I vote algorithmically, myself, each rule deciding every applicable race, then applying the subsequent rule to the remaining races: Libertarian Party ticket, then against incumbents, then women, then minorities. Against government spending and regulation, like that.
I think this doesn't actually correlate, but is confounded. For example, "The Ready-Now Leaders report from the Conference Board shows that organizations with at least 30% women in leadership roles are 12x more likely to be in the top 20% for financial performance." This sounds to me like you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring qualified women for such positions, but not that women are inherently better at the job.
The second link below requires a subscription, apparently, so I cannot have an opinion on it. But I remain unconvinced such factors as gender and race have any significant effect on leadership ability.
Further, that the ignoring-qualified-women disservice is common enough to be worth countering. Also, these are not significant desiderata, they are the tiebreakers at the end of the list, hey?
I understand. If you don't know which candidate is better, then I suppose choosing by gender or race is as good a selection criteria as any.
Your algorithm has something in common with my own for candidates about which I don't know anything significant: the affiliated party, then against someone for whom I've seen advertising but about which I don't know anything. This is similar to against incumbents.
I think it's hard to know whether someone would be a good person to have in any particular office, since one of the skills a politician must cultivate is dissembling. How are we to know truly who we are electing? It often seems like the only electable people are those who shouldn't be in office.
Women are more verbal and they have more highly developed social skills. That's not disputable. It's not that big of a stretch to assume they might have a leg up in the leadership department.
This is literally a Forbes "Contributor" article. They are paid for articles to boost credibility and don't actually reflect the opinion, or the standards of Forbes in any way. The author is a business/life coach, not a serious researcher.
The article itself rates leaders on such abstract qualities as: Relating, Self-awareness, Authenticity, Systems Awareness, Achieving, which mostly means nothing. Using quotes from "Chief Learning Officers" and organizations like "The Leadership Circle" which is an organization this author has covered favorable in the past.
In short, a clearly heavily biased and low credibility reason to base your voting decision on.
follows a simple heuristic on gender differences: it’s acceptable to find women are better at things than men, and unacceptable to find men are better at things than women (excepting maybe very limited physical tasks). When there’s such a strong filter on what will be published, merely the fact that studies exist showing only results within the range of a priori acceptable results becomes meaningless
This is actually one of my biggest beefs with academia. When you become an activist, your academic work is naturally compromised--it's become hard to answer the question 'does gender have any effect on competence' for exactly this reason. You can see this applying with the whole African-American GFR question (which could theoretically hurt people on either side), though I don't really have the background knowledge to comment intelligently.
There are plenty of leftists who have thought hard about this question, I know. However, I'm not a leftist, so I don't agree with their goals and therefore am not particularly curious as to what they have to say.
It's almost certainly a complete bunk, but the funny part here if such an article appeared anywhere with "men" and "women" switched, the cancellation storm would be cat 5. But of course, "reverse" (which is not reverse, actually, but the same) *isms are just fine. Note that there isn't a claim anymore that it's needed to correct some past problems and "even the playing field" and so on. It's just before, evil bigots claimed group X is always better than group Y, and that was totally evil. Now we won, and it's not allowed anymore. Now we say group Y is always better than group X, and this is just a scientific fact, and you have to be stupid to deny science. The brazenness of this is just hilarious.
Funny: I do get unfriended because I vote Libertarian. I'm happy to make the genders are different and women are better at civilization arguments, e.g. Rich outlive poor, whites outlive blacks, women outlive men. In my youth I was in... environments that favored masculinity... and I prefer civilization, honest.
Don't worry, those weren't your friends. But the idea here I presume is that either men are better than women in everything, or women are better than men in everything? That's the two choices you're choosing between? It is a sad place to be in, really.
Not at all; rather that women are better at for example, cooperation and people and men are better at, for example, things and, ah, competition, and that as civilization progresses it more strongly favors women.
What's the reasoning behind the "vote against incumbents" rule? If it's something like "the govt is bad and needs to change" then perhaps you prefer Harris to Trump (hasn't actually been President, analogously a former Governor is more incumbent than the current Lt. Governor) but if it's more like "people shouldn't hold power for too long" then I think you should prefer Trump to Harris (because Harris is currently in office).
It is multivariate: the base is... dislike... of a professional political class; I'm one of those kooks who favor single-term limits. Some libertarians - not naming names here - were pleasantly surprised when Trump was elected - not a professional politician, a step in the right direction. One step from career politician does not, alas, get you to philosopher king, let alone economist.
Yeah, this is what I was wondering too (could have asked more directly) - thanks for articulating. I don't have a strong feeling about either of these principles, just curious.
Trump of course. Didn't you hear we can't afford four more years of this Trumpian mess? Didn't you hear everything that is wrong now is his fault? Obviously, he must be the incumbent.
Definitely Harris, and I'm surprised this is in dispute. The actual current state of affairs and current government policies are on everyone's mind, and a Harris victory will be widely taken as a positive endorsement of those. While a Trump victory will be taken as a repudiation of those, and not as an endorsement of him or his former policies (some of which he's changed, others many people have forgotten).
