Bringing Hillary To Heel

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the protest vote)

This is in part a response to Clay Shirky’s “There’s no such thing as a protest vote,” but really an attempt to address some rather fuzzy thinking about democracy and elections.

The fundamental task in an election is not to choose which of two immutable candidates will win, but to choose among a set of competing policies/priorities. Those policies can shift even if the candidates or parties do not. People forget that Bernie Sanders is a bit to the right of Eisenhower (a Republican) and just a bit to the left of Nixon (another Republican) — our Overton window has shifted so far to the right. At the same time, the Hillary Clinton before Bernie Sander’s challenge supported a very different policy platform than the Hillary Clinton of today, who will in turn be different than the Hillary in November. Why did Hillary move to the left? Because lots of Democrats viewed her as too conservative and didn’t vote for her. Not voting for Hillary got us movement on superdelegates, the minimum wage, healthcare, and college tuition. The most productive act that anyone could do for their country over the last six months was to not vote for Hillary Clinton.

This is an important lesson. It is false to argue that the candidates are fixed, and you have to choose between one of two, like choosing between the red shirt and the blue shirt. The color of a shirt doesn’t change, but candidates adjust their positions all the time as they scramble to assemble a winning coalition. If you give your vote easily (or even automatically), then you wont get any policy concessions. By always voting for the lesser of two evils, you cede any influence you have over the winning policy profile to the most extreme wing of the opposing side, because your candidate will only be marginally better than your opponents’.

One reason why the Republicans managed to move Democrats over to the right is because they were willing to lose elections. If a Republican candidate stakes out an extreme position to the right, and if the Democratic candidate can enforce party discipline in their base, then the Democrat can move within epsilon of the Republican and remain the lesser of two evils. If people vote just on the principle of choosing the best of the two options, then the opposing party can easily be hijacked into a policy profile that the majority of its base does not support. One side can trade winning the election for winning the policies, and then you will have made sure that your candidate won, but will wonder why they act like the candidate from the other party.

This is how we ended up with a Clinton gutting welfare, imposing fiscal austerity, de-regulating telecomm, de-regulating wall street, not enforcing labor law, and gutting anti-trust. The rigidity on the part of the Republicans together with the triangulation of the Clintons got us to this point.

So what is someone on the left to do when the right nominates an extreme candidate? How does one prevent the Democratic nominee from moving to the right? The solution is to make triangulation work for you; don’t vote for candidates that don’t represent you:

The Democratic candidate will keep moving to the right up until such time as the number of voters on the left that she loses is equal to the number of voters on the right that she picks up. That’s the marginal condition for maximizing votes obtained. Therefore the effect of refusing to vote in response to a shift to the right is to pull the candidate to the left. There is great virtue in not voting, as long as you do this consistently and strategically.

How is that done? Pick a set of standards and then don’t vote if your candidate doesn’t meet those standards. For example of the top 6 issues for you, demand that the candidate reflects your views on at least 3. But it has to work both ways — once you pick that standard, then if the candidate shifts to meet it, you need to vote for them with the same discipline as refusing to vote for them if they don’t meet it. I.e. don’t vote for or against a candidate because you like (dis)them, or (dis)trust them, but because of what their policies are on election day. Hillary is going to make a lot of proposals and repudiations between now and November. Listen and wait, and then vote accordingly, always insisting that you will not vote for any candidate that doesn’t meet your standards whenever you have a chance to let your voice be heard. Then on election day, stick to your guns and vote for a third party candidate or no candidate if your standards are not met.

Obviously your threshold can’t be too strict, otherwise there aren’t enough votes on the left for a winning majority, but they can be strict in proportion to the extremity of the opposing side. While those advocating party discipline see the insanity of Trump as opportunity for Hillary to vacuum up many Republican votes (and donors) — to basically complete the transformation of the Democratic party into the Republican Party— we view it as an opportunity to be even more demanding as she doesn’t need votes on the right to win. They see Trump as a bogeyman that scares us into supporting Hillary despite her policies. We see Trump as a weak enough candidate to hold Hillary to a stricter standard.

This is a view that isn’t very popular or understood. If you see a store owner who doesn’t have a lot of revenue, and you to tell him to lower prices, it seems counter-intuitive. It seems foolish. Lowering prices should result in even less revenue, they think. It’s simple math, they declare, that lowering prices by 10% reduces revenue by 10%. But the simple math doesn’t take into account that the world reacts to what we do, so when the store owner lowers prices, they get more customers and revenue can go up. Both action and reaction need to be taken into account, and an analysis that only looks at action without looking at the resulting reaction and final equilibrium is facile and wrong. The simple math says a vote withheld from Hillary makes Trump more likely to win. The equilibrium analysis says that Hillary will try to win back that lost vote:

If a large block of voters on the left credibly threaten to not vote for Hillary because she is too far to the right, then she will move to the left. Maybe not enough to win back every voter that she lost, but enough to win back a majority necessary for the election. This assumes that she wants to win, e.g. that she is less of an ideological candidate than an opportunistic one.

The candidates and the party loyalists hate this approach, because they don’t want to be subject to discipline by their base. This is why there is such scolding and insults heaped at those who say, “I wont vote for Hillary because she doesn’t represent my interests”. The imperial candidate prefers we carry her to victory on our backs out of fear of our party losing. We demand that candidates earn our votes, that it is Hillary’s job to defeat Trump by making enough concessions to enough voters, and it is our job to only support candidates that speak to our most important issues.

Being a vote on the margin — -a vote not won — is where the power lies. Credibly threatening to not vote for any candidate that doesn’t meet your standards is crucial to a functioning democracy. Without this stabilizing influence, one party can easily be taken over by another that is more disciplined and is willing to lose the election. So pick standards and be prepared to not vote, or to vote for a protest candidate — that’s how you meaningfully influence the policies and priorities of the future.