At last, someone from the world of politics is being honest about a pervasive and harmful trade-off. When home prices rise faster than earnings, owners like me gain wealth, while non-owners lose because their incomes fall further behind housing costs.
Honesty is saying that home prices have to fall. But this is progress.
The Generation Squeeze folks have recommendations.
Yes, ranked choice voting allows people to vote for who they want elected without being forced to vote “strategically” in what amounts to a horrible two-party system like the USA.
The problem is that idea of “strategic” voting only exacerbates the problems with fptp. If everyone voted for who they wanted, NDP would be getting a lot more votes.
Strategic voting is a self fulfilling prophecy.
“Getting more votes” doesn’t help in FPTP unless you actually get a plurality of the votes.
If everyone voted honestly, the biggest effect of the NDP would be to help the conservatives win more elections.
I disagree. When everyone votes for who they actually want, everyone, including the political strategists in charge of trying to figure out how their party can win, can see what the voters really want. Yes, they will still play nasty games, but at least it will be with an awareness that there are actually a lot of people who prefer different policies.
Possibly, at least initially. But maybe the conservative strategists would see that they are courting a smaller fringe than if they had courted the socially progressive. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve long thought that most policies and platforms in all parties were designed to lead to victory rather than to adhere to some principled ideology.
That would only really work if Liberals and NDP splitting the socially progressive vote doesn’t cause them to consistently lose.
What’s the stable equilibrium of everyone voting honestly? Each party moves to get about a third of the votes? You could reliably have an election where 2/3rds of the electorate would prefer anyone but the conservative, yet the conservative wins?
FPTP is a garbage tier electoral system.
The problem is that NDP isn’t (or didn’t used to be) just another way to vote for people adjacent to the centre, but for real change. “Strategic” voting for decades has done nothing but allow everything to move further right. There was a time when NDP were actually pretty radical and the Liberals weren’t just yet another neoliberal clone but with fewer people stuck in the 1950s or earlier.
All the parties eventually pay attention to the most vocal voters. We need to outshout the conservatives, not just take the lesser of two evils approach. The conservatives didn’t end up being such a dumpster fire by taking a lesser of two evils approach, but with a make no compromises approach. That’s how they turned the ship and that’s how we turn the ship. And voting our conscience is part of that.
And yes, FPTP is garbage.
The problem in FPTP is that it works really, really badly when you’ve got 3 or more viable candidates in one election.
As an activist in a FPTP system, you can either try to make a successful third party, or co-opt one of the existing ones during candidate selection. Both are very difficult, but the second approach is generally much easier, because you don’t have to deal with vote splitting.
That makes it sound like the most effective “voting” strategy under FPTP is activism against FPTP.
I do understand strategy and tactics and understand the thinking behind strategic voting (which I think is better characterized as tactical voting, given that it’s focused on immediate goals rather than long term ones). I used to be very involved in strategic voting initiatives, but after about 4 decades, it seems to me that it’s not actually getting us anywhere.
My personal opinion is that one of the conservative strategies is to lock us into tactical voting as it simplifies the environment in which they operate. It also keeps us moving in their direction because we we’re always focused on putting out a fire instead of on “fire prevention.” This creates a ratchet mechanism, where they just do whatever they want without regard to the consequences while everyone else is taking the more reasonable approach of trying to minimize the pain of change.
That’s actually the inverse of what ranked choice does.
Ranked choice fulfills “later-no-harm”; filling out a third choice can never hurt your second or first choice.
Because of that, it fails “favorite betrayal”; there are times when you get a worse outcome by voting for your honest favorite.
That’s mostly because ranked choice doesn’t consider your second or third picks until your first and second have been eliminated. So there’s a bunch of weird edgecases where a compromise candidate with enough second, third etc. votes to win in the final round gets eliminated early on before they actually get any second, third etc. place support.
Suppose there’s an election like that where the Liberal is the compromise candidate that could beat either the NDP or Conservative candidate in the final round, but because the NDP and Conservative get more first-place votes, the election goes Conservative. Depending on the particulars, NDP voters could potentially have elected the Liberal by staying home, or even by voting Conservative. Either way, they’d have been better off strategically voting for the Liberal than voting honestly for the NDP.
In general, voting honestly in ranked choice is only safe either if you’re voting for a fringe third party that could never win or if you’re voting for one of the two candidates with the most total popularity.