At last, someone from the world of politics is being honest about a pervasive and harmful trade-off. When home prices rise faster than earnings, owners like me gain wealth, while non-owners lose because their incomes fall further behind housing costs.
Honesty is saying that home prices have to fall. But this is progress.
The Generation Squeeze folks have recommendations.
I disagree. When everyone votes for who they actually want, everyone, including the political strategists in charge of trying to figure out how their party can win, can see what the voters really want. Yes, they will still play nasty games, but at least it will be with an awareness that there are actually a lot of people who prefer different policies.
Possibly, at least initially. But maybe the conservative strategists would see that they are courting a smaller fringe than if they had courted the socially progressive. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve long thought that most policies and platforms in all parties were designed to lead to victory rather than to adhere to some principled ideology.
That would only really work if Liberals and NDP splitting the socially progressive vote doesn’t cause them to consistently lose.
What’s the stable equilibrium of everyone voting honestly? Each party moves to get about a third of the votes? You could reliably have an election where 2/3rds of the electorate would prefer anyone but the conservative, yet the conservative wins?
FPTP is a garbage tier electoral system.
The problem is that NDP isn’t (or didn’t used to be) just another way to vote for people adjacent to the centre, but for real change. “Strategic” voting for decades has done nothing but allow everything to move further right. There was a time when NDP were actually pretty radical and the Liberals weren’t just yet another neoliberal clone but with fewer people stuck in the 1950s or earlier.
All the parties eventually pay attention to the most vocal voters. We need to outshout the conservatives, not just take the lesser of two evils approach. The conservatives didn’t end up being such a dumpster fire by taking a lesser of two evils approach, but with a make no compromises approach. That’s how they turned the ship and that’s how we turn the ship. And voting our conscience is part of that.
And yes, FPTP is garbage.
The problem in FPTP is that it works really, really badly when you’ve got 3 or more viable candidates in one election.
As an activist in a FPTP system, you can either try to make a successful third party, or co-opt one of the existing ones during candidate selection. Both are very difficult, but the second approach is generally much easier, because you don’t have to deal with vote splitting.
That makes it sound like the most effective “voting” strategy under FPTP is activism against FPTP.
I do understand strategy and tactics and understand the thinking behind strategic voting (which I think is better characterized as tactical voting, given that it’s focused on immediate goals rather than long term ones). I used to be very involved in strategic voting initiatives, but after about 4 decades, it seems to me that it’s not actually getting us anywhere.
My personal opinion is that one of the conservative strategies is to lock us into tactical voting as it simplifies the environment in which they operate. It also keeps us moving in their direction because we we’re always focused on putting out a fire instead of on “fire prevention.” This creates a ratchet mechanism, where they just do whatever they want without regard to the consequences while everyone else is taking the more reasonable approach of trying to minimize the pain of change.