I plan to write more Over There about the Electoral College (I think), but I did want to touch on a Washington Post piece arguing that two arguments in favor of it are bunk. I believe he’s wrong on the second one:

Some critics say that allowing voters to directly elect the president would splinter the two-party system. It would encourage many candidates to contest the general election, thus producing a winner with only a small share of the vote.

This is also wrong. In a system of direct election, potential candidates risk their political futures by running against the official party nominees. And there is no compensation. You win nothing by coming in third. So there is little incentive to run.

By contrast, the electoral college encourages third parties, especially those with regional bases, because by winning a few states they may deny either major-party candidate a majority of the electoral vote. You can come in third and still win a prize. Such a result was certainly the goal of Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. Imagine giving these racist candidates leverage to negotiate with the leading candidates before the electoral votes were officially cast.

Now, I would favor replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote (and yes, did so prior to this election). But a plurality-based national popular vote really is a problem, and precisely for the reason being “debunked.”

There are two kinds of third-party candidates. First, there is the regional third-party candidate and the national. He points out Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, but those are somewhat outdated exceptions. The closest we’ve had since is Evan McMullin, and he never got as much attention as Gary Johnson this cycle. McMullin did make the argument that if the election can be thrown to the House then he can win it in the House, but that was never a viable argument. Rather, winning Utah was mostly seen as a benchmark of success. There are other benchmarks for the other kind of candidate.

The second kind of candidate is the more common kind: The national third-party candidate. Gary Johnson, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, John Anderson, and more. All of these people are more recent than Edwards’s example. None of them had all that much success, but a part of that is attributable to the electoral college itself. At some point, though, it becomes apparent that the bar for winning is so high for them so as to be impossible. They could win the popular vote but still lose the election because how do they get to 270? Contrast this with governor races, where candidates can and do get a plurality and often get much larger chunks of the vote when they don’t. It’s easier to run for governor than president, of course, but the complete absence of a path to the White House scares off potential investorscontributors and volunteers that would make a national campaign possible.

A long time ago, conservatives and anti-Trump Republicans were looking for a candidate to run a third party candidate. None was found. I don’t know if it would have been any different under a national popular vote, but I do think it might have been. There would have been a clearer path to the White House that wouldn’t have relied on renegade electors. But as my mind drifted I thought of the potential challenges for a third party, and one of the biggest by far was the Electoral College. As Edwards points out, it’s not responsible for the two-party system, but it does provide yet another firewall.

Which is, incidentally, a reason not to like the Electoral College. I support a two-party system but want the parties to be able to challenge it. The Electoral College makes that so daunting that it’s unlikely any serious effort will be made (at least at the presidential level. A First-Past-The-Post system makes it easier. Which is good! Except that it would encourage outcome distortions, which is bad!

So, contra Edwards, we actually do need some manner of dealing the plurality problem. That can be done with a separate runoff or ordered ballots or something else. Maine, which elects its governor the same way Edwards wants to elect our president, just voted to implement ordered ballots (IRV) precisely to deal with the problem he says plurality victors don’t cause.

@davereaboi @GlennKesslerWP @Max_Fisher pic.twitter.com/VbDXhkzqXs

— EducatédHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) November 15, 2016

Jim Webb says U.S. didn’t have income taxes until 1913

Our ruling

Webb said “we did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913.”The modern income tax structure, complete with Form 1040, was born in 1913. But in the interest of history, it should be noted that Lincoln ushered in an income tax in 1862 and it lasted 10 years.So we rate the statement of Webb — a historian himself — Mostly True.

Ron Paul says federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913

Our ruling

Paul’s statement that the federal income tax rate was zero until 1913 reflects the timing of the constitutional change enabling the current tax. But his claim disregards two pre-1913 efforts to impose an income tax — one of which was in place for a decade. This debate claim rates Half True.

2000th tweet dedicated to one of the greatest moments in Russia history. pic.twitter.com/Hxa4a4mdNO

— Only In Russia (@CrazyinRussia) November 9, 2016

One of the things that seemed crazy at the time was Donald Trump’s bringing out the women who made accusations of sexual assault against Bill Clinton. The polls bore it out, in that nobody especially held that against Hillary. On another level, though, maybe it did work with swing voters. Not (just) that Bill Clinton did Bad Things, but he did Bad Things and people voted for him anyway. Ergo, you can vote for Donald Trump even if he did Bad Things. Or is, in general, not a good person. Democrats spent eight years talking about compartmentalization and how you don’t have to like the person to support them for president. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 and came to regret that for multiple reasons, one of which is that character does count. So ironically, the reason I regret voting for Bill contributed to my voting for Hillary. But personal scoundrelry really did become normalized during his era, even if there are clear distinctions to be drawn between their behaviors. Less than 40% of Americans approved of Donald Trump, but 47% of him voted anyway. His voters tended older (old enough to remember Bill), and it’s not unreasonable to believe that it’s not that they didn’t care about Trump’s misbehavior, but that they had compartmentalized it in a way they were trained to a couple decades ago.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”

Source: Quote by Michael Crichton: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is…”

Or any people, for that matter. The good stuff doesn’t start until an hour in. It actually sort of gives you an idea of how long it actually took. Well, if you’re watching it on video. I suspect things like that go more quickly when you’re in the middle of the terror.

