Today’s math challenge: Less than 50% of the vote but 72% of the seats
On Morning Joe today, they interviewed Senator Mallory McMorrow. She mentioned toward the end (around 8:02 minutes in) that in 2014 the Republican party had less than 50% of the vote. However, they had 72% of the seats. Unfortunately, it was toward the end and no one’s ears perked up upon hearing this. She notes it will not get any better unless they are voted out of office.
At Crooks and Liars today is a post of James Carville suggesting that the Democratic Party needs to start pointing out how “weird” and “strange” the Republican Party is. I’m thinking he did not hear Senator McMorrow. Her words all revolved around the word “hate”. The hateful, hate filled words coming out of the mouths of the Republican Party universally.
Both note that election results have to change. I’m certain using words such as weird and strange is really not describing the truth of the Republican opponent. Too easy for a Republican skilled in word warfare to deflect. Using words such as hateful, mean, nasty will get people to stop and think about what they are voting for. It is using shame for once against them and ultimately stigmatizing as they have been doing since Gingrich’s list of words in the 90’s. (Tressie McMillan Cottom piece)
So, this gets me to the math problem. What percent of the Republican vote has to vote for the Democratic Party candidate when the Republican Party only had less than 50% of the vote but 72% of the seats such that their win is 50% of the seats?
Is it real to expect that percentage shift in those voting Republican? Is there that percentage of voters who voted Republican that would come to realize how hateful , mean, nasty the party has become?
And then there is Manchin and Sinema to mess up the math.
This would be in the US Senate presumably.
Since the number of Senators is determined
by the number of states, not their population,
this is hardly surprising.
Lets have a Constitutional Amendment to fix this, pronto.
If the name is unfamiliar, it may be because she is a Michigan state Senator.
Sen. Mallory McMorrow is serving her first term in the Michigan Senate
Sen. Mallory McMorrow gains national spotlight pushing back against ‘hateful garbage’
Detroit News – April 20
Lansing — A five-minute speech from Michigan Sen. Mallory McMorrow gained national attention Tuesday and more than 9 million views on social media as the Royal Oak Democrat spoke out against an attack by Republican Sen. Lana Theis of Brighton.
McMorrow gave a speech on the Senate floor, where she focused on a fundraising email Theis’ reelection campaign sent out Monday. The message specifically claimed McMorrow and others were “outraged” they can’t “groom and sexualize kindergarteners” …
These numbers are Michigan State numbers as Sen McMorrow is a state Senator.
But certainly, we are headed for some form of this at the Fed level considering the gerrymandering.
That the gerrymandering is at the state level, and we are seeing such distortions in the election results as presented here, how do we fix it by voting?
In this example, is the percent change needed to succeed in voting out those who created this results even possible?
Daniel
Michigan just went through a redistricting of voting districts which will impact both state and Federal Elections for the House and the State Senate. It appeared to be a nonpolitical redistricting this time as determined by state legislation. In national elections, the state typically votes Dem except when “stupid” reins as it did in 2016 with the “Anyone but trump or Clinton” vote.” There is a growing Dem population in Michigan.
This makes sense. I would not use the term “gerrymandering” without a deep analysis of the districts, though. Voting patterns in many parts of the country can make quite normally drawn districts act the same as oddly drawn districts specifically intended to pack voters. In fact, this is a major reason that Democrats were anxious to have political affiliation deemed a measure of illegal gerrymandering since other measures, like “compactness”, frequently would not indicate seriously bad districting.
Jut posted on Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow. Senator Lana Theis and I have had a few exchanges.
Since ~1994, Michigan State Senate has been controlled by Repubs. Since 2000, Repubs have had control of the state House except for a couple of years. The Governorship has been under Repubs 2 of 4 times. Repubs have had a trifecta two of 4 times.
And yes, this is due to Gerrymandering every 10 years. This last go-around for redistricting was done by a mostly civilian board and 2 from each political party. It became part of the Michigan Constitution. We will see if it works.
Fred C. Dobbs wrote: “Lets have a Constitutional Amendment to fix this, pronto.”
Unfortunately, no one will be willing to give up this advantage.
I think with gerrymandering, I think a relatively small change in the vote can cause a bigger change in seats won, because the idea (for a Republican) is to get as many Democrats as possible in a few districts, with many districts having a small Republican advantage (the more seats you want, the smaller the margin in each). So say there are 5 districts that are gerrymandered so one in 70% Democrats, 30% GOP and the other 4 are 45% vs. 55%. That means Republicans are half the electorate but get 80% of seats. But convince 10% of Republicans to vote Democratic and Democrats get all the seats.
Better turnout might more easily be achieved than promoting switch hitters. If we only knew how to give more people a reason to show up.
If voter suppression efforts are carried out as planned, ‘more people showing up’ to vote shouldn’t be a problem for holding on to the ‘status quo’.
