me of your linkpost about digital democracy. Specifically, the idea of seeking surprising agreement which was mentioned.
In the OP, I posited that “the new center” should have a strong, simple set of issues, pre-selected to cater to people who are sick of both sides. But I think Stuart Anderson is right: it shouldn’t focus so much on the battle between the two sides; it should focus on the surprising commonality between people.
As Steven Byrnes mentioned, swing voters aren’t exactly moderate; rather, they tend to have extreme views which don’t fit within existing party lines. The article Byrnes linked to also points out that the consensus within party elites of both parties is very different from the consensus within the party base.
I find myself forming the hypothesis that politicians have a tendency to over-focus on divisive issues, and miss some issues on which there is broad agreement. (This would be an interesting question to investigate, if someone really did a feasibility study on the whole idea.)
My new suggestion for the new-center platform would be, rather than distilling complaints about both sides, seek surprising agreement in the way mentioned in that podcast you linked.
The proposal would be something like this:
You register with The New Center platform. This involves “signing” a non-binding agreement to vote according to the New Center recommendations.
I’m imagining that you’re never asked to promise to vote a specific way, but rather, you are asked to affirm that you agree with the argument that making such a commitment would increase your voting power overall. (Mostly because something feels shady to me about actually making people promise to vote a specific way.)
The platform crowdsources issues, and aggregates New Center opinions on those issues, looking for issues where there is broad agreement.
This might be done by something like quadratic voting, letting people spend points to indicate how much they care about an issue, so that you get information on the strength of preferences rather than only their existence.
The platform publicizes the issues on which there is broad agreement. The main purpose of this is so that politicians know the issues on which they will be judged. A secondary purpose is to attract new people to the New Center platform, if the current New Center consensus resonates with them.
Finally, the platform rates political candidates on the consensus criteria, and makes recommendations on that basis. (This is probably also done in a democratized way.)
It could also be interesting to keep track of New Center’s preferences wrt bills being voted on in legislative bodies, and keep track of politician’s record in terms of voting with New Center. Politicians with a record of voting according to New Center recommendations should be rewarded by the system, even if their voting record goes against what’s now the consensus of New Center, because (in the long term) the hope is that some politicians end up deferring to New Center’s opinions (at least some of the time). So you want to avoid punishing that behavior just because New Center flip-flops on an issue. However, that’s a corner case which may not be that important (because hopefully, New Center finds issues with broad appeal on which there isn’t so much flip-flop in public opinion over time).
I like this a lot and I think it’s worth serious effort to research some of the assumptions and obvious failure points (brought up by others here, although I think half of them are not addressing the core of your proposal)
I see a few other failure points mentioned, but no one has mentioned what I consider the primary obstacle—if membership in the New Center organization is easy, what prevents partisans from joining purely to influence its decisions? And if membership is hard, how do you find enough people willing to join?
The key idea that makes Bitcoin work is that it runs essentially a decentralized voting algorithm. Proof-of-work means that everyone gets a number of votes proportional to the computational power that they’re willing to spend.
You need something similar to proof-of-work here, but I don’t see any good way to implement it.
Not sure I follow. What prevents republicans from joining democrats?
I think the point is that you get peoples opt into the party and then show during elections that this party can indeed swing votes. That’s the proof of work.
Sorry, let me try again, and be a little more direct. If the New Center starts to actually swing votes, Republicans will join and pretend to be centrists, while trying to co-opt the group into supporting Republicans.
Meanwhile, Democrats will join and try to co-opt the group into supporting Democrats.
Unless you have a way to ensure that only actual centrists have any influence, you’ll end up with a group that’s mostly made up of extreme partisans from both sides. And that will make it impossible for the group to function as intended.
Here is another possible solution (which might be bad in other respects):
Maybe a formal declaration of membership only serves to increase the visibility of the group (by boosting numbers on their website). The actual position on issues cannot be “influenced”. Instead, the New Center platform preforms imperial surveys of the general population to find issues on which there is broad agreement.
Or: official bloc membership might get you a voice in determining which issues get put on the surveys. But ultimately the surveys determine the New Center position.
This would make it difficult to take over the New Center and make it a mouthpiece for non-moderates (albeit not impossible).
The short answer is the same thing that prevents the target audience from joining the reds or the blues and influencing them in the direction they would prefer: too much work.
But based on the idea so far, I claim this is a requirement for effectiveness. In order to get either party to change their behavior, they need to have a good understanding of what this group of swing voters want, and that requires getting an inside view.
It is much, much harder to persuade a group of people than it is to simply tell them what they want to hear. You will be encouraged to know that this is the formal position of virtually all political operatives, because their unit of planning is an election campaign and research shows that is too short a time to effectively persuade a population of voters.
It would also be super weird if when targeting disaffected voters in the middle there were no converts from the disaffected margins of either major party (who presumably will still naturally advocate for the things that drew them to the party in the first place, which is almost the same as a true believer in the party advocating). This too is a desirable outcome.
I don’t have time for this. Do you? Is/should it be a priority? I have other ideas which may or may not make it more probable (which I excluded from the post out of an abundance of caution).
No I don’t have time for this unfortunately. I suppose it’s probably worth at the very least publishing this on medium and posting to relevant subreddits.
Some of the other comments have reminded me of your linkpost about digital democracy. Specifically, the idea of seeking surprising agreement which was mentioned.
In the OP, I posited that “the new center” should have a strong, simple set of issues, pre-selected to cater to people who are sick of both sides. But I think Stuart Anderson is right: it shouldn’t focus so much on the battle between the two sides; it should focus on the surprising commonality between people.
As Steven Byrnes mentioned, swing voters aren’t exactly moderate; rather, they tend to have extreme views which don’t fit within existing party lines. The article Byrnes linked to also points out that the consensus within party elites of both parties is very different from the consensus within the party base.
I find myself forming the hypothesis that politicians have a tendency to over-focus on divisive issues, and miss some issues on which there is broad agreement. (This would be an interesting question to investigate, if someone really did a feasibility study on the whole idea.)
My new suggestion for the new-center platform would be, rather than distilling complaints about both sides, seek surprising agreement in the way mentioned in that podcast you linked.
The proposal would be something like this:
You register with The New Center platform. This involves “signing” a non-binding agreement to vote according to the New Center recommendations.
I’m imagining that you’re never asked to promise to vote a specific way, but rather, you are asked to affirm that you agree with the argument that making such a commitment would increase your voting power overall. (Mostly because something feels shady to me about actually making people promise to vote a specific way.)
The platform crowdsources issues, and aggregates New Center opinions on those issues, looking for issues where there is broad agreement.
This might be done by something like quadratic voting, letting people spend points to indicate how much they care about an issue, so that you get information on the strength of preferences rather than only their existence.
The platform publicizes the issues on which there is broad agreement. The main purpose of this is so that politicians know the issues on which they will be judged. A secondary purpose is to attract new people to the New Center platform, if the current New Center consensus resonates with them.
Finally, the platform rates political candidates on the consensus criteria, and makes recommendations on that basis. (This is probably also done in a democratized way.)
It could also be interesting to keep track of New Center’s preferences wrt bills being voted on in legislative bodies, and keep track of politician’s record in terms of voting with New Center. Politicians with a record of voting according to New Center recommendations should be rewarded by the system, even if their voting record goes against what’s now the consensus of New Center, because (in the long term) the hope is that some politicians end up deferring to New Center’s opinions (at least some of the time). So you want to avoid punishing that behavior just because New Center flip-flops on an issue. However, that’s a corner case which may not be that important (because hopefully, New Center finds issues with broad appeal on which there isn’t so much flip-flop in public opinion over time).