Compare how far society shifted left after 2008 or 2020 (not very) versus after 2012 (enormously). Endorsement of incumbent ideology is a much much stronger signal.
Anyone not sufficently supportive of the Democratic platform/culture should vote against Harris.
For a while, I had a bunch of metrics like that--I'd vote against the party in power to try to push for divided government, for instance. Turns out that can be hard to calibrate due to all the switches. People have done wavelet analysis and gotten 16-year and 5-year cycles, BTW.
Ironically, I've actually been voting *against* women candidates post-MeToo. Not out of concerns about competence (I have none), but because I've become convinced the genders' interests are fundamentally opposed. I'm not in favor of repealing the 19th amendment (which will never happen anyway) or anything wacky like that--we just need our own pressure group. You fight for your people, I'll fight for mine.
I'm going to break my rule to vote against Trump. I don't like guys who want to be dictators and steal elections. Contra Moldbug, I think a king would be an awful idea. The Chinese have learned over 2000 years how to restrain an emperor through a bureaucracy, and Singapore is tiny; we'd turn into a Latin America-like mess of ethnic conflict and incompetence.
On voting your conscience: Within days of the election, and often before even taking office, elected officials begin positioning themselves for the next election. Even term-limited politicians will do this (positioning themselves for their next office run ). Election results and exit polls provide politicians an important data set to work from. They can observe who voted for whom across many different races, and intuit which votes they might sway in the next election based on how they behave while in office. In this way, a sufficiently committed movement/coalition can influence governance, even if they're unable to get a specific official elected, as the winning candidate will be incentivized to govern in such a way as to earn their votes in the next election.
Against strategic voting: While it does matter who the named elected official eventually becomes, in the sense that they're more likely to be influenced while if office by the financial interests that helped them get elected and to the extent they follow party-line votes, they're not incentivized to be directly responsive to the desires/concerns of someone who is only voting for them because of the letter after their name or because they're "not [other candidate]". They're free to ignore the preferences of strategic voters who will vote for them again regardless of how they govern, suggesting that strategic voting may be counterproductive. Indeed, if a voter prioritizes the name/party at the top of the ticket over ideals/principles, they should expect to 'get what they paid for', enhancing the influence a principled voter or a special interest has over the actions of the elected official.
Meaningless campaign promises: Strategic voters aren't swayed by campaign promises. "I'm voting for X because they [party/not Y]" is not a voter who will change their vote in the next election because a campaign promise was broken. As such, a candidate who makes these promises is not incentivized by strategic voters to keep promises after the election, and therefore should not be expected to do so by a strategic voter.
"They're free to ignore the preferences of strategic voters who will vote for them again regardless of how they govern, suggesting that strategic voting may be counterproductive."
I think it's difficult to impossible to get strategic voting to work well in the USA, since there are two giant parties and then everyone else is Party Of oddballs, small local interest, or 'will row in with big party A or B if elected'.
Where it does work is if there is a credible third party as competition, or small but effective parties where "oh crap if the voters vote for Sean McSnoddy of the Living On The Ceiling Party instead of Our Guy, McSnoddy may well get elected and we'll be down a warm body for the numbers to form a government with" is something the voters can hold over the heads of the big parties. In the US, it's "yeah who are you gonna vote for, the other lot? Don't make me laugh".
I think we're needing about five parties, and a 'ranked choice' system. Ranked choice sounds like it worked well in Alaska, and the two-party charade is bankrupt.
A choice between and idiot and a fool is no choice at all. To pretend the two clowns running are anything but stand-ins is denial of the highest order.
I'd just like to know who -- collectively -- will be in charge. I don't need their personal information; that's none of my business. I want their vita, their track record, qualifications, achievements, etc.
A lot of US elections are surprisingly close - whether at the general or primary level - giving principled voters a lot more potential sway. If you jettison the idea that politicians are duty-bound to adhere to whatever they say on the campaign trail (something that's often empirically supported), a lot more options become available to the principled voter over the strategic voter.
Hypothetical example: Representative Stevens just won her race 50%-48%, a 2% point spread, or about 20,000 voters. She perceives herself as vulnerable in the next election in 2026. Her team gets together and determines they need to either raise $1.5M, pick up another 1.5% of voters, or some combination of these factors to be 'safe' in the next election. Since they're looking to find or buy about 15,000 votes, each vote they can secure without fundraising represents $100 of campaign fundraising they don't have to pull in.
(You might think, "or vice-versa", but this is probably not true. If they can get a comfortable enough lead in the polls, Stevens will donate the excess she's able to raise to the party's national fund. After all, she wants to get on the Committee of Important Decisions. Being incumbent in a safe district that contributes to the party's general election campaign fund will help her get better appointments.)
