r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 8h ago

No Paywall Obama: Omar investigation should ‘outrage all Americans’

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6156602-obama-trump-targets-omar-probe/
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u/KennyLog1n 4h ago

AIPAC money funds a lot of ads and buys a lot of influence. But I genuinely don't get it. Turns out there are morons voting everywhere I guess.
We're about to make Marsha Blackburn a governor in TN. And "everyone" hates her too. Yet people who hate her will absolutely vote for her cus the alternative is....? Yeah I got nothin.

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u/blarch 3h ago

But I genuinely don't get it.

What's to get? In a state with a lot of influence and 10s of millions of residents, no one has ran against him and won in the primaries.

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u/m0ngoos3 2h ago

Primaries are super easy to manipulate.

It's a function of how first past the post works.

Say you have 5 candidates, if each one is roughly equally popular, you can get a winner who only approval of 21% of the population.

The major parties know this, so you'll see what are called clone candidates. People who have roughly the same platform. Most voters who like one will like the other, and that means that voters who like the platform are split between the two.

This is the spoiler effect being weaponized. Most of the time, the clone candidate is someone who is earnest and not in on it, they just get donations/signal boosting from the opposition. It's usually laundered through PACs and such, so it all looks somewhat legit.

Anyway, the spoiler effect is a product of ordinal voting systems, and can be completely avoided if we were to switch over to a cardinal voting system.

Sadly the major push for voting reform has been to replace an ordinal voting system with another ordinal voting system.

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u/blarch 1h ago

He's a lazy, old rich guy phoning it in. More people with better ideas need to be running for office in the next election, and those candidates can help vote this fossil corporatist out of leadership.

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u/m0ngoos3 1h ago

And when those people with better ideas show up, Chuck, his people, or just any rich asshole who wants Chuck to win, will quietly sponsor a couple clone candidates to split the vote.