Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
UPDATE: new comments link for Part 5 (TypePad says they’re working on this!)
New comments link for Part 4 (TypePad says they’re working on this!)
SDG here (not Jimmy) with more thoughts on voting.
In Part 4 I proposed what I called the “intuitive and obvious” claim that “you vote for the candidate you hope to see win.” The first point in need of further consideration is what is meant by “the candidate you hope to see win.”
Whatever the merits of voting any way at all, in the end any election will produce a winner whose administration will have practical implications for the common good. Such implications, it should be noted, are broad-based, extending not only to the implementation or non-implementation of specific policy initiatives, but also to such effects as public advocacy of or opposition to key principles on public discourse and cultural sensibilities, the stamp of a candidate’s administration on the party and the nation, and of course the long-term effects of a candidate’s judicial nominees.
Let’s suppose two major-party candidates X and Y. Candidate X strongly supports several intrinsically immoral policies — virtually every such policy on the market, let’s suppose — while candidate Y is largely opposed to most of them, though with various qualifying asterisks and footnotes. (For example, let’s suppose that Y favors embryonic stem-cell research, though not as robustly as X, and while Y is anti-abortion he allows loopholes that may not be compatible with Catholic teaching, and so forth. What? It’s a thought experiment.)
Candidate X is highly likely to vigorously reinforce and strengthen the culture of death in various ways: legislative support for intrinsically evil policies, increased public funding for abortion, evil-activist justices to the Supreme Court as well as lower-level judges, and so forth.
In virtually all of these respects, we recognize that candidate Y is highly likely to be an improvement on candidate X, even if Y still has significant problems. Y will oppose most intrinsically immoral policies, though he may advance some, if not to the extent that X would. It seems likely that Y’s judicial nominees would be an improvement upon X’s, though far from certain that they would be particularly good. The country would be spared the corrosive cultural effects of X’s public advocacy of intrinsic evils.
Of course X would accomplish some good things in office; so presumably would Y, or so would any candidate. It could even be that the implications of a victory for X would include some positive effects on the very issues where Y advocates intrinsically immoral policies. Almost any catastrophe will include some good effects. It doesn’t change the fact that a victory for X is a catastrophe, and that Y would be significantly preferable.
At this point it seems fairly clear that we may say we do not want to see X win — that, of the two possible outcomes, an X administration would be the more undesirable outcome for the common good. Thus it would seem that, of the two possible outcomes, a Y administration is the preferred outcome.
Yet if candidate Y supports even one intrinsically evil policy, can we speak of “hoping” that he wins? Is that “hoping” for evil?
In almost any race there are assorted candidates flying well below the radar — Chuck Baldwin, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney. If we could, many of us would pick one of these marginal or quixotic candidates to send to the White House. Many do in fact cast votes for such candidates, or if necessary even write in the candidates of their choice. Why shouldn’t the rest of us follow suit? Why settle for the lesser of two evils if there is a better choice?
The common-sense response, of course, is that Z has zero chance of winning. Much as we might like to see someone else win, we have no real hope of our quixotic candidate (or any other) winning. We may choose to vote for him anyway — it is not my primary purpose here to oppose quixotic voting as a matter of personal choice — but at the end of the day, or the election cycle, the White House will in fact go to one of the two major-party tickets. Whatever objections and criticisms we may have of the selection process, whatever better systems we might advocate in principle, the reality of our current system is that, once the primaries are over, the campaign underway, the VP choices announced, there are only two possible outcomes.
Some idealists may resist this conclusion. Why is it that Z has no chance of winning? Isn’t it simply because we all agree that he has no chance? Isn’t it a self-fulfilling perception? If enough of us got up on election day and voted for him, why then, he would be the winner. What if everyone rebeled and voted for the genuinely good candidate? Wouldn’t that be a better world? Why shouldn’t we do our part to work toward that better world?