While reviewing the results of the 2024 election, Stevens' team notices there's a Save the Squirrels Coalition, whose chief policy aim is squirrel preservation. In 2024, they endorsed a third-party candidate who only got 1,000 votes, and whose sole policy aim was to push the SSC agenda. Stevens realizes that by sponsoring minor amendments to bills that push the SSC agenda she can hope to capture a large percentage of these single-issue voters. Since most voters don't care about or think about squirrel preservation, they're unlikely to know or care about what she does legislatively on this topic. But the SSC people REALLY care about it, so pushing this policy agenda is worth up to $100,000 dollars to Stevens. She can literally earn these votes using her incumbent advantage - power to push legislation on behalf of her constituents - without having to spend money to do so.
Even better would be if the SSC community reached out to Stevens after the election themselves, instead of relying on Stevens' team to figure out what their policy proposals are. They could work with Stevens' team to draft the amendments they prefer, with the promise to endorse Stevens in the next election. In this way, despite not having voted for Stevens in 2024, SSC gets their policy preferences prioritized in the administration that DID win the election ... proportional to their demonstrated voting power in the last election.
Even if (most) US general elections are R vs D, there's a lot of room for strategic voting in primaries. The Republicans have lot a lot of very winnable elections because of weirdos winning primaries that would have been plausibly won by BoringRepublican McSuitBusiness. This is about to happen again in North Carolina, where the 2020 election was reasonably close (51 to 47) but now they have Mark Robinson who is going to underperform.
Genuinely I haven't decided yet. Granted I'm in VA (not a swing state -- probably) so there's little urgency about e.g. Harris vs Trump -- if Trump somehow has chance of winning Virginia then he's probably already won the EC. But it feels like every week I go back and forth, between "come on, you're not seriously gonna vote for Trump are you?" and "wait am I seriously underestimating how bad a Harris presidency could be?".
As far as down-ballot I'm probably voting Republican for both the senate and house races. I think Hung Cao has a healthy conservative perspective on immigration (as a Vietnamese immigrant). Though those are both very solidly D races so there's no chance that will actually happen.
Question 1: Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment
Vote: no
Reason: Abortion is a difficult issue, as protecting the rights of the baby restricts the rights of the mother, and vice versa.
This likely necessitates some sort of balance, mostly revolving around point of gestation.
However, Maryland already allows abortion throughout the entire pregnancy, and on top of that, in 2022, the state already voted to enshrine a broad right to abortion access into the state constitution
So, it doesn’t seem that the balance requires further protection of abortion – if anything, the opposite might be more reasonable.
Question A: Affordable Housing Bond
Vote: no
Reason: “Bond measure” is a nice way of saying a tax. If the government sells bonds to pay for something, it will need to then raise taxes at some point to pay for that.
Additionally, these bonds are going to fund “affordable housing costs.” Government involvement in housing often just makes issues worse. E.g. by giving people extra money to pay for housing, that just raises demand for housing, without increasing supply – so prices just rise.
As with markets in general, the main thing we need to bring down prices, is market competition that can increase supply. The text of this ballot question actually references a goal of “lessening density”
(Question A is for the purpose of authorizing the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to borrow up to $20,000,000 to be used for ... and making operative the Affordable Housing Program of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, including, but not limited to, ... support the Affordable Housing Trust Fund; support the elimination of unhealthful, unsanitary or unsafe conditions, lessening density…).
And that’s likely gone up recently, as the budget for the 2023-4 year is 1.7 billion, and the last enrollment number I see, from the year before is 75,995 (https://www.baltimorecityschools.org/o/bcps/page/data), which would come out to over $22,000 per student if enrollment remained unchanged from last year. But enrollment has dropped (ibid) so, it’s likely already higher.
Question C: Community and Economic Development Bond Issue
Vote: no
Reason: It’s more tax and there’s no reason to think the government would use it well. In fact, the ballot question once again authorizes them to use the money to decrease density.
Reason: It would amend the city charter to use public park land around Inner Harbor Park to be used for commercial uses, multifamily residential development, and off-street parking.
In general, I think that as much government owned land as possible should be auctioned to private buyers.
The buyers are then incentivized to make as much money as possible from those. Typically, this is by using them to produce as many desirable goods and services, as possible.
Government has no such incentive when using its land.
In particular, this would allow those areas to be used for housing. In general, housing is expensive since it’s illegal to build enough of it, creating an artificial shortage. Allowing more housing to be built, is generally good, and leads to lower prices.
Question G: Community Reinvestment and Reparations Fund Charter Amendment
Vote: no
Reason: It “establishes a Community Reinvestment and Reparations Fund.” Sounds bad. That sounds like the sort of thing where any money spent would likely be counterproductive.
Reason: Maryland isn’t a swing state, so the main purpose of a vote is in making a statement. However, none of the candidates are good, and they’re bad in different ways so it’s not clear that a vote for any would be a positive statement. And leaving a field blank is also a statement.
The ways in which Trump is bad are well known and self-evident (some of the worse ones, like his systematic attempts to overthrow American democracy through the fake elector scheme and phone call to Georgia demanding more votes probably receive too little attention relative to more minor transgressions).
Since the issues with those candidates are well known, I’ll focus on writing about the other candidates.
