One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”
The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.
Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.
A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.
Yeah no. That’s a lot of noise to ignore that the party and Republican voters preferred Palin. Begich wouldn’t even have been there in traditional FPTP. Calling the most popular candidate from a party “a spoiler” is a rhetorical device republicans came up with to go after RCV.
Peltola is also hardly some far left representative. So calling it a center squeeze is a bit rich. This entire write up screams, “I can’t approve of the Alaskan RCV election because I’m paid not to.”
To be clear, not you, the author of that Wikipedia article.
Edit to add- and sure enough if you go to the talk page there’s a partisan group defending it from any changes to bring it towards Wikipedia objectivity standards. This is why your teachers told you Wikipedia is a bad source.
I didn’t tell you to trust Wikipedia, I told you to follow through to the linked sources in that section. Also, that talk page suffers from the same problem you’re having, which is assuming that the RCV results are the same thing as the public opinion. The entire point of analysing the data is to look past the voting system used and try to understand what people’s preferences are. Here’s another (very long) source that summarizes the full ballot data and explains that, yes, Palin was a spoiler. Justifying this as acceptable by saying that RCV followed its own rules (which it must do, by definition) is the same as saying Ralph Nader spoiling the 2000 election was the correct outcome because those people had Nader as their favorite.
Look I don’t hate RCV. It’s certainly better than FPTP. I just don’t want people to have false ideas about its function. Spoilers can and do happen, they just behave differently than FPTP. And, I will add, they behave in a much more acceptable way, with RCV spoilers being much more likely to be competitive candidates compared to FPTP. Plus, RCV has less center-squeeze than FPTP. Mathematically, Approval doesn’t have spoilers nor does it have a center-squeeze effect, and I would argue that it’s better than both RCV and FPTP for this and other reasons, but I do want to re-confirm that FPTP is the worst.
SPAV still requires a proportional system. You cannot just magic it into our system. And even if there’s a state willing to go proportional, asking voters to use two different systems is a non starter.
Second. That source is shit too. It’s a bunch of mathematicians playing what if? This quote is as far as I got because it makes it obvious.
Peltola, could have lost by getting more 1st choice votes from Palin supporters.
If you’re going to criticize RCV it needs to be on facts. Not on fantasy situations that can be generically applied. Yes if some Palin voters in an alternate universe decided to abandon their entire ideology and vote blue, they could have kept Begich in the race and prevented Peltola from getting those second round votes. But that’s an absolutely ridiculous assumption and shows these guys are just playing the numbers game.
Which is what every conservative attempt to attack RCV voting in the wake of 2022 came down to.
You’re not bringing any novel evidence to the argument and you’re proposing a niche replacement that doesn’t even fit our system.
I dunno why you’re bringing back SPAV into this, the discussion has had very little to do with it. There are local races that use STV, which is a bigger change to the voting and representation system than SPAV is.
You should just skip down to the part that explains that yes, Palin was a spoiler. You don’t seem to be particularly interested in actually having a discussion, I’m not here to score wins or attack one system or another. I’m here to provide and receive a better understanding of how voting and representation systems work. You don’t seem to be particularly interested in that.