This line of thought is appealing, but it doesn’t work in practice. This isn’t necessarily to dismiss all quixotic voting, which might be advocated on other grounds. However, the fact remains that, no matter how many of us vote quixotic, the outcome of the election will be collectively decided by those who vote for one of the major-party candidates.
To begin with, our quixotic candidate is doomed, not because everyone agrees he is doomed, but for the more elementary reason that a critical mass of voters never think of him at all. However it has happened, he hasn’t made the necessary impression on the collective consciousness of the voting public to have a real shot.
It may not be his fault. The exigencies of the American political process turn heavily on factors ranging from national organizational infrastructure to the enormous amounts of money needed to power national and grass-roots campaigns as well as the realities of national public attention and media coverage. Once again, we can rail against the system as much as we like; it may be that there are better systems, and perhaps we should consider them.
In our present situation, though, it essentially doesn’t matter how many of us rebel against the two-party duopoly and vote quixotic — our quixotic candidate is still doomed. Let’s suppose some astronomical percentage of the electorate — over half, or even two-thirds — were to wake up on voting day and decide to throw viability to the winds and truly vote their heart for the two-person ticket they would truly most want to see in the White House. Would that be a better world?
In a word, no — at least, not as regards the outcome of this election.
For one thing, once we widen the pool of candidates beyond the major parties, there’s no particular reason why voters thinking outside the two-party box will commence rallying around our quixotic candidate, or any candidate we might support, or even any candidate we might like better than X or Y. The field of potential quixotic candidates — and the bloc of potential quixotic voters — is too diverse. Votes will be cast for Baldwin, Nader, Barr and McKinney. But many will find none of those choices acceptable. If we are truly voting our hearts, there’s no reason why we should be limited to names on the ballot. And so we will get write-ins for anyone and everyone from Pat Robertson to Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates to T. Boone Pickins, Paris Hilton to Scott Hahn, Michael Moore to Mel Gibson.
In the end, our massive quixotic vote will wind up hopelessly divided among countless prospects. Very likely a great many voters, however carefully they consider choices outside the two-party box, will still wind up with no better idea than to vote for the major-party ticket of their choice — not to mention the pragmatic voters who will do the same. In the end, the largest bloc of votes for a single candidate will still ultimately go to one of the two major-party tickets.
In an earlier combox discussion on this blog, someone suggested that a certain pro-life quixotic candidate could win if only American Catholics were serious about voting pro-life. The problem, of course, is that he couldn’t: There aren’t enough Catholics in America, pro-life or otherwise. We aren’t a large enough bloc, even voting all together, to elect a quixotic candidate all by ourselves. Catholics in general are a key swing vote, but a candidate needs support from multiple sectors in order to win.
The only practical effect of any such extravagant experiment in quixotic voting is this: The winning major-party ticket will be picked by a smaller bloc of voters than ever before — and, conversely, whatever preference that enormous bloc of quixotic voters may have as a group between the two major-party tickets will be a non-factor in the outcome. Our massive exercise in quixotic voting turns out to be an exercise in large-scale self-disenfranchisement.
Again, this isn’t necessarily an argument against all quixotic voting. It could be argued that, in the long run, such a defeat can have a salutary effect for the losing cause. Efforts to avoid similar defeats may possibly result in improved major-party candidates seeking to unite the base and woo back disaffected quixotic voters. And maybe so. On the other hand, the losing party could also wind up essentially writing off the quixotic vote (or the sector of the quixotic vote we happen to represent) and seeking to shore up other sectors of support — possibly along lines that worked for the winning ticket. Again, I’m not primarily arguing the merits of quixotic voting, so the point is moot.
The argument at this stage is simply the obvious observation that, things being what they are, the outcome of the election will be collectively decided by those voters who vote for one of the two major-party candidates. The more numerous quixotic voters are, the fewer major-party voters will have input on which of the two major-party candidates will in fact govern the country.
