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Comment by pudo | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how well this will fare in a German context, as opposed to the US, where 538 now seems a solid part of the campaign season.

Some differences come to mind: voter participation in DE is higher and campaign cost is much lower, meaning it is perhaps a bit less about activating your supporters and more about actually getting people to change their preferences.

Volatility seems really high, too - see the recent rise and fall of the Greens. There's also a few weird turning points, like the 5% quorum that could conceivably hit the Left this season. And there's the non-fixed number of seats.

So: congrats, INWT, for the nice marketing. Let's see if you picked a good model :)

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German elections are much less tactical and significantly more boring than US elections. The US system creates much bigger swings based on small differences and creates much more of a narrative around campaign strategies. In Germany you pretty much just look at one poll for all parties and the popularity of the potential chancellors, but that's it.

The election is also far less influential, because there will always be a coalition in power, where sometimes single-seat differences (often resulting from weird specialties of the election system like Ueberhangmandate and Ausgleichsmandate) decide on the (non-)viability of some option.

And all the election programme of a party is very much up for discussion in coalition talks: A famous example of a coalition compromise: 2005 SPD promised "leave VAT at 16%", CDU promised "VAT raise to 18%". Their compromise? raise VAT to 19%.

The election is the boring part, the talks right after the election decide what will happen.

My favorite example of that is from 1909; Churchill describing the number of battleships to be built.

“The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”

We had a famous case of this in the German federal election of 2005. The conservatives (CDU/CSU) wanted to increase sales tax by 1%, the social democrats (SPD) were opposed to increasing it at all. They ended up forming a coalition that raised the sales tax by 3%.

this isn't a bad thing

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I like boring and reliable elections with more than two choices. But I suspect that this also means that there is simply not that much interest for a 538-like site in Germany.

Greens look a blip caused by the slow vaccine rollout. Their peak is right around when people were maximally angry about how far the EU was behind the UK.

Nope. The blip coincides with and was caused by a corruption scandal involving quite a few CDU/CSU politicians. As well as an increase in Greens' press coverage when they announced their candidates.

Both influences have subsided by now

This is wrong. April and May was peak anger about the coronavirus response. Around that time, the political conversations among Germans was entirely about the virus and how sick of it they were, and they were blaming the party in power. People care far more about being stuck at home for another summer than they care about corruption, or the media splash made by Baerbock. Plus, von der Leyen serves as a convenient symbol of an EU bureaucracy run as a retirement home for the incompetent and well-connected, and she's a CDU politician. Baerbock's appeal was that she would be a change from a status quo that failed.

But then since mid-May they administered 40 million doses, and everything is forgiven. Just subjectively, it went from no one I know is vaccinated, to everyone is either vaccinated or has an appointment to be vaccinated. Summer isn't canceled after all.

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