Fred,
Prior to Youngkin, then I might have said that it can’t happen here, then it did.
*************************************************
Virginia Is Leading the Way on Voter Protection
By Cia Price and Jennifer McClellan
September 15, 2021
https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/politics/elections/virginia-republicans-file-20-bills-restrict-limit-absentee-voting/291-aeb866cd-09fb-4ed0-b2f0-5ad850d9b414
Virginia Republicans file 20 bills to restrict or limit absentee voting
After state Democrats expanded voting access, state Republicans are seeking to cut back on absentee voting options in the latest election power struggle.
Author: Evan Watson
Published: 5:58 PM EST January 14, 2022
Updated: 6:24 PM EST January 14, 2022
Mike B.,
In any case though, you are correct on the math. How to swing 10% may be a big problem. The pro-government party has an image problem with more than white backlash. There is also the IRS and every state’s tax department and DMV. Anti-government sentiment has an abundance of author’s despite the irony of an anti-government political party.
Speaking of irony, Ayn Rand said that Libertarians were just hippie anarchists. Now who loves Ayn Rand more than Libertarians? The irony never stops.
Ron
Off post topic. You are a veteran like myself. What is your take on Ukraine pushing back on Russia. My initial take was Russia was stuck in a war of attrition. The mistakes made by the Russians were serious. I do not see Ukraine punished enough to capitulate. If they were ready to roll, Russia should have known they would do so and began punishing them again weeks ago, never letting up in retreat.
Why go to Kiv when the landscape is different than eastern Ukraine. Russians spent a lot of resource in the attempt whether feinted or not in the effort. Other pundits appear to think it was to wear the Ukrainians out.
Run,
To express my feelings about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then I would have to go all George Carlin on you which would be too blue for this venue. So, I will keep my feet dry and stay with the martial science and the psychology.
Putin is apparently running this war himself, whether because his generals are incompetent or just afraid to push back. It does not matter why. Clearly he is no student of military history. Logistics is not a replacement for strategy, but it is a powerful complement when done well and and a recipe for failure when abandoned for a misguided strategic goal. The huge irony is that Russians had defeated both Napoleon and Hitler by stretching out their supply lines until they broke. Large expeditionary forces need supply lines and no political leader is qualified to run a war. Meanwhile the Ukrainians have home field advantage and a political leader that is approachable.
Coberly provided a link to an article on another AB thread blaming the US for feeding the Ukrainian right wing arms to confront the Russians and move Zelensky away from an earlier diplomatic solution with Putin prior to the recent invasion. Dale just provided it as an alternative view to his own. I have not back-checked the agenda and sources behind that article, but it did pose a believable back story given US history back to my native ancestors all the way up to Ky and Diem, after which I may have missed a few things during the decade that I was self-medicating. We agreed that Russia’s behavior since their invasion makes that argument moot now. Imagine how Ukrainians feel about that. Putin seems to have bridged the divide between left and right in both the Ukraine and the US.
Got stuff to do, so I will be brief on the head shrink. Ukraine is defending itself and Russian is out to screw the world. You probably remember George Carlin on military aggression, but he was talking about the US. Same difference. We are the good guys not because we are so good, but because they are so bad.
[Found a in depth link on the Putin psych that I agree with. As for target cities, then that fits this article by just saying they are bigger wagers.]
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/why-putin-is-playing-poker-not-chess/
Why Putin Is Playing Poker, Not Chess
As a semiprofessional gambler, I recognize his moves and ways in which the West can win
March 4, 2022
Jason Pack is the author of “Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder”
Russia and the West are now at war. And the delicate dance leading to conflict between nuclear powers is a form of poker, not chess. Putin is used to bluffing and stealing the pot. He was shocked that the West called his biggest raise ever. Now what happens? Game theory and the poker concept of “pot odds” point to more escalations. I argue that these can possibly be averted through eschewing negotiations and focusing on deterrence.
Nuclear powers generally don’t bumble into war against each other. And make no mistake, since Feb. 24, NATO is for all intents and purposes at war with Putin’s Russia. True, this is partially a limited war, in that NATO militaries will not directly engage unless NATO territory is attacked, but it is also an unlimited war in that no financial or military options are off the table and Putin’s regime is existentially threatened in the way that it has not been in previous conflicts in Georgia, Syria or the Donbas.
I account for this surprising outcome because of a series of miscalculations by both sides. I assert that neither Putin, Biden, Zelenskyy, Macron nor Scholz wanted it to come to this. All wanted to avoid this outcome, which is suboptimal for all of their interests. Yet, having reached this point, all actors will likely be trapped into yet further escalations in the days to come. The only way to stop this cycle of escalations is for Western leaders to pivot from negotiations to deterrence. To better understand this paradoxical state of affairs, I believe we should explore various gaming metaphors to better conceptualize the current crisis and the realm of options open to our policymakers.