RFK Jr. represents the aggregation of the worst elements of all political factions in the US. For decades he’s perhaps been best known for his opposition to vaccines – one of humanity’s greatest achievements, skepticism of which has led to mass death.
As far as Jill Stein, if Harris’s economic policies would be bad, Stein’s more Progressive ones would be that much worse. She also quite soft on dictators, supposedly opposing foreign intervention, but calling for the US to prop of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and seeming to blame the US for protest against him (https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-jill-stein-resorts-odd-conspiracy-theories).
Chase Oliver (Libertarian) has some stances I like, but he also seems bad in unique ways, so a vote for him isn’t merely a harmless statement against the other candidates. To achieve that, one can simply leave the field blank.
The issues with Chase Oliver include the following:
He seems kind of dumb. I only looked at a few of his tweets, and I saw a number of typos.
It doesn't have the right to commit hundreds of airstrikes that indiscriminately kill innocent people, including aide workers.”
Evidently, he doesn’t know the difference between “aid” and “aide.”
And 10 days after the October 7 massacre (before Israel had even entered Gaza), he tweeted (https://x.com/ChaseForLiberty/status/1714288528446918800) “All of the violence we have seen in both Israel and Palistine has been heartbreaking.”
Besides for the issues with the contents of his Tweet, he can’t even spell ‘Palestine’ correctly.
He also struggles to articulate cogent defenses of positions, even when stronger defenses could be made.
For example, when it comes to the issue of transitioning children, including surgically, kids, he says "it's a healthcare." When the interviewer notes that it's dubious that it has any medical benefit, he repeats "it's a healthcare issue." (https://youtu.be/usmh1DSzwdc?t=815).
But that's obviously not a sufficient response. If your kid has cancer, so you whack him on the head with a mallet, to kill the cancer, instead of taking him to the hospital, one can definitely imagine the state getting involved, even if "it's healthcare."
Just as the state can get involved if e.g. a doctor gives a patient 100 times the appropriate dose of a drug and it kills them.
The fact that something involves health hardly precludes rights being violated or the state having a say in it.
It’s one thing to oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle. But Oliver implies (here and elsewhere) that Williams was innocent and wishes him well.
Even if there were some parallel universe that were identical, with the exception of Williams not having committed this murder, he would still be a brutal monster, with 15 prior convictions.
There’s no reason to wish this guy peace, while wishing ill on decent law abiding people who oversaw the execution of a monster.
This is part of a larger trend of Oliver adopting Lefty views on criminal justice, as distinct from principled libertarian ones.
“America imprisons a quarter of the world’s inmates—an injustice in a nation that prides itself on freedom. We must dismantle the prison-industrial complex.”
The reality is that you can't just whine about America having many prisoners compared to other countries, instead of looking at whether the people in the prisons deserve to be there.
US has 4% of the world's population. If the there are 11 million people incarcerated worldwide, that would mean that he wants the US to incarcerate just 4% of that or 440,000 people.
Even if we released from prison everyone except those convicted of murder, manslaughter, assault, and sexual assault, we'd have way more than that (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html).
So even the most rudimentary law enforcement, that didn't do anything about robbery and other property crimes would be too much for him.
The truth is that we have a much higher crime rate, which could be substantially lowered, if we incarcerated more people.
His website also states there “Let’s shift from punishment to rehabilitation and make our justice system a true beacon of freedom.”
But it’s not clear why that would be a libertarian position at all. Under libertarianism, the state maintains a monopoly on violence, which includes incarcerating criminals. But why would it be the state’s prerogative to spend more money on trying to rehabilitate them? That’s just social services, which libertarians don’t support the government engaging in.
And the reality is that there’s little to no evidence for any system that actually significantly reduces recidivism.
The only measures that effectively end recidivism are execution and to a lesser extent, incarceration, both of which he opposes.
US Senate Maryland
Vote: Larry Hogan (Republican)
Reason: Hogan is a moderate Republican, which seems like the best case scenario for Maryland. That is, he’s probably already about as “libertarian”-ish as the state could allow with chance of winning. Given that he’s there, I don’t know that there’s as much utility in trying to vote for a Libertarian to shift the overton window, in this case.
Additionally, since, as I noted, he has a small chance of actually winning, that makes me less inclined to vote for the Libertarian.
Notably, the Libertarian candidate isn’t perfect himself, either, as he opposed Ukraine funding, and he takes an even more anti-Israel stance than Chase Oliver.
U.S. House Maryland District 7
Vote: Leave blank.
Reason: They all seem really bad, and it isn’t a close race, so the vote makes no difference anyway.
In more detail, since this isn’t a close race, at all, and the Democrat will certainly win, there’s no incentive for a normal person to run against him. So the only people running against him seem to be random cranks.
I wouldn't vote for the Libertarian, as he seems less competent, doesn’t have a website, and seems more likely to be a crank, having previously tried to run for office representing other third parties, like Green. (https://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=22198).
I wouldn’t vote for the Republican, as he seems to represent the dumb dregs of the Republican party.
“Will you accept the presidential election result once the totals have been certified by the states and any legal challenges adjudicated?
After watching the 2020 election results, do you seriously expect me to believe the Manufactured Media and Democratic Communist Jackass Party of America’s insane narratives? Get real!
Jacob Chansley dropped the dime on everything the Deep Fake State has been up to on Tucker’s show. Another Tucker interview with Mike Benz explained what the Deep State has been doing the past few years and also went back to 1947 to paint a vivid picture of the origins of today’s deep state.”
If it were a close race, it might be necessary to look closer at him and see if it’s necessary to hold your nose and vote for him.
But since it’s not a close race, I see no reason to.
The Democrat seems bad as well, having voted, for example, for the massive spending that led to America’s inflation spike.
Reason: The incumbent Democratic mayor will certainly win reelection, since Baltimore is something like 10-1 Democrat.
So the vote won’t make a difference. The only reason to vote would be to make a statement, or shift the Overton window.
But not only is the incumbent bad, his Republican opponent seems far from great, herself.
While it’s good that murder came down under the current mayor, Brandon Scott, it’s not clear to what extent he’s responsible for that.
After all, he became mayor in the end of 2020 and homicides didn’t really start coming down until 2023. And there are other factors that could explain that, such as a new State’s Attorney, Ivan Bates, assuming office, and taking a tougher approach on crime than his predecessor (who is a convicted criminal herself, currently serving time).
And while murder is down, other crime remains unacceptably high.
The solution to crime is more toughness at every level, more police, more policing, more arrests, more prosecution, tougher prosecution, longer sentences.
His opponent, Shannon Wright, also mentions (https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/04/11/shannon-wright-2/) “restorative justice,” (“a city-wide restorative justice initiative with all stakeholders at the table”), and is a NIMBY, stating:
“I do not support a high-rise plan for Harbor Place or the unethical way it given for us to swallow under current so called leadership. I would like to see redevelopment height at or about where it is which is 2 stories for the 2 pavilions. To build high-rises in that foot print would be a slap in the face of those that have invested their dollars both commercial and residential for the view. It would also change the aesthetic feel of the inner harbor” (ibid).
She also just seems kind of nutty, saying for example: “Currently we are living under the second coming of slavery at hands of a master that looks like us” (ibid).
Baltimore City Council President
Vote: leave blank
Reason: Once again, it’s a Democrat against a Republican in Baltimore, so it presumably not a close race, and the only reason to vote is to shift the Overton window or make a statement.
The Republican candidate seems not too smart, and includes a picture of himself with people in Trump shirts, and a low-res picture of himself wearing a red cap that looks like a Make American Great Again cap (https://www.digmanforbaltimore.com/).
On the other hand, the Democratic incumbent seems to mostly be into nonsense, rather than anything Baltimore actually needs. He introduced a wide ranging bill mandating that Baltimore establish a commission to make sure that everything in the city revolves around “trauma informed care,” which is probably nonsense and often goes hand in hand with soft-on-crime policies.
He sponsored the Gender-Inclusive Single-User Restroom bill, which helps ensure our city is safe and welcoming for all communities by requiring all single-user restrooms to have gender-inclusive signage. It was the first bill in Baltimore’s history to be signed at a Pride Parade. (Taken from here: https://www.baltimorecitycouncil.com/zeke-cohen).
So your options are the polished liberal who’s into nonsense instead of substance, and the unlettered Republican opponent.
I disagree with several of your policy proscriptions and votes, but the reasoning was all solid and grokkable. Not that it matters since I never got a chance to vote in Maryland elections when I lived there, but I figured I would chime in that this is exactly the kind of thing I hope comes from the other meetups.
Incidentally, I think that it would be preferable for ACX groups who don't agree on all votes (which would presumably be the norm, rather than the exception) to explain their respective votes in a voting guide, rather than simply voting among themselves, as it lets readers more easily vote in accordance with their respective preferences and perspectives. Crowd-sourcing seems much more useful for clarifying descriptive matters, than determining normative matters; after all, if someone already knows that they hold a minority view, and hasn't jettisoned it spite of the contrary wisdom of crowds, they probably wouldn't dismiss it on the basis of the wisdom of an ACX group.
Presenting the reasoning for any potential votes seems much more useful for readers who aren't expected to compromise their normative positions.
Any Oakland folks interested in joining the Berkeley group for the statewide issues, and then splitting off to write something smaller for Oakland-specific races (with other folks there lending a hand on that research if they feel like it)?
If this is a success, consider marking your calendar to start earlier next year. In Boston/Cambridge, there are some interesting ballot questions, but almost all the meaningfully contested elections for office happened in the Democratic primary on September 3rd, and I imagine the same is true for many of the deep-blue cities on your list.
Huh? I thought primaries were always in spring, to correspond to the presidential primaries. I agree the primaries are when some of the interesting action happens, but I thought stretching this process out over six months would be too much.
Yea that's a crazy late primary in MA, we had ours back in May. But you might consider posting a couple weeks earlier next time, I already cast my mail-in ballot in MD last week and I'm guessing a lot of places are already sending out mail-in ballots.
