One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”
The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.
Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.
A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.
SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled. But in the US, by Constitutional law, it’s one seat per geographical district.
About RCV though it’s still head and shoulders above FPTP, and easy to understand. About Alaska specifically, I don’t understand why you would call the party backed candidate who got more votes a spoiler?
Palin lost in the second round because roughly half of Begich’s voters did not want Palin. If the less popular Republican candidate wasn’t in the race then Peltola still wins. This was a case of RCV working exactly as advertised. A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.
SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled.
Yes, that’s how it works. The first round is functionally identical to regular approval which is why I like using the two. Approval for single-winner, SPAV for multi-winner.
But in the US, by Constitutional law, it’s one seat per geographical district.
I’m pretty sure it’s just federal law, but I would have to double check. Not like Congress would change it anyway.
A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.
That’s pure speculation. But using the voting data from the general, we Begich was preferred to both Palin and Peltola in head-to-head matchups. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich to eliminate him in the first round and he lost to Peltola in the second. If Palin hadn’t run Begich would have won.
You can read more about it from the linked sources here.
Here’s the most relevant section:
Some social choice and election scientists criticized the election in published opinion pieces, saying it had several perceived flaws, which they technically term pathologies. They cited Begich’s elimination as an example of a center squeeze, a scenario in which the candidate closest to the center of public opinion is eliminated due to failing to receive enough first choice votes. More voters ranked Begich above Peltola, but Palin played the role of spoiler by knocking Begich out of contention in the first round of the run-off. Specialists also said the election was notable as a negative vote weight event, as those who voted for Palin first and Begich second instead helped Peltola win by pushing Palin ahead of Begich in the first round.
Elections scientists were careful to note that such flaws (which in technical terms they call pathologies) likely would have occurred under Alaska’s previous primary system as well. In that binary system, winners of each party primary run against each other in the general election. Several suggested alternative systems that could replace either of these systems.
You have to be careful analysing RCV results, because people tend to only look at what the election did, and fail to look at what it didn’t do. One of the good things about RCV is that it collects a fair bit of information, but then it usually ignores a fair bit of it. When trying to understand whether a candidate was a spoiler or not, you have to ask what would have happened if they didn’t run at all, which requires considering collected information the “unaltered” election didn’t take into account. If removing them from the election changes the winner of the race, then they were a spoiler. We know that removing Palin would have resulted in a Begich win over Peltola, so that makes Palin a spoiler. She’s a losing candidate that changed the winner of the race simply by entering, assuming voter preferences are stable.
Yeah no. That’s a lot of noise to ignore that the party and Republican voters preferred Palin. Begich wouldn’t even have been there in traditional FPTP. Calling the most popular candidate from a party “a spoiler” is a rhetorical device republicans came up with to go after RCV.
Peltola is also hardly some far left representative. So calling it a center squeeze is a bit rich. This entire write up screams, “I can’t approve of the Alaskan RCV election because I’m paid not to.”
To be clear, not you, the author of that Wikipedia article.
Edit to add- and sure enough if you go to the talk page there’s a partisan group defending it from any changes to bring it towards Wikipedia objectivity standards. This is why your teachers told you Wikipedia is a bad source.
I didn’t tell you to trust Wikipedia, I told you to follow through to the linked sources in that section. Also, that talk page suffers from the same problem you’re having, which is assuming that the RCV results are the same thing as the public opinion. The entire point of analysing the data is to look past the voting system used and try to understand what people’s preferences are. Here’s another (very long) source that summarizes the full ballot data and explains that, yes, Palin was a spoiler. Justifying this as acceptable by saying that RCV followed its own rules (which it must do, by definition) is the same as saying Ralph Nader spoiling the 2000 election was the correct outcome because those people had Nader as their favorite.
Look I don’t hate RCV. It’s certainly better than FPTP. I just don’t want people to have false ideas about its function. Spoilers can and do happen, they just behave differently than FPTP. And, I will add, they behave in a much more acceptable way, with RCV spoilers being much more likely to be competitive candidates compared to FPTP. Plus, RCV has less center-squeeze than FPTP. Mathematically, Approval doesn’t have spoilers nor does it have a center-squeeze effect, and I would argue that it’s better than both RCV and FPTP for this and other reasons, but I do want to re-confirm that FPTP is the worst.
