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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

I think polling on such a detailed level is fundamentally changing the democratic process. In the past, politicians had to be leaders - present a vision that was quite possibly unpopular to start with, and persuade people to come around to it. (See e.g. JFK and the space program.) Nowadays they're becoming expert hagglers: keep this mini-group barely content, say exactly the right nice things to the other, ignore a third altogether because they're 10% over in enemy territory. I don't know where this is leading to, but it's definitely a big change.

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I disagree, politics has always been about haggling, you cannot do politics if you don't know how to build a coalition. A politician cannot represent 100% of the people that is why there are political parties and politicians of different ideologies. I think if you look a little deeper all the JFKs, Reagans and Clintons were hagglers and negotiators first. A good politician is an expert negotiator and the very best are exceptional leaders. Its been the same since the first democracy was born. The only change now is that it is very easy to identify who will part of your coalition.

The vast majority of the population are influenced by some sort of benefits the government "offers" whether they be tax breaks, healthcare, welfare, gun rights, subsidies, higher pay for teachers, etc...

Because of this I think that this sort of micro-haggling can happen. Instead of offering a broad plan that is ideologically consistent, and then trying to convince the population to go along with that - politicians can turn the knobs of the different constituencies by holding out the carrot that matters to that group of people.

The problem with that is that the media is not that stupid. If you don’t have a consistent message you will be called out on it.

There are forces counteracting that, you know.

If your contention about voter bribery is true, how come red states are the ones taking the biggest government benefits relative to their taxes and blue states the opposite?

I think voters vote for ideals rather than as a business proposition, and there are polls that back that up. The idea that 47% of the electorate is 'bought' was pretty thoroughly slammed in the media the last couple months.

I'm not really taking it to the level of bribery. I just think that by analyzing the different micro-constituencies and what makes them most concerned - social security, taxes on high pay, auto industry jobs - you can better tailor your message to them.

While I agree that voters vote more based on ideals - I know I do - if there are enough 'business propositions' that go against you, that is most likely going to be an affront to your ideals. If your job relies on corn subsidies, you more than likely agree with the idea of crop subsides, and therefore will vote for the candidate that supports your "ideals".

Sure, but even if we slice it by constituencies, medicare recipients overwhelmingly voted for romney-ryan while the 18-44 set voted for Obama. I still think ideals come in way ahead of "what's best for me personally".

Red states / districts have significantly lower population per area, education levels, and incomes etc. However, the republican party is vary heavily influenced by it's donors which tend to be either retired or affluent. From this perspective you can see why so many of there policy's are setup to hurt the vast majority of their voters.

Ronald Reagan's electoral graph would like to disagree.

Winning 49 states is VERY much not equivalent to winning 98% of the popular vote.

Indeed. Even Mondale got 40% of the vote. The idea of Reagan as a qualitatively different "uniter" and "great communicator" is mostly a myth. The truth of the matter is that 1984 represented the apex of the "southern strategy", the republicans having shorn up the southern white rural vote pioneered by Nixon, but not having lost the middle class of the northeast or west, nor yet dealing with the emergent minority demographics of the modern world.

And he was a great candidate facing a pretty mediocre one as an incumbent in a growing economy. It was a perfect storm of circumstance, not a unique moment.

The oposite opinion can also be argued, that now politicians are a lot more connected to the populace, and that the will of the people is now represented much better than it was in the past.

How does a politician become "more connected" to the populace if said populace is only encountered as an integral function of a wider statistically significant effect?

"Dear Candidate, you will have to see people in that part of the country, not because you care, but because our data has shown that a similar visit before was statistically significant enough to matter."

On top of that, this data-driven approach actively undermines any connection by reducing it to a functional one. There isn't even the pretence anymore that the candidate cares for the given group due to intrinsic values or some sort of connection other than statistics.

> "Dear Candidate, you will have to see people in that part of the country, not because you care, but because our data has shown that a similar visit before was statistically significant enough to matter."

When has a candidate ever campaigned in a place for any other reason other than an attempt to snag votes? The advent of computer-driven data didn't suddenly steal the innocence out of campaigning.

Let's take it to the logical extreme. Say the candidate did exactly what the statistics said to do on every issue and that they had no vision or leadership whatsoever. That candidate would be the closest a representative could get to the will of the people. It would also be the closest a representative democracy could get to being a direct democracy.

While I can appreciate there is value to having figureheads around, it's hard for me to look at a system approaching direct democracy and feel that it is worse.

Since when is direct democracy completely void of any form of value? Following your "extreme", then, means that every election means simply projecting all your private hopes onto someone completely void of any coherency, other than that projected onto them.

Statistics reflect groups already present or in the process of development, which formed due to previous work (be it a former presidency or the opposition thereof). Giving statistics free reign does not approach direct democracy, because it merely manifests what was already there, or -- if you want to be more dystopian -- they will create through their own precriptions what they define (→ theory effect).

