site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18903 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

15
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So everybody around is now like "please vote, please vote". I'd like to challenge that. I'll start with the observation that while obviously not everybody votes who has the right to, we don't exactly have a crisis level of participation here, we have about 2/3 of voters turn out. Which isn't that bad, it's not like a tiny group of people are deciding for the whole country.

Now, if somebody is so disinterested in politics - or so lazy, or disappointed, or uninformed - that they don't want to vote, why should any effort be spent on convincing them? Their vote probably would not be well thought out, and they would probably fail to accurately appreciate the consequences of their choices. Best case they'd vote at random, worst case they'd follow the first demagogue or pretty face they encounter. I mean, if you work for your local neighborhood demagogue, it's exactly what you want I guess, but why anybody else would support such an effort? I'd rather say the exact opposite - please don't vote unless you understand what it is about and what are you voting for - in which case you probably don't need anybody else to tell you what to do anyway!

I think it's politically motivated from the Democrats to increase their votes. This is mostly speculation/extrapolation, but there are multiple pieces of evidence:

First, note that the majority of the pressure appears to coming from Blue Tribe looking sources. Although they don't explicitly say who to vote for, you can guess that they personally are voting for the Democrats based on the general tone of the piece and source.

Second, my general opinion on American politics is that the Democrats and Republicans are mostly the same mix of generally incompetent and corrupt politicians who are there with the primary goal of being elected and accumulating wealth, power, and prestige, and a secondary goal of serving the voters and advancing their team's agenda, but only just enough to keep the voters happy enough to keep them in power. Both sides do this in different ways, but the Democrats are much better at disguising it with nice sounding words and smiling faces. Therefore, the average uninformed voter tends to think that the Democrats are better than the Republicans, because on the surface they appear better. Therefore, the marginal lazy/uninformed voter is more likely to vote Democrat. This provides a motivation for Democrat aligned groups to want to increase voter turnout.

Even if this effect is minor and the marginal uninformed voter has 60-40 odds in favor of voting Democrat, that's still an improvement for them. Increasing participation in the Democratic process is just an excuse, you're right that it isn't about helping society.

I'd rather say the exact opposite - please don't vote unless you understand what it is about and what are you voting for - in which case you probably don't need anybody else to tell you what to do anyway!

I'd love to know the results if we re-ran our elections on that basis, but I expect that world would be terrifyingly different than the one we live in, in ways you and I can't even predict.

But across the mass of people, even really smart people, you'd be shocked how many people forget what day election day is. I spend much of election week reminding personal friends to vote (for local candidates), and a decent number of them forget what day it was and didn't schedule it in.

I'm not sure it'd be that different, actually. I mean if only 30% voted, these people wouldn't be some Martians - they'd be somebody's peers, friends, coworkers, relatives, etc. - so they'd be part of the same culture. If you're an academia and everybody around votes Democrat, and some of them would be too hang over to vote, the rest would still vote Democrat. If you're in rural Tennessee and everybody around votes Republican, and you just forget to vote - the rest would vote Republican anyway. Sure, some patterns may shift here and there, but I suspect it won't be that different even if much less people voted than do now.

But that's assuming that the knowledge of politics is evenly and randomly distributed across other factors and identities. It isn't. You'd have far more rich educated voters and far fewer poor and elderly voters. Do red tribe and blue tribe coalitions even make sense once you disenfranchise major portions of each base?

Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.

I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.

We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.

This says 66.9%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#Turnout_statistics

midterms, not presidential

Well, if these people vote in presidential, that means they know how to vote and are able to, but still choose not to. I think I shoudn't worry about them not participating - it's not like they were excluded - they specifically chose to abstain, that's as valid as any other vote.

The marginal voter has a high propensity to break for Democrats. This explains blue tribe cheerleading about the voting for the sake of voting. Get out the vote campaigns help Democrats.

This may have been the case a decade ago, but I'd be interested in anything showing that it still holds empirically with increasing polarisation on density and education, and decreasing polarisation on race.

Of course, I'd expect anyone cheerleading about voting for the sake of voting to benefit their own politics on average, because people cheerlead to their own social networks which usually are in political alignment with them.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats