Will there ever be a “multi-party” system (i.e. 5-10 parties) or are we stuck here?

Short answer, we are stuck – at least for the foreseeable future.   

There are roughly three types of party government – single parties (China), two party (USA), and multi-party, where 3 or more parties have a legitimate shot at governing in whole or in a coalition (most of Europe).

As you know, the USA has a two-party system. 

Why? 

Well because the parties in power make the rules governing our elections.  And the two major parties, acting like the monopolies write the rules to keep and perpetuate their power. 

Ballot Access

Actually getting candidats on the ballot is difficult – more so in certain areas.

Access to the ballot requires filing fees and signature requirements.  These requirements vary state by state and by office.  Here is a 37 page summary document.  37 pages of ‘summary’!

A third party that wants to field a candidate in every congressional district across the country, we are talking millions of signatures and significant amounts of money.

Winner Take All Elections

In political science, there are few “laws”.

In almost every case as with most social science “it depends….” Is the beginning of most answers.

However, there is Duverger’s Law. 

Pssst…Meet Maurice Duverger – doesn’t this French political scientist look exactly like the type of guy that would pen a political science law?

I will paraphrase here (and his law is a bit more nuanced), but single member districts with first past the post elections – favor two party systems.    It’s a law!.

The very structure of American elections strongly favors two party rule.

Ideological Void

I will add a third reason.

In most cases, most people clamoring for a third party have few things in common other than rejecting both major parties. (I wrote a great post earlier about third parties in presidential elections)

Most independents act like closeted weak-partisan voters – meaning when pushed, their voting behavior mirrors a partisan voter (just don’t dare call them that).

To date, any third party that has put together a platform ends up being so absolute that they end up running goat sacrificing candidates.   Yeah, I am looking at you Libertarian Party.

Try it: write a platform and try to gain buy in.  It is so difficult, the GOP doesn’t even have one.  BAZINGA!

Conclusion

Without significant changes to the laws and regulations that govern elections, third parties will face nearly insurmountable obstacles – put in place by those that make and benefit from those exact laws and regulations.

One nascent change that is gaining a little  momentum is moving away from first past the post elections to rank choice voting.  We see this type of ballot in Maine, NYC, Alaska and few other places.    I am not a huge fan of the process, but you can learn more about it: https://www.rcvresources.org/how-it-works.

But it is also illustrative of the main point.  Those in power loathe to cede it to anyone, and will do all kinds of things to keep it. 

In Florida, Ranked Choice Voting was passed in Sarasota for local election via referendum.

Yeah, the State of Florida promptly and quickly banned it (Senate Bill 524)  for all elections in Florida with bi-partisan support.   

Overview

For the most part, voters in Alachua County performed about as one would expect.

Of all campaigns that were partisan and county wide, Democrats averaged 58% and Republicans averaged 42% of the vote.  This is in-line with historic returns going back to 1996.

There were no major deviations, except for two things:

• Republican Kay Abbitt won a school board race (in a primary, and that is a different post)
• Single Member Districts (SMD), even with the controversial campaign, (also, also, also) passed.

It is SMD that I am interested in exploring.

Results

SMD passed with 51% of the vote. 

It passed with a slim margin of 2,567 votes or 51%, but SMD did +9% points ‘worse’ than the baseline Democrat partisan result in the county races (average of 42%). 

This is interesting.

Dem Performance and SMD No Votes Are Highly Correlated

If we plot precinct’s percentage returns of Democrat performance (I used Alford vs Eagle County Commission race as a baseline) on the x axis, the SMD NO vote on the Y axis, we observe the two votes are highly correlated (.943 Pearsons) with an R² of .889.   (A perfect correlation is 1.0).

If you voted Dem (on a county commission race), you likely voted ‘no’ on SMD.  Partisanship was a main driver.    

So, what happened? 

There are two main clusters of deviation from the fit line:

• Precincts with high percentage of registered voters, A18-34.  (Defined as >=50%)
• Precincts with high percentage of African American voters.  (Defined as >=30%)

Under-Performance

First we will explore under-performance, Democratic performance – No Vote on SMD.

On average, under-performance voting was 12%.  However, there are a two clusters of outliers with the highest being 29%.

Exploring the precincts that are ~2x the average:

*Bold indicates AA precinct

^indicates student precinct

Voter Fatigue

As with most down ballot issues, we also look at fall-off or voter fatigue.  These are precincts that had voters that cast a vote in the County Commission campaign and for whatever reason didn’t cast a vote in SMD question.

On average, fall off / fatigue was 6%.  However, there are a couple of outliers with the highest being 21%.