The whole point of holding elections is to find a compromise that works for the majority -- if not most -- of the people, and for that you need a program that then creates groups. If you however campaign solely based on the already existant groups, you will cement the already existing groups (and schisms) without the chance to actually initialise any new group formation processes.

I don't understand direct democracy as a system where the candidate serves merely as an empty canvas on which every individual voter (or group of voters) can project their preconceived opinions without even having to engage in any form of idea-led political discourse.

Under direct democracy, there wouldn't be a candidate at all--the citizens propose and vote on every issue themselves, instead of electing a representative to do it for them. It's been done before, and the principle argument against it is that it doesn't scale (thus representative democracy).

"Merely manifesting what was already there" is exactly the point of democracy: the majority rules as opposed to some superior-minded entity. Your argument seems to be that representative democracy is better than direct democracy because compromise wouldn't exist without representatives or people wouldn't factionize without them. I find those claims dubious, but we're all entitled to our opinion.

What I think lies beneath your argument is a form of the old classical AI versus statistic AI debate. The classical side asserts that there's not much scientific value in statistical techniques because they don't increase our understanding. The statistical side emphasizes pragmatics and has the best results. Interestingly, even if your side were right, it's going to be (and is already, evidently) steamrolled by the other side simply because they have the results. It doesn't seem impossible to me that there could be something valuable about sharing values with candidates, but the candidate that employed the statistical method better won. As long as that remains the case--in other words, until voters vote based on actual values rather than statistically determined hot-button issues--it's a moot point.

Correction: the will of those who are financially able to represent themselves in front of politicians. Presidents and leaders don't have time to understand their populace on their own accord these days.

It seems to me that the whole point of having elected leaders instead of making every choice a referendum is to modulate the will of the people, instead of following it blindly.

Whether you like or dislike Obama, the single biggest difference between him and Romney is leadership the way you described it -- willingness to stand behind something unpopular.

Winning requires all kinds. Sketch out the broad vision, and then do the little data-driven things that can give you a bunch of tiny little edges on the margin. But if it's not close to begin with, no amount of small edges are gonna help you.

A good analogy would be having good architecture and good code quality in a project -- you need both, but no amount of code quality can save a bad architecture.

> Whether you like or dislike Obama, the single biggest difference between him and Romney is leadership the way you described it -- willingness to stand behind something unpopular.

That doesn't sound completely right to me. Romney's stint at Bain was expected to cost him the presidency (and maybe did) because of the unpopular things he did while there: Fired people and outsourced jobs while making a couple hundred million for himself in the process. Of the many things he's flop-flopped and waffled on, that record isn't one of them. If running for president in a down economy with that around your neck isn't standing behind something unpopular, what is?

Excuse me, political leadership. Romney has, to my knowledge, not once stood on the losing side of an issue out of principle, and if the electorate flips, he does too. Obama has gone out on a limb for things that aren't popular multiple times.

Not being able to change his past at Bain, not that he didn't try, isn't a sign of backbone, it's just how 'the past' works.

> Romney has, to my knowledge, not once stood on the losing side of an issue out of principle

You clearly have an issue in mind when Obama did this?

> Not being able to change his past at Bain, not that he didn't try, isn't a sign of backbone, it's just how 'the past' works.

By running with this past (it's very much an option not to run), he implicitly ran on a non-flop-floppable platform of "I'm willing to do stuff that's unpopular and will hurt".

The healthcare bill is a pretty high profile example of Obama standing by something that's a short-term political loser. Stimulus, arguably, as well.

Hm, you're right. I was actually under the impression ACA was fairly popular among the relevant groups, but it wasn't. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/six-charts-...

There's a lot of stuff. In addition to those, these are other examples off the top of my head:

* Coming out in support of gay marriage, which has always lost in state ballots.

* Going after Osama bin Laden, on a 50/50 chance, inside a foreign nation who would have every right to shoot down our invading helicopters.

* The auto bailout, which was not popular at the time. It's amazing how easily people forget stuff like this.

Osama bin Laden is a great example, because it could have gone horribly wrong and made Obama look terrible. The other two are really lousy examples, for two reasons:

1. Gay marriage and the auto bailout are or have been unpopular, but not among Obama's core voting groups. Yes, standing behind those positions will piss off lots of people, but not people who were going to vote for him anyway. The ACA falls under this category as well, in that it wasn't terribly popular, but many on the left didn't like it because it didn't go far enough. No way were they going to vote for Romney because Obama hadn't gone far enough with the ACA.

2. Obama didn't come out in favor of gay marriage until Biden forced his hand, and there's no way he would have. But Biden forced his hand and it turned out well for him in the end.

Obama is just as calculating and concerned about keeping his base happy as any other national politician.

I'll agree that he dragged his feet for the right moment on gay marriage but the auto bailout could have SO easily gone the wrong way and Obama would be married to it. As in, he's catching the blame for decades of business decisions, in exchange for trying to help. But he did.