Vladimir Putin is clearly an accomplished sportsman and an intuitive poker player. As a judo master, he has decades of training in probing for an opponent’s weakness and then stealthily exploiting it while going for a knockout blow. As a seasoned practitioner of the poker-like aspects of diplomacy and counterinsurgency, he has been consistently calling America’s bluffs for several U.S. presidential administrations already. Over these decades, he has received repeated confirmations that brinkmanship pays and no major indications that his preferred strategy would all of a sudden fail.
Buoyed by his previous successes, Putin thought he could read Biden’s tells even over Zoom. Filled with dreams of future grandeur and calculations of his waning hard power, he wanted to steal one more big pot before it was too late. Putin has also grasped that by being an unpredictable bully he is better able to cow adversaries. Game theory tells us that wild aggression verging on, or feigning, psychopathy can grant a poker player a key edge against more “circumspect” actors. In the game theorist’s version of chicken, a rational actor impersonating a megalomaniac psychopath rates to win against a selfless, reflective, rules-based actor. In high-stakes gambling, even if played adroitly, the hothead approach will frequently experience a greater expected value (EV), but when it fails, the results can be disastrous. This is why it is called gambling after all.
Like many gambling games, diplomacy is an iterative contest in which players mold their strategies progressively in response to adversaries’ feedbacks and their analysis of other players’ preferences and risk thresholds. Putin has correctly understood that Western leaderships and populaces are “war-weary” as a result of the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been accurately reading this as at the root of our default “appeasement responses” to piecemeal acts of Russian aggression. This has spurred him to push progressively further and increasingly inhabit the hot-head approach to his gameplay. The lack of an overwhelming Western pushback against his unprovoked aggression in Georgia in 2008 encouraged him to annex the Crimea in 2014. Obama’s lack of enforcement of “the red line” over Syrian chemical weapons use in 2012-13 convinced Putin that he could deploy mercenaries, barrel bombs and indiscriminate shelling to keep Assad in power and get away with it. He was proved right.
Reflecting on this decade’s long trend line of Western appeasement, war weariness and passivity, he felt that the moment for more decisive action may have arisen. The intertwined phenomena of Trump and Brexit were seen in the Kremlin as wins that had weakened the West’s internal cohesion and might even have been meaningfully aided by Russian information operations. Finally, an unproven German leader had recently taken over the chancellery and there were noises in both Downing Street and the White House of a dramatic pivot away from Europe toward Asia, seeking to contain an ascendant China. He also noted that the spot price for European natural gas was soaring in late 2021 and that EU domestic gas production has declined and now covers only 42% of consumption, as compared with 53% in 2010.
Assimilating these various inputs, Putin probed for further Western weaknesses by progressively massing troops around Ukraine. Sensing a lack of concrete responses to counterbalance his troop movements and aware that the Ukrainian army was progressively gaining strength as it integrated Western military support, he decided that the optimal moment had arisen for a decisive invasion. It was now or never. He decided to cross the Rubicon, or shall we say, the Dnieper.
Even the most seasoned poker players sometimes miscalculate. Even a lifelong judo master sometimes attacks too brazenly, leaving himself open to counterattack. This can happen as a result of both sides misreading the strategic context. Sometimes the pigeon (as novices are called in backgammon) misplays the position in such a way that leads to the expert overcompensating and finding himself subsequently trapped in a variation that incentivizes yet further suboptimal plays.
Russia is now not only in a hot war with the majority of the Ukrainian people (including most of the native Russian speakers) but in an all-out proxy and financial war with a united Western alliance made up of all NATO countries and most democracies on earth. The world is more united against Russia than even during the height of the Cold War.
Putin has definitely blundered. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Putin has all of sudden become unhinged or is losing his mind or is having a genuine psychotic episode, as various pundits are asserting. This outcome is the predictable result of the strategies that Putin has been deploying for the past two decades. Playing aggressive brinkmanship diplomacy closely resembles high-stakes poker in that it requires one to take big gambles based on imperfect information and iterative interactions with a familiar adversary. Faced with such circumstances, even the world’s best gamblers sometimes overplay their hands and go bust. Diplomacy, like gambling, involves profound elements of risk and chance.
Before I draw on my personal experience as a semiprofessional gambler to investigate specific gaming metaphors to model the assumptions and miscalculations that can shed light on how we got to the current moment in Ukraine, I think it is useful to take a step back and quickly examine various scholarly and media narratives about diplomacy.