I said above that voting quixotic amounted to an act of self-disenfranchisement. For many quixotic voters, though, it may be seen as an expression of an existing sense of disenfranchisement — of their inability to influence the process in any way, as illustrated in the present race by the poorness of both candidates, neither of whom even remotely resembles a candidate the quixotic voter would like to support.
Quixotic voters note that no presidential election, no matter how close or contested, ever turns on one single vote. No one vote affects the outcome. Even if I have a preference for one of the major-party candidates over the other, I as an individual have no actual power even to contribute to his victory. My vote has no actual effect. Therefore, there is no compelling reason for me to cast my vote for a lousy major-party candidate just because the other guy is even worse. It’s not like my vote has any chance of saving us from the worse candidate anyway.
At first glance this might seem like an exercise in fuzzy-logic sophistry, but the point is subtler than that. Fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth and fuzzy sets. For example, one person who picks one flower from a national park may tell himself that one flower won’t ruin the park — but a million people picking a million flowers ruins the park, and every one of the million people who picks one flower is complicit in the park’s ruin. Isn’t the quixotic voter essentially committing the same error as the flower-picker?
Actually, not exactly, no. The “ruin” of the park is a matter of degrees; each flower picked really does infinitesimally damage the park. If a million picked flowers ruins the park, ten thousand would damage it, twenty thousand would be twice as bad, and so on. It’s a matter of degree.
The outcome of an election, though, is not a matter of degree in the same way. Rather, it’s a matter of reaching or not reaching a given threshold. There is a sense in which, beyond that threshold in either direction, more or fewer votes doesn’t change the outcome; a candidate is no more or less president (or not president) for the margin by which he exceeds or falls short of the needed threshold.
Thus, in contrast to the flower picker whose one act of flower-picking really does have an effect, it may be argued that the individual voter actually makes no difference to the outcome. Therefore, since my vote doesn’t actually affect the outcome, there is no practical reason to vote pragmatic rather than quixotic.
This argument is of a type that seems superficially cogent, but I think our common sense distrusts the conclusion. One might as well conclude that there is no point in voting at all. Certainly it is hard to see why, on this point of view, exercising the right to vote should be considered “morally obligatory,” much less a form of “co-responsibility for the common good” (CCC 2240). How can we exercise “co-responsibility” if our vote makes no difference?
In any election, while the outcome is in one sense not affected by any one vote, it is nevertheless individual votes and nothing else that determines the outcome. (In our system this principle is modified by the vagaries of the electoral college process, in which individual votes are tallied on a state-by-state basis, and the correlation between the popular vote and a winning number of electoral votes isn’t exact. Nevertheless, the state-by-state outcome ultimately determines the final outcome.) Individually considered, we have no power to affect the outcome, but the outcome is determined by nothing other than individual votes.
In a certain sense, the outcome of every election is ultimately determined, on a state-by-state basis, by the distribution of potential voters among three crucial blocs:
A. those who vote for X (henceforth “Xers”),
B. those who vote for Y (henceforth “Yers”), and
C. those who vote for neither X nor Y, either because they vote quixotic or because they don’t vote at all.
Specifically, the outcome is determined solely by which of the first two groups has the advantage of numbers on a state-by-state basis. (The third group affects the outcome only by their absence from the first two blocs.)
Needless to say, none of these blocs is a monolithic unity. Those who vote as Xers or Yers do so for a wide range of different, even conflicting reasons. Some may support X or Y in spite of factors that others reckon among the main reasons to vote for that same candidate. There may in fact be no one policy, priority or factor that unites all Xers or all Yers — other than their common preference for their candidate over the major-party rival.
Yet this preference, while it unites all Xers and all Yers, is not synonymous with being an Xer or a Yer. The crucial threefold division of Xers, Yers and others substantially overlaps with, but is not identical to, another, equally crucial threefold division:
A. possible voters who prefer X to Y — who believe that the common good would be better served by an X administration than a Y administration;
B. possible voters who prefer Y to X — who believe that the common good would be better served by a Y administration than an X administration; and
C. possible voters who have no preference between X and Y — who see no clear advantage or disadvantage for the common good from either in relation to the other.
