Median Votes and Political Losers

So I'm fully prepared for a liberal supermajority in both the House and the Senate, and a Democratic administration. I've got my bags of rice stockpiled in the basement and a trap door under my welcome mat in case someone ever attacks me. I do, after all, list my political beliefs at facebook as at the 53rd percentile, so I'm technically right of center. But in all seriousness, it's worth thinking a little bit about the median voter theorem and what we can expect in 2016.

The median voter theorem is based on some older theories by an economist named Hotelling who wrote about a "linear city" in which hot dog vendors had to decide, based on the distribution of customers, where to set up shop. The city was mathematically represented as a line, and so normally the story to make it seem realistic is that the vendors are setting up shop on a beach shore (which is kind of like a line). Where do the two vendors locate? Well, imagine that everyone who buys hot dogs is just randomly distributed along the city, equally spread out. And if people just want to go to the vendor that's closest to them, then there's an incentive for each vendor to keep moving to the middle of the shoreline. Let's say the city is a shore, and there's a left side of the shore and a right side of the shore. Then the vendor on the right will keep moving to the middle because then he gets to collect in his pocket all the people to his right (as he's now closest to them compared to the vendor on the left) as well as some of the ones now to his left. In the simplest model, though, they basically set up shop right beside one another, at the median point of the shoreline, and collect half the market themselves. This is usually considered to be the reason why American politics for all its rhetoric and rage is in the end a kind of benign centrist politics - at least when it comes to the Presidential elections. It's why Republicans sound so right-wing in the primaries, and Democrats so left-wing in the primaries, but become soft and mushy when they face one another in the general election. The system is set up, in other words, to create this kind of race to the middle.

In 2008, it's almost certainly going to be a bloodbath for Republicans. Obama is not just going to win, but he's looking like he's going to win a ton of states - even states that were solidly in McCain's pocket not a month ago are now a dark blue on the map. One of the strange things about American politics is the level of interest Americans give to the Presidential election, but the diminishing interest they give at the more regionally disaggregated races - even though at the local and state level, political involvement has a much higher payoff in terms of being able to influence the outcome of the race. A single vote cast in a national election has no statistical effect on the outcome of a race, and yet people are extremely energized it compared to the lower level races. Thus, if a single party can have an electoral landslide, not only does their candidate win in the Presidential race, but their party wins most likely in all the trickle-down Senate, Congressional and other races on the ticket that day. That's because people tend to vote in political blocs, and so if they vote for Obama in Nov. for the general election, they're also going to vote Democrat for everything else, even if they're ignorant of those races. Thus, this is setting the stage for a major revolution, for lack of a better word, at various levels of government.

Most likely, the first face we see of this new political regime will be a vastly liberal one. Without a way of filibustering in the Senate, the Republicans will have little bargaining power. But at some margin, there should be a realization of the median voter theorem coming back, and you will see again the tendency of politicians to become centrist again, particularly in years of re-election. In that time, though, a lot of things can be changed, and it will be in that time that the right side of the shoreline will sit and watch and become frustrated again. And out of that frustration will come a kind of purity of commitment and zeal - commitment to some philosophical system about governance and proper economics - that will raise up a bench of candidates who will be the perfect yin to this political age's yang. It will be effective because inevitably Obama will be a moderate in his ruling, just as Clinton was a moderate - though the loss of the House and the Senate in this case means Obama may actually have something Clinton never had, and that's the freedom to pursue executive, judicial and legislative goals that otherwise are kept in check by the Republican party (and vice versa). Depending on your beliefs, this is either very good or bad. To me, it's likely to be a mixed bag (hence why I'm a 53rd percentile person) with some things on domestic policy that I'll likely support as I'm closer to modern Democrats there, and some things on foreign policy that I am not comfortable with, as I'm more like the hawkish Republicans in that sense.

Still, the point remains that Obama will at some point be a disappointment to his left base, just as Bush was a disappointment to so many of his right base. But b/c Republicans are out of power, Republicans can afford to be as zealous and committed as they want to be, without paying any price or face any incentives to shift to the middle. And this seems to be the way American politics is always going to be - and personally the one thing that makes it so interesting to watch and so confident that whatever course we go on, we likely cannot do really, really terrible things to ourselves. I'd have to ask a political scientist, though - I'm sure that the democratic election does not guarantee any kind of minimax outcome, where the least worst thing is chosen. But still, it could be much worse.