ETA: I'm reading what I wrote and it sounds more sassy/judgmental in text than I want, fyi not trying to be a jerk just a general suggestion/comment.
No, that's totally reasonable and I was considering posting earlier, but I held off because in California they don't send out the voter information pamphlet until early October, and I thought people would want to have that. I asked in an open thread whether other states were the same, but I didn't get many responses.
Some states have presidential and state primaries on the same day, but many don't. Presidential events are mostly Jan-May, state primaries mostly May-September.
Local US politics is on a (deliberately) pretty chaotic schedule.
* Washington & Seattle had a primary election in August.
* The New York State primary elections for the federal elections were June 25th, but their mayoral elections are 1 year after the presidential elections (Mayor Adams won his primary on June 22, 2021) and city council are elected every odd year (last primary was June 27th, 2023, last general was Nov 7, 2023).
* Chicago elected Mayor Johnson with a first round in February 2023, then runoff in April 2023.
My understanding is that at part of this is deliberately scheduling local elections for awkward times to keep less enfranchised voters out of the election. So eg school board elections will sometimes be scheduled on odd years because that concentrates the power of the more invested teachers & parents who are more likely to care enough to vote at unusual times, whereas if the election was at the same time as federal elections more people would tick extra boxes on ballots they're filling out anyway.
I think if you want to make a serious effort at federating & publishing local voting recommendations you'll want do something like let established local voting groups pass recommendations up to you and then put them in the "links for the month" posts
For what it's worth, the Democratic primary in the part of Cambridge where I live had no contested races this year, so this didn't matter. I hear there was an interesting one over in Harvard Square though.
I agree the Decker-MacKay race would have been very interesting to do this for—there are a lot of ACX readers in the district, the final margin was only a few dozen votes, and I'd guess that a dedicated meetup discussion could have helped a lot of ACX readers make the tough choice between a socialist (but a very sensible one responsive to evidence-based concerns and pushing for good state governance practices) vs. an anti-transparency incumbent who misrepresents her activities to her constituents (but is more pro-business)
What I found interesting here in MA is this year there's something new in the voter info mailing about the ballot questions. They added a new "3rd" opinion piece for each one, written by a subgroup of legislators. Since ballot questions are intended to circumvent the inaction of legislators, it's no surprise they advised voting "no" on all 5 questions. I plan to vote "yes" on 4 of them.
I remember hearing the the first proposed "concepts of a plan" for this project awhile back, and being excited for it - nice to see the fruit is nearing fruition. It's a fun tradition every 2-4 years now to receive my several-hundred-pages(!) paper voting guide and wade through all the absurd crap on the SF CA ballot. Even the dogcatchers frequently have highly amusing characters running for them. Appreciate encouragement for the downballot focus, the topline very much mostly writes itself this year. It's often rather annoying trying to find information about e.g. state court judges or Board of Education prospectives - usually nobodies with minimal ad spend or discourse presence, but a huge outsize impact for a small-time politician...and applying appropriately vigorous Bounded Distrust to the classic endorsements of yore, like newspapers, just gets exhausting when offices and their candidates get into the dozens and dozens. (It does amuse me greatly to keep getting campaign ads from both the rightwing and leftwing local pols. That's not how horseshoe theory works!)
Does anyone want to do one for Arizona? My friend and I made a website that has all of the elections, including the likes of school boards and city councils, in one super long mega-ballot. After you fill it out you can share a link to it. When you put in your address to someone's ballot it only shows the elections relevant to where you live. This can take the voting guide from over 600 elections to around 70, depending on your address. Here's the link: ballotcheatsheet.com
Before anyone asks, yes we would like to do this for other states but this requires not only compiling all that election data but also sourcing district maps. This is also our first website so if it goes well for Arizona (and we somehow get a bunch of money/volunteers) we can expand it next election.
I'd be interested (and live in AZ) but don't particularly want to create an account. Is there an option to do it without an account that I'm not seeing?
You only have to make an account if you don’t already have a Google account, otherwise you can just sign in with your existing one. We can add other Oauth providers if there’s demand for it though. If you don’t have Google is there a particular one you prefer?
We're the same with the opposite conclusion. We are paranoid about security due to being an obvious target for election interference, so rather than roll a simple account system we outsourced our account security to an Oauth provider since that system is no doubt more robust and well-audited than anything we could come up with in a short time frame.
On the local PHX ACX discord we've been talking about the various props and we were thinking about sharing that. But when it comes to politicians, we kinda felt our choices would be uninteresting and basically split down partisan lines.
What is the chance that out of those locales, the outcome won't be "vote 100% D"? OK, possibly excluding assistant dogcatchers. I guess in some locales there might be non-partisan low-level positions left? Or more than one D candidate maybe (does that happen post-primaries)? Also I guess there are ballot props - is there any chance to see daylight between D position and the group recommendation on those?
I guess y'all want to stay nonpartisan, but focusing on swing states would make politicians actually care about making you happy. (That may not be considered a good thing around here.) I don't think any of these outside Philly is in a state that's in play.