Are we sure the auto bailout hasn't gone the wrong way? The problem with bailouts are two-fold:

1. They protect jobs, but often at a much higher cost than is justified. Admittedly, I don't know the numbers here, but I recall something about the ban on foreign tires protecting US jobs at a cost of $900,000 per job saved.

2. They introduce moral hazard. See our repeated pattern of bank bailouts for examples. If the auto bailout did cause this problem, we won't know about it until much later.

A defining feature of capitalism is competition, which means economic winners and losers. If we protect companies from the need to restructure, even for a noble purpose, we may cause more problems down the road. The auto industry wouldn't have ceased to exist if two companies had gone through bankruptcy. Other automakers and manufacturers would have bought those assets and run them more efficiently. And those other companies are exactly the type you want to be doing this, since they didn't need a bailout in the first place, right?

That's a longer term than political success/failure and a different conversation.

I don't think the moral hazard argument holds for the auto industry like it does for banks, and the auto industry is strategically critical to have around and in good health. But there are valid arguments that disagree.

Those are all valid points, and I thank you for the civility :)

To say the ACA "wasn't terribly popular" is a huge understatement.

The amount of $$$ spent against "Obamacare" before and after its passing easily numbers in the hundreds of millions of dollars. "Obamacare" is/was considered a defamatory label. The president's Chieff of Staff essentially begged the president not to go through with it. 0.00000000000000000 Republicans ever went on board with it. The whole law wasn't even to go into effect until 2014. Presidents for how many decades have tried and failed to deliver health reform?

There was absolutely no short-term (or even near long-term) political gain to be found in pursuing the law. And if the law didn't pass, the president would be in a much weaker political position.

Even by passing it, the president knew the process would kill any remaining political capital he had left and also hand the House of Representatives to Republicans. That much was not rocket science.

What is amazing is that he chose to pursue it anyway. It's even more amazing that the law passed given all the political and entrenched forces against it.

So, to be clear, the ACA was emphatically not popular in any way. I still remember all the anti-Obamacare ads that showed up on Youtube videos. The law was villified to kingdom come and it would be a tragedy if that fact is forgetten.

Don't confuse volume of attack with number of attackers.

The president bet all of his political capital, the House of Representatives, and potentially his entire presidential career on passing 'Obamacare'. I don't know of a better example of acting in spite of the political ramifications.

This is called 'science'. They used these techniques back in the days of JFK, too.

The difference is that now, campaigns have access to unprecedented amounts of audience data. But make no mistake, it was all dog and pony back then, too.

> They used these techniques back in the days of JFK, too.

No, the contemporary approach is based on a series of tools, such as focus groups, which are a very new phenomenon in politics. The first national campaign where these figured prominently was 1992, I believe. (With e.g. "soccer moms" among the archetypal mini-groups.) Their sophistication increased by leaps and bounds up to the level described in this article. And they are quite game-changing for the nature of politics.

That's how politics has always worked at the city scale and lower. Now it's happening on the national scale, using polling and computers to gather and analyze the data, instead of using party members to gather data face-to-face and a party organization to collate and understand it.

This may be myopic or off-base, but I feel like JFK had two big advantages with the space program that helped make it happen:

1. His constituents were terrified of the Soviet space program dropping something nasty on their heads, and didn't want to be behind the curve in that arena. 2. His assassination effectively canonized the program. (I think he'd argue my terming that an "advantage.") Cutting it after his death would have been political suicide. Where space exploration often has the same inherent challenge as nuclear power–specifically that the length of any serious endeavor will span several presidents, congresses, senates, to say nothing of economic cycles, (see CxP)–the Apollo program, despite being 2.2% of all federal outlays, had broad support.

There were numerous other factors, but I think those two played a big part in its success.

Just like any new technology when it's introduced, the value of this micro-targeting strategy will be overstated at first. But over time people will realise human nature has stayed the same, and this technology will find its place as just another tool in a politician's utility belt.

Perhaps we've already seen it misused on Romney's part: depending on where in the country he was speaking (say, southwest vs. rustbelt) he would take a different tone on the topic of immigration. In the age of instant news, flipflopping like that in the name of "targeting" your audience can have major consequences.

Well, it seems like a big change. In the past, your observation (about haggling) was applicable to local elections; perhaps now it simply escalated to a larger, country-wide, scale?

Agreed; zeteo is looking at the past thorugh some decidedly colored glasses. That's never been the way it worked. Elections have always been won via "haggling", whether that happened in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of party conventions. Remember that the expectation of a general election being "close" is a fairly recent one. From 1865-1932, for example, the president was effectively picked by the republican convention delegates.

Winning an election through careful attention to the polls simply means you're tailoring your messaging and policies to the opinions of the demographcs that matter most to victor. How is that not "democratic?".

If your complaint is that some demographics matter more than others, then address your criticism to the electoral college, not the strategy picked by the winning candidate.

I think you underestimate the sophistication of techniques of the past. They may have had less raw data, but what makes you think they didn't know precisely who they were talking to?

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