I would add that “electoral maths” is something some medias spend way too much time obsessing about. It goes “meta” on the voting intentions, ultimately encouraging tribalism by eclipsing the actual propositions. Furthermore it’s all based on polls which are increasingly unreliable since the end of the landline era.
Really liked this articulation that someone shared with me recently:
here’s something you need to know about polls and the media: we pay for polls so we can can write stories about polls. We’re paying for a drumbeat to dance to. This isn’t to say polls are unscientific, or false, or misleading: they’re generally accurate, even if the content written around marginal noise tends to misrepresent them. It’s to remind you that when you’re reading about polls, you’re watching us hula hoop the ourobouros. Keep an eye out for poll guys boasting about their influence as much as their accuracy. That’s when you’ll know the rot has reached the root, not that there’s anything you can do about it.
@theluddite@lemmy.ml @luciole@beehaw.org I swear one day I’m going to sit down and do the actual math to prove that voting systems are broken by having a majority of voters factor their perception of “electoral math” into their preferences even when their perceptions are accurate. Arrow’s impossibility theorem is already pretty discouraging without all this meta stuff.
If you sort of mean like how my dad insists that while he loves Buttigieg, he doesn’t think a gay man will ever become president, so he votes for the “electable” candidates, thus helping to manifest his own assumptions, I think that would be very interesting to see laid out with data.
How many self-defeating near-progressives constantly land us with Centrists because they assume that they’d be wasting their vote by voting progressive, and is it enough that it would actually change the outcome if they just voted progressive?
That would be a really fun project! It almost reads like the setup for a homework problem for a class on chaos and nonlinear dynamics. I bet that as the model increasingly takes into account other people’s (supposed?) preferences, you get qualitative breaks in behavior.
Stuff like this is why I come back to postmodernists like Baudrillard and Debord time and time again. These kinds of second- (or Nth-) order “news” are an artifact of the media’s constant and ever-accelerating commodification of reality. They just pile on more and more and more until we struggle to find reality through the sheer weight of its representations.