If you simply want to encourage civic engagement, you could figure out what the #2-#5 countries are and do the same thing on their election day as well (if they have one).
From what I can see of the 2024 meetup list, using the current Nate Silver list of AZ, GA, MI, NV, NC, PA, WI, you have meetups in Phoenix, Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Reno, Asheville, Raleigh-Durham, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Madison, and Stone Lake. Perhaps raise the profile of these?
I'm from Michigan, and I believe Ann Arbor and Detroit are both liberal enough not to be swayed. Any populations from those areas would get together and declare 100% for Democrat candidates and policies, with few enough exceptions not to matter.
Yet the STATE is a swing state, as it appears on projections. The more urban the area, the more Democrat the voting.
Right, but when you have a swing state everyone's votes count because the totals are aggregated by state. Turning out an extra 1,000,000 people in New York doesn't help, but an extra 1,000,000 people in Philly does. If you raise Republican totals in Philly, you can increase the probability of a Republican victory by swaying PA, even if Philly overall swings Dem.
"If your meetup group covers many localities (like a city with many city council districts, or somewhere like Berkeley or Boston where many of the attendees will really be from Oakland or Cambridge), you can decide whether to do full ballots for all localities, the most important races from each, or just pick one and stick to it."
Is there any consensus on how far the spread is for different cities? I'm specifically asking about Seattle, because I'm from Snohomish County (just north of Seattle). I'll probably join either way but if there are enough people from my area to form subgroups that will definitely push me more towards joining.
I'd say feel free to tag along? It's standard practice to include a disclaimer to the effect that anyone in the area is welcome when advertising a meetup. (Personally, I've lived in Newton, Massachusetts, but I come to meetups in Cambridge even though that's ~6-7 miles away, and I don't think I'm an extreme outlier in that regard.)
Snohomish County, Washington is a harder sell, since the county's closest point to Seattle is ~10 miles away and its farthest point is ~75 miles away*. By the time you get to ~50 miles of separation, the concept of a metropolitan area stops making sense any more. However, if you live in the southwest corner of Snohomish County, then by all means, you can go to Seattle.
*I used the Google Maps measure distance tool to figure this out; it's really invaluable for this sort of stuff.
> If you’re in a non-US city that also has an election in the last few months of 2024, feel free to tag along, I guess.
This intrigued me enough that I actually went ahead and looked up which cities would plausibly also be eligible for this. Say that a city is "eligible" if its country has an election* between October 22, 2024 and December 31, 2024, AND it has ever hosted an ACX everywhere meetup**. This gave me 11 cities/towns (excluding the USA), which are as follows:
** In practice, I actually only looked at the fall 2024, spring 2024, fall 2023, and spring 2023 iterations; there is very little variance between iterations, so I gave up.
*** One of the meetups was officially listed as "Seminyak, Indonesia", but upon further inspection it appears that Seminyak is actually the name of a beach (?!) in the town of Kuta, so I went with Kuta instead.
It would be great to also compile links to sources. I'm always scrambling to find the public access dabate videos.
Yes! local goverment proposals and exact wording of proposed laws are sometimes absurdly hard to find
#Individual Non US citizens to vote how?
I vote algorithmically, myself, each rule deciding every applicable race, then applying the subsequent rule to the remaining races: Libertarian Party ticket, then against incumbents, then women, then minorities. Against government spending and regulation, like that.
What difference does it make that someone is a woman or a minority?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2023/03/31/new-research-women-more-effective-than-men-in-all-leadership-measures/
https://hbr.org/2019/02/research-when-gender-diversity-makes-firms-more-productive
I think this doesn't actually correlate, but is confounded. For example, "The Ready-Now Leaders report from the Conference Board shows that organizations with at least 30% women in leadership roles are 12x more likely to be in the top 20% for financial performance." This sounds to me like you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring qualified women for such positions, but not that women are inherently better at the job.
The second link below requires a subscription, apparently, so I cannot have an opinion on it. But I remain unconvinced such factors as gender and race have any significant effect on leadership ability.
Further, that the ignoring-qualified-women disservice is common enough to be worth countering. Also, these are not significant desiderata, they are the tiebreakers at the end of the list, hey?
I understand. If you don't know which candidate is better, then I suppose choosing by gender or race is as good a selection criteria as any.
Your algorithm has something in common with my own for candidates about which I don't know anything significant: the affiliated party, then against someone for whom I've seen advertising but about which I don't know anything. This is similar to against incumbents.
I think it's hard to know whether someone would be a good person to have in any particular office, since one of the skills a politician must cultivate is dissembling. How are we to know truly who we are electing? It often seems like the only electable people are those who shouldn't be in office.
Women are more verbal and they have more highly developed social skills. That's not disputable. It's not that big of a stretch to assume they might have a leg up in the leadership department.
This is literally a Forbes "Contributor" article. They are paid for articles to boost credibility and don't actually reflect the opinion, or the standards of Forbes in any way. The author is a business/life coach, not a serious researcher.