Diplomacy, and especially warfare, is sometimes compared to chess. I think this is largely inappropriate as it implies that there is a “correct/winning” move and that other moves are wrong or suboptimal. Chess analogies also imply that one is playing the position and not the opponent. In chess, the best move is the optimal move independent of who one is playing and what her/his tendencies are. In the late 1990s, IBM’s chess playing artificial intelligence known as Deep Blue beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov not by anticipating Kasparov’s tendencies and countering them but rather by playing perfect moves. Therefore, I think we can simply discard the chess analogy altogether as entirely contrived. Diplomacy is not chess; the right move does not always win and even more frequently the wrong move does not lose.
Daniel Baer recently wrote an essay for Foreign Policy, titled “Why the Chess Metaphor for Putin Is Wrong: The problem with Russia is not a game,” in which he argued that because Putin is a psychopathic thug, the present conflict is more serious than a game of chess. Baer also argued that Putin is simply flouting the rules of the game of diplomatic “chess,” while our rational Western leaders play adeptly to contain him within acceptable diplomatic rules. Similarly, retired CIA senior clandestine services officer Dan Hoffman told Fox News, “The profile of Vladimir Putin from today is not the one that we would have written two weeks ago, or two years ago. So it’s almost like we’ve seen a transition from a chess player to a poker player.”…
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[This is a much longer article, but I probably already copied more than just a reasonable teaser. If still interested then take the link.]
Ron:
Been reading some stuff elsewhere. How many right wingers did you meet while in the
service of your majesty’smilitary? A lot of conspiracy theories going around.Run,
On the politics of soldiers question, then I must go along with Hal Moore – We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. IOW, we were draftees mostly and too young to vote. I do not remember any talk of politics in the service. Talking about who died with those that knew them stands out most in my recollection.
Ron
Never did more than acknowledge the last of what you talk about. It was not a beer drinking topic. There was a lot of talk about the riots and being called out. Never happened though, even though we were trained for riot control in case Washington DC was over run. The remarks were not kind and right leaning. The remarks about politicians and the government were not what I would call neutral. I kept my mouth shut and just did the job.
yea we were young and angry and trained to do what we were told.
Run,
Interesting. So an autocracy like Russia has a problem using a conscripted military and a democracy like the US has a problem using a volunteer military. I was always for the draft despite my objection to the Vietnam war and if anything more so because of my objection to the Vietnam war.
Run,
In retrospect, my two-year stint of service did not offer me a revealing vantage point to observe military life in general. My service was limited to basic at Benning, AIT at Gordon, Vietnam service with 101st Camp Eagle and Phu Bai (after brief stopover in Bien Hoa for P-training), and finishing up at Benning’s Infantry School as permanent party instead of trainee. Neither combat zones nor training camps are the same as other military service. Combat zones have Claymores and training camps have newbies. Lifers have a tendency to be on their best behavior around either one.
OTOH, stationed at both the TOC and HQ for the 101st, then I had an exceptional vantage point to observe the war in relative safety for myself, but still aware of all the grim details.
Well, I made up the numbers to try to somewhat answer one of the questions asked in the post, and to make the point that gerrymandered districts are more vulnerable to a voter swing. That’s just the math, but I don’t claim to know what kind of swing is achievable.
I wouldn’t call the GOP anti-government. They support a bigger military, more police, more prisons, bail-outs for corporations, more anti-immigration agents, a border wall, laws against abortion, laws restricting free speech (as in schools), etc. And I’m not sure people are that anti-government. They like Social Security and Medicare, good schools, the Post Office, clean water, etc. (not to say they’re happy with how these are run).
Killer issue: Republican Party killer: 50% of American workers want to have a union — 6.2% have a union. The other 50%, in my experience talking to them at random, hardly know what a labor union is all about — in our so long ago deunionized labor market that folks have long since forgotten just exactly what unions are for.
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
Regularly scheduled cert/recert/decert elections at every private sector work place would be hotter than any civil rights issues in the ’60s because almost everybody’s situation in life would be radically changed.
Yes, of course there is. I suspect it happened in 2020 quite a bit.
Those of us who left the party a long time ago are moving into the straight-ticket Democrat category, but those who only left recently still have hopes the worst elements of the party will disappear. Recent history says that is very unlikely, and their votes will tend more Democratic or other not Republican over time.
The GOP is distilling down to the most hateful, mean, and nasty core. It will become harder to find people who will peel off, but there will be some for whom the line is finally crossed.
The Democratic party today, for all the vitriol about socialism leveled against it by the GOP, is pretty close on domestic policy to the more progressive GOP of the 50’s and 60’s. Perhaps Eisenhower was an aberration, but he represents the GOP, or the idea of the GOP, that many of us old folks joined back in the day.
i guess the only reason that people who feel that their wished are ignored arent moving is that it isnt cheap to move. maybe the Democratic party start helping some move to new states? considering that more Democratic states are much better off than their Republican states. not that they are perfect, but given how some GOP states tend to only support the businesses in their state (business friendly….sort if any way…then there are Florida and Texas who dont fit that any more).