Among each of these groups, again, is a great deal of diversity, with divergent and conflicting priorities, values, outlooks and opinions. Even regarding their common preference for X or Y, there is room for a wide diversity of opinion regarding the merits of both X and Y, from enthusiastic and unqualified support to those who reluctantly consider one candidate the lesser of two evils. Conversely, attitudes toward the non-supported candidate may fall anywhere along an opposite spectrum, from considering (say) Y a good candidate but not as good as X to considering Y a disastrous candidate. Many on both sides may consider X better than Y in some respects, but Y better than X in others.
Ultimately, though, however strongly, with whatever conflicts, and for whatever reasons, some potential voters prefer X to Y, and others prefer Y to X. For lack of a better term, I’ll classify these groups as “X-friendly” and “Y-friendly” — though, again, this shouldn’t be taken to imply any actual fondness for X or Y.
It will be seen at once that all Xers (those who actually vote for X) are also X-friendlies (with minimal allowances for confusion over ballot configurations and so forth, as well as those marginal voters who may not actually technically exist). However, not all X-friendlies necessarily wind up voting as Xers. Many X-friendlies may wind up in that indeterminate, self-disenfranchised third bloc, those who either cast no vote, or who vote quixotic.
In short, the outcome on a state-by-state basis is determined by two factors. Factor 1 is which group has the advantage of numbers, X-friendlies or Y-friendlies. Factor 2 is how reliably X-friendlies wind up voting as Xers and how reliably Y-friendlies wind up voting as Yers. Do the math (it’s multiplication) and you’ve got the winner. To the extent that X-friendlies tend to vote as Xers, X is more likely to win; to the extent that Y-friendlies tend to vote as Yers, Y is more likely to win.
From this, it seems to follow that to be, say, Y-friendly more or less entails hoping that Yers outnumber Xers state by state, rather than vice versa — which, in turn, more or less entails hoping that Y-friendlies (that is, potential voters like ourselves) as a group wind up, by a critical margin, voting as Yers.
There are various ways of trying to resist this line of thought, but I find them unconvincing, as I try to show in time. The bottom line is that if we think the common good will be best served by a Y administration rather than an X administration, we hope that Y will win, which means we hope that others who also think as we do that the common good will be best served by a Y administration vote for Y.
If they do not do so — if potential voters who are only somewhat or marginally Y-friendly wind up not voting, or voting quixotic, and if in part as a result of this Xers wind up outnumbering Yers state by state, so that X wins — then the common good suffers relative to Y winning.
From this is seems to follow that what we wish to see other voters like ourselves do, we bear some responsibility to do ourselves. If we believe the common good is best served by voters like ourselves voting a certain way, that is how we ought to vote. If we are Y-friendly and want other Y-friendlies to vote as Yers, then we have some responsibility to vote as Yers ourselves. (The term “responsibility” is used here in a general, popular sense, not a technical moral-theology sense. To put it more precisely: On a Y-friendly assessment of the election, to vote as Yers should be seen as a permissible act that discharges our general moral obligation to take co-responsibility for the common good by voting. Other acts also, including voting quixotic, might be argued to discharge that moral obligation; it falls to prudential judgment to decide which of the available permissible ways of discharging our duty is most prudent and advantageous.)
How much “responsibility” we have as Y-friendlies to vote as Yers (that is, how much good “voters like us” can hope to accomplish voting as Yers) may vary with circumstances, but it is never, I submit, entirely nonexistent. Obviously in a critical battleground state the obligation is much more significant than in a state that is solidly friendly to our candidate. However, even in an overwhelmingly Y-friendly state, Y’s victory still depends on actual Y-friendly voters actually turning out voting. That Y’s victory in this state is practically inevitable doesn’t change the fact that Y can’t win the state without actual votes from Y-friendly voters. It is thus incumbent on Y-friendly voters even in an overwhelmingly Y-friendly state actually to turn out and vote for Y; though individual Y-friendlies might make a prudential judgment that enough Y-friendlies will vote as Yers to permit some Y-friendlies to seek the common good in other ways (e.g., voting quixotic).