So who didn’t make it down the ballot?  For the most part, they are precincts where younger voters comprise at least 50% of the registered voters.

As you can see 7 of the top 10 precincts that fell off are ‘student’ precincts (as defined by me as registration A18-34 >=50% of total registration).

*Bold indicates AA precinct

^indicates student precinct

Precincts comprised of younger voters experienced higher rates of voter fatigue for SMD.

Conclusions

So, what is the bigger “sin”?

Voting and not making it all the way through the ballot? (students)

OR

Voting and breaking with your party? (African Americans)

Regardless, two ‘bases’ of the national Democrat party coalition under-performed at this  local issue :young voters and African American voters.

If you are looking for 1,300 votes to change an outcome, either one is a good option.  (Average size of AA precincts is~1000 votes cast, student precincts ~1100 votes cast)

However, which is a bigger ‘surprise’?  Students not casting a vote for a local issue that doesn’t affect them much – OR – African Americans breaking from their local party’s position?

Finally, what is the better campaign strategy?

Asymmetric warfare using a ‘trusted’ messenger of the NAACP?

OR

Attempting nothing but to ride a partisan advantage and trusting a newspaper with declining readership to carry the message?

Data download

If you are interested in the cleaned up datafile, please feel free to contact me. 

We spent time in part 1, part2 , and part3 in this series speaking about the difficulty in changing minds once formed. We also spent some time talking about the ‘deep work’ needed and how to change to change minds.
We have seen just how difficult it is to change minds and rare.

In writing those posts, I realized that is not what most people in our field are speaking of when they talk about “changing minds.”

(In fact, we may not want to affect your mind, opinion at all. We may be more interested in affecting your behavior. Does a political actor really care what you “think” as long as you vote or don’t vote this specific way?)

I have heard one researcher say to actually change minds, a relationship is required. In today’s politics, there are few relationships formed outside partisanship.

So, for the most part, we aren’t talking about changing minds at all.

What we really want to know about is…..propaganda.

Propaganda – the techniques of mass persuasion.  The use of symbols and psychology to prey on prejudices and emotions with the intent of having the “recipient” come to think it is all their idea and adopt a position. 

We must return to our model of thinking.

We have two main systems – System 1 (fast, automatic) and System 2 (slow, deliberate).

I have used the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. Others have used other metaphors (the Gator and the Judge).

Regardless of what you call them, System 1 is continuously scanning, decided on what one will focus on, ignore, and / or use some sort of heuristic to process quickly. System 2 takes effort, requires one to slow down.

As a researcher said, “System 1 is judging all the time, and system 2 decides – but only sometimes” and I will add : “and rarely”.

THE BASIS OF MASS PUBLIC OPINION

John Zaller in his work, The Nature of Origins of Mass Opinion, expands on the important concept with 4 ‘axioms’:

1) reception – greater a person’s engagement with an issue, the more likely they will take in and seek out information.

2) resistance – people tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political per-dispositions.

3) accessibility – the more recent consideration has been given the less time it takes to form a thought about the subject.

4) response – people form opinions and provide survey answers by averaging across everything that is immediately salient or accessible to them.

Said in a different way, most people who are into politics have their minds made up and seek out information to fortify their positions. Others, who aren’t into politics – are the most difficult to reach and yet the most persuadable – mostly by what they experience in their current environment.

Hate to break it to all of us in the political realm, most of the public just isn’t that into us. Most don’t think deeply about candidates, issues, or the use of political power.  They have other priorities. 

For the most part, in politics we aren’t doing the deep work to change hearts and minds, we are looking for those who agree or are inclined to agree with us – then motivating them. We are identifying those who don’t agree with us and unmotivating them.

Persuasion in this sense is less about changing minds or behavior, but rather on creating the environment then prompting you to act – creating the illusion the change was your idea all along.

One of the main concepts I have come to understand – System 1 is an always-on, giant threat detector. It is continuously scanning for anything that can injure, hurt, and/or kill us.

Our minds therefore our attention naturally gravitates towards deviations from the norm and any and all perceived threat(s). If there is no threat, no novelty, or no one/something we trust to interrupt the elephant, System 1, the elephant, just lumbers on. Our brains simply ignore most banal or routine things.

CONCLUSION

In summation, this means the processing of most political information is happening largely in System 1 using mental shortcuts – affecting this sytem – this is where the real power of persuasion lies.

Rarely is system 2 used (especially if it requires us to think against the groups we hold dear), like it or not, the main route of persuasion is through System 1, the playground of propaganda. 

COMING NEXT

The perfect propaganda recipe.