Betting the Farm on the Drought (2015)
Beautiful article, I don’t have too much to add except to the unexpected conclusion:<p>&gt; “So why is it,” I asked, “that when I hear people talking about you, and you hear people talking about me, the only thing they ever talk about is that 5 percent?”<p>I feel like this is a solved question. There is a mathematical pattern present in our political system which says that a political party must either spinelessly focus on that 5% or die. The pattern says that few folks in the US are truly “conservative” or “liberal”, most are “terrified of those crazy liberals” and “terrified of those crazy conservatives”—this farmer seems to be an example of the former. Focusing in the 5% allows you to do this; if you don’t do this for Deep Principled Reasons then you lose your voters to a Spineless party which focuses on those 5% issues to demonize that other party.<p>The “spoiler effect” present in first-past-the-post voting and could be changed by building political support for moving to a proportionate House of Representatives: rather than endless gerrymandered districts, every state becomes one big multi-representative district: you vote for a party, not for a representative; your state’s parties each publish a list before the election, “here are our representatives that we will put in the House in order.” This is a very standard electoral approach in many parliamentary democracies; there is no reason that we couldn’t use it here to relax some of this internal tension and actually get work done on that remaining 95% that we want to solve.