The article itself rates leaders on such abstract qualities as: Relating, Self-awareness, Authenticity, Systems Awareness, Achieving, which mostly means nothing. Using quotes from "Chief Learning Officers" and organizations like "The Leadership Circle" which is an organization this author has covered favorable in the past.
In short, a clearly heavily biased and low credibility reason to base your voting decision on.
oh my god
Selecting women for leadership roles is endogenous! This is terrible causal reasoning!
How about equating casting a vote with selecting the winner? ;-) It is, at most, signaling.
This failed to replicate and I think is now considered debunked - see https://qz.com/emails/quartz-at-work/2042125/what-if-mckinseys-diversity-research-is-wrong
Academic research usually
follows a simple heuristic on gender differences: it’s acceptable to find women are better at things than men, and unacceptable to find men are better at things than women (excepting maybe very limited physical tasks). When there’s such a strong filter on what will be published, merely the fact that studies exist showing only results within the range of a priori acceptable results becomes meaningless
This is actually one of my biggest beefs with academia. When you become an activist, your academic work is naturally compromised--it's become hard to answer the question 'does gender have any effect on competence' for exactly this reason. You can see this applying with the whole African-American GFR question (which could theoretically hurt people on either side), though I don't really have the background knowledge to comment intelligently.
There are plenty of leftists who have thought hard about this question, I know. However, I'm not a leftist, so I don't agree with their goals and therefore am not particularly curious as to what they have to say.
The current idea that women are better at people and men are better at things isn't absolute truth, but it is interesting to think about.
It's almost certainly a complete bunk, but the funny part here if such an article appeared anywhere with "men" and "women" switched, the cancellation storm would be cat 5. But of course, "reverse" (which is not reverse, actually, but the same) *isms are just fine. Note that there isn't a claim anymore that it's needed to correct some past problems and "even the playing field" and so on. It's just before, evil bigots claimed group X is always better than group Y, and that was totally evil. Now we won, and it's not allowed anymore. Now we say group Y is always better than group X, and this is just a scientific fact, and you have to be stupid to deny science. The brazenness of this is just hilarious.
Funny: I do get unfriended because I vote Libertarian. I'm happy to make the genders are different and women are better at civilization arguments, e.g. Rich outlive poor, whites outlive blacks, women outlive men. In my youth I was in... environments that favored masculinity... and I prefer civilization, honest.
Don't worry, those weren't your friends. But the idea here I presume is that either men are better than women in everything, or women are better than men in everything? That's the two choices you're choosing between? It is a sad place to be in, really.
Not at all; rather that women are better at for example, cooperation and people and men are better at, for example, things and, ah, competition, and that as civilization progresses it more strongly favors women.
Who is more of an incumbent, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
In my case it is unimportant, of course: first rule is vote gold, Chase Oliver. I'd say Trump, since he was president and Kamala was not...
I do see the other argument, that she is currently in office and he is... not...
What's the reasoning behind the "vote against incumbents" rule? If it's something like "the govt is bad and needs to change" then perhaps you prefer Harris to Trump (hasn't actually been President, analogously a former Governor is more incumbent than the current Lt. Governor) but if it's more like "people shouldn't hold power for too long" then I think you should prefer Trump to Harris (because Harris is currently in office).
It is multivariate: the base is... dislike... of a professional political class; I'm one of those kooks who favor single-term limits. Some libertarians - not naming names here - were pleasantly surprised when Trump was elected - not a professional politician, a step in the right direction. One step from career politician does not, alas, get you to philosopher king, let alone economist.
Yeah, this is what I was wondering too (could have asked more directly) - thanks for articulating. I don't have a strong feeling about either of these principles, just curious.
Trump of course. Didn't you hear we can't afford four more years of this Trumpian mess? Didn't you hear everything that is wrong now is his fault? Obviously, he must be the incumbent.
Definitely Harris, and I'm surprised this is in dispute. The actual current state of affairs and current government policies are on everyone's mind, and a Harris victory will be widely taken as a positive endorsement of those. While a Trump victory will be taken as a repudiation of those, and not as an endorsement of him or his former policies (some of which he's changed, others many people have forgotten).
Compare how far society shifted left after 2008 or 2020 (not very) versus after 2012 (enormously). Endorsement of incumbent ideology is a much much stronger signal.
Anyone not sufficently supportive of the Democratic platform/culture should vote against Harris.
For a while, I had a bunch of metrics like that--I'd vote against the party in power to try to push for divided government, for instance. Turns out that can be hard to calibrate due to all the switches. People have done wavelet analysis and gotten 16-year and 5-year cycles, BTW.
Ironically, I've actually been voting *against* women candidates post-MeToo. Not out of concerns about competence (I have none), but because I've become convinced the genders' interests are fundamentally opposed. I'm not in favor of repealing the 19th amendment (which will never happen anyway) or anything wacky like that--we just need our own pressure group. You fight for your people, I'll fight for mine.
I'm going to break my rule to vote against Trump. I don't like guys who want to be dictators and steal elections. Contra Moldbug, I think a king would