Source: Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2-Hour, 40 Minute Animation | Open Culture

I mentioned Over There how bad of a candidate Hillary Clinton is and got a fair amount of pushback. If she’s so bad how come she keeps winning? The answer involves quite a bit of good fortune that doesn’t actually reflect on her capabilities as a candidate. She has, with only one exception (2006 re-election), underperformed in every race that she’s run. She’s just been in a position that she’s been able to afford to. In 2000, she was elected to the senate as a carpetbagger… and underperformed Al Gore by five points. But you can do that when you’re running as a Democrat in New York. In 2008, she lost to underdog Barack Obama. In 2016, she had the hardest time fending off Bernie Sanders, who should have been a token challenger. Any one of these performances can be explained away (Obama is really good! She was a carpetbagger against a native! Someone else getting 45% was inevitable!), but taken all together the common thread is her. We can add this election to her list, where if you tilt your head and squint your eyes you can say something about the popular vote or Comey or whatever. But she lost to a man with a 37% approval rating. It’s pretty remarkable. In the end, she was a Martha Coakley who chose less bad races.

I had been spending quite a bit of time arguing that Trumpism could win, but completely regarded that Trump himself would.

I’ve been wrong about him time and time again as a candidate. I hope that I am shown to be wrong about him as president.

This is a reasonable facsimile of a campaign sign in a few places just outside of town near Lain’s preschool.

I kept wondering where Garrison County was, and why there were signs for a campaign in some county somewhere else that I’d never heard of. I mean, there are a number of counties around here since we’re by two state lines, but even so I thought I knew what they were.

Finally, I remembered to google it and discovered that there is no Garrison County. So… what the hell?

It took me way too long to figure out what was going on.

Politico says there is no Shy Trump Voter. Morning Consult says that there is, but that it’s not sufficient to close the gap with Hillary Clinton.

One of the thoughts that has been crossing my mind is the phantom Clinton voter. Who would be afraid of saying that they plan to vote for Clinton? Well, some Republicans might. But maybe the bigger goal mine is Clinton wives with Trump husbands:

I may have cracked the code of the gender gap and how American families are not ripping themselves apart (via latest @YouGovUS poll) pic.twitter.com/ZsQsCTzriS

— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) October 9, 2016

I don’t know how widespread this is, but it’s an interesting phenomenon all the same and could cut in to whatever Shy Trump Voter margin exists out there. My final prediction is that Clinton will win by six, outperforming the polls by a bit. It may prove to be going out on a limb. However, I think the reasons for the disparity are probably not shy voters but a combination of organization and harder-to-reach Democratic voters. Basically, the same factor that lead polls to underestimate Obama in 2012.

One thing we’re likely to learn this election is whether the swing voter is, in fact, a thing of the past. I believe its death has been exaggerated, and that at least a part of the reason for greater alignment is candidates being in-sync with their party. If there is ever an election which might shake some people loose, it’s this one. The non-GOP public has been very patient with the GOP in not associated it with its standard-bearer. It’s unclear whether that will carry over to the election. And whether they might view the GOP as a hedge against also-unpopular Hillary Clinton.

I follow a lot of conservatives on Twitter who didn’t like Trump in the primary. Some intentionally, some just kind of ended up in the same place. Different people have responded to everything differently. Some came around to Trump. Others are talking about pox and a pair of houses. Others still are saying that they would prefer Hillary but will punt by voting third party. Some are now With Her.

It seems not coincidental that ethnic and racial minorities are going the last route. Most whites (including Jewish) are going in one of the first. It’s actually a stronger predictor than “How conservative are they?” is. While saying things like “Voting for third party is white male privilege” leads to things like white men lecturing women and minorities about privilege, it seems noteworthy all the same.

There was a case to be made for Hillary Clinton’s courting of the frustrated Republicans early on. There was at least the perception of a chance of a landslide. As time has progressed, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it wasn’t actually helping her as much as downticket Republicans. Which, as one can imagine, frustrates downticket Democrats. Especially given their historical hyperfocus on the presidency that has left congress shut out of what could have been a majority.

Clinton has gone more sharply against Republican officeholders, but never did go full-throttle. I have a theory as to why.

For all of the talk of how divided the GOP is, there is a bit of a battle brewing on the Democratic side. Democrats seem oddly sanguine about Sanders getting way further in the primary than he should have because he lost in the end, but that should be an alarm for some of the more moderate members. Combine that with Fight for Fifteen and the ascent of Elizabeth Warren, and there could be some trouble ahead once Trump is no longer in the picture.

Or maybe not. It’s hard to say. But one of the things we’ve learned through various illicit releases about Hillary Clinton is that despite being reckless in some regards, is very cautious in others. They are keenly aware of their vulnerabilities. Overly so, at times. It’s not out of the question that she might be worried about the above. And another sense I’ve gotten from what I’ve learned is that she may be, in her heard of hearts, a moderate that is genuinely uncomfortable with the leftier segment of her party. More than once, I’ve gotten the impression her folks might hate hippies more than a lot of Republicans do.

If this is the case, then I actually find myself wondering if she’s not courting our votes precisely in preparation for the coming conflict. I don’t know what my partisan future holds, though if I do jump it will likely be to keep the Hillary Faction in charge up against the Warren Faction. Not out of any particular love for her, of course, but if she could once again find herself in my eye as the thing that stands in between the future and a wrong turn. Meanwhile, doubling down to enthuse the youth vote and disaffected left is something that she’s seen can backfire on a political party. People like me would only strengthen her faction.

Whatever the case, while I don’t know how I’m going to vote tomorrow I have found myself more comfortable with the prospect of her leadership. Maybe corrupt, but within normal parameters. And on the political spectrum, even moreso perhaps.

Donald Trump has taken the lead in the Yardsign poll. He started off ahead 5-3, then at some point it became 10-9 for Clinton. It’s been all Trump since. Even the guy with the flag put it back out.