What about Y-friendly voters who live in an overwhelmingly X-friendly state? Superficially, their situation might seem to be the same as that of Y-friendly voters who live in a solidly Y-friendly state: The outcome is essentially a foregone conclusion, so it “doesn’t matter” how they vote. In fact, though, there is a difference. In even the most Y-friendly state, it is still necessary for some Y-friendly voters to turn out and vote as Yers in order for Y to win. In the most X-friendly states, OTOH, Y cannot win no matter how many Y-friendlies vote for him. In that state, Y is a non-viable candidate; he cannot win there any more than quixotic candidate Z can win. So is there any reason Y-friendlies should vote for him?
Again, Y-friendlies in such a situation may legitimately consider voting quixotic, but yes, there is still good to be accomplished by voting as Yers, no matter what state you live in. The reason is that the “threshold” character of election victory has been somewhat overstated. Although winning or losing is a threshold event, election results do have a somewhat fuzzy character (fuzzy fuzziness, as it were) in which every single vote contributes, just as every flower contributes to the forest. There is winning and winning. The popular vote does matter; how much you win or lose by does matter.
For example, consider this sentence from Zogby regarding recent poll numbers that show Obama with double-digit leads over McCain:
These numbers, if they hold, are blowout numbers. They fit the 1980 model with Reagan’s victory over Carter — but they are happening 12 days before Reagan blasted ahead. If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment…
“Not only victory but realignment.” IOW, the wider the gap between the winner and his nearest competitor, the greater the winner’s perceived mandate; the more he will be perceived to have the will of the people behind him; the less political clout his opponents will have to push back on his agenda; the more pressure they will feel to cooperate with his initiatives.
When Bush 43 eked out an electoral college win by Supreme Court decision in 2000, it was widely understood that he came to office with very little political clout and would have to govern in a very bipartisan style. Bush was accordingly humble and soft-spoken in the early months of his first term.
What changed that, of course, was the devastating “realignment” of 9/11. In the new crisis environment, bipartisanship was shelved for united front, Democrats and Republicans closed ranks, and Bush’s approval ratings soared to the highest levels of any president in U.S. history. This gave him the political capital to aggressively pursue his agenda with little resistance — and he poured out that political capital like water, in ways that, many would conclude, led to his ultimately suffering the worst approval ratings of any president in history.
What events may occur during a president’s term that may affect his perceived mandate, we have no way of knowing. The one fixed point, possibly the key event in the absence of some 9/11-like crisis, is the election.
For Y-friendlies who oppose an X administration, even in an overwhelmingly X-friendly state, it makes sense to want X to win by a smaller margin rather than a greater margin. Likewise, whether or not we can prevent an X victory at the electoral level, we at least want to prevent “realignment.” The popular vote matters; the margin of victory or defeat matters. Thus there is always reason to vote for the preferred viable candidate.
What about voting quixotic? Doesn’t that also add a vote to the non-realignment side of the equation? Yes, to a degree. If X wins 51 percent of the vote, that has a certain fixed value, whether Y wins 49 percent and all possible Zs win 2 percent, or Y wins 42 percent and all possible Zs win 9 percent.
However, there is also a fixed value in the point spread between the winner and his nearest competitor. Winning by two percentage points is one thing; winning by nine percentage points is something else. In terms of weighing against an X mandate, there is always value in voting for Y, whether in an X-friendly state or a Y-friendly state.
Once again, this is not to say that voting quixotic might not be felt to accomplish other goods that are more worth pursuing, particularly in highly X-friendly or Y-friendly states. It is simply to say that there is, in fact, good to be accomplished in voting for Y, no matter what state you live in. It is never the case that such a vote is meaningless.
Whew. More to come.
