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The current top comment on the /r/politics post on this is:
(Post did not include a link to NYT, but here is the source from an article titled "Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record".)
I pretty much agree. I wasn't happy about Trump being elected but at first I was hoping there may be some silver lining in him actually being serious in his claims to care about corruption. But that hopefulness didn't last long. (Also, I'm not entirely sold on term limits; I think looking at other structural reasons for incumbency like first-past-the-post elections making it difficult to run an ideologically similar campaign is probably a better idea.)
I still don’t understand how the poster child for “draining the swamp” is a billionaire real estate mogul and entertainer from New York City. The constant self-advertising alone surely raised red flags. And that’s before the scandals, the inability to fill offices, the nepotism, the public infighting, and the general inability to pass anything.
Damn it, we need an alternative to FPTP.
I'll take this opportunity to pimp my impractical idea for a decentralized voting system. Everyone gets to vote for whomever they like to delegate for them. Then, if no one has (50%+1) of the vote those delegates then vote for themselves(person with least delegates can't vote for themselves) or someone else and the votes are recounted. This is repeated until someone hits the majority bar. You'd have to register as actually wanting the job and if you don't the people who delegate to you just have their votes immediately passed through you to whomever you voted for.
You have a friend you trust who cares about politics but you don't give a shit? delegate your vote to them and sit back. There are lots of cryptographic schemes that could make this work. Although it's pretty impractical I think it'd result in winners much more people trust.
From a game theoretic and psychological perspective, I'm not sure this would be meaningfully different from first past the post. To a first approximation, everyone just votes for the same person they would now: red team or blue team, and then one of them has 50%+ and wins (I guess it eliminates the electoral college if this is in the U.S.)
Theoretically, it might help third party candidates, because you can vote for one and if they lose your vote won't be wasted, but this is only true if you're certain that candidate is going to delegate to the correct side. For instance, if Scott Alexander was in a standard election and had a good shot at becoming President I would definitely vote for him over pretty much any politician (because they're all scum). But under normal circumstances I would not delegate my vote to him in your system because he's not going to win, and then he's very likely to send it to some Democrat, and I think they tend to do slightly more damage than Republicans. Even if he delegates it to an above average Democrat, they're also going to lose and then the vote stays in house until eventually it ends up with Hillary Clinton, or whoever else ends up on top of the Democrats that year (I'm using the 2016 election as an example since it's a strong case of when I'd very strongly prefer my vote not stray).
So in practice, all the high up Republicans and Democrats end up in bed with each other and refuse to send votes to the other side, all the voters loyally vote for someone on one side or the other, and their vote stays in house, until eventually whichever side got more votes ends up sending them all to the most popular person on that side. Theoretically, this would allow someone to vote say Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton, but then he loses and delegates the votes to her and she has them all, which is kind of what the primary system already does, it chooses the most popular person on each side to pre-emptively delegates all of the votes to. If anything, this system makes things worse because if someone had a preference for, say, Bernie > Trump > Clinton, then Clinton unfairly siphons votes by being vaguely associated with a more moderate person even though she isn't him. Your system will incentivize more moderate people to run for office, on both sides, but only for the purpose of siphoning votes for their party's main candidate.
And the strategic thing for voters to do in response would be to not trust any of the moderates who are unlikely to win and are just going to siphon their vote for one of the two main parties, and instead just vote for their favorite party directly rather than risk choosing the wrong moderate. And then we have FPTP again.
If you don't trust Scott to not give his vote to dems why would you trust Scott to not side with them on policy? I think the opposite of what you say would happen, the extremist candidates will get less votes and need to win the acceptance of moderated or the moderates will pool their votes and the extremists will have to capitulate. Really it would cascade in the direction that's actually more popular. And you could always delegate to someone who says they'd never give their vote to the extremist as well.
Because policies aren't binary like that. I think Scott would side with them on policy like 60% of the time, but he would pick the better 60% of policies they have and leave out the insane culture war stuff.
The extremist candidates will get less initial votes, but if each moderate delegates to someone 10% less moderate than themselves then it ends up with the extremists anyway. Look at how Trump has captured the Republican party. I suppose you could model it as splitting the Republicans into two factions, the pro-Trump and the never-Trump. So suppose at the end of the day you end up with three leading candidates: Democrat with 45%, pro-Trump Republican with 35%, and anti-Trump Republican with 25%, the anti-Trump Republicans are going to be forced to delegate. If the anti-Trump Republicans decide to delegate to Trump in this circumstance to keep the Democrats out, then we see how extremists capture the moderate votes. If the anti-Trump decide to delegate Democrat because their candidate is more moderate, and if this stance is known ahead of time, then voting anti-Trump Republican is equivalent to voting Democrat. And some Republicans did that in the current system: they voted Democrat because it was preferable to Trump. But there is still the same pressure towards extremism for the same reasons as in the current system: ie the median voter theorem. Which hasn't exactly worked out nicely.
But there is another world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25 where trump delegates to the moderates. You've put your thumb on the scales in this example. More importantly the point is essential to imbue your vote with the intelligence to make these kind of game theory decisions iterated down where there is much more flexibility. Are you really better off if you have to decide if you're going to need to guess if trump is the only way to stop the democrats from winning before you vote or by giving your vote to someone who can try every other options before it comes to that? Your example actually seems like the best outcome for someone whose preference is mR > tR > D, you complaint is contained in the fact that you've built a scenario where trump would have rightfully be who was selected.
And is that not the world we live in? In the existing system, with primaries, the electorate all decide which among their party is the most popular, and then the chosen candidates of those parties go against each other. In the delegation system the electorate all choose their favorite candidates, and then candidates within each party pool their votes together towards the most popular one. It's the same steps just in different orders, and the forces towards and away from extremism seem pretty much the same to me. In the world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25, the moderate would have won the Primary in the current system and become the Republican party candidate instead of Trump.
There are small technical differences, such that you can come up with very niche scenarios where the outcome will differ. But I think the general pattern of having two monolithic parties with extreme candidates are the same in both systems for the same reasons, and in almost every circumstance they will lead to identical incentives and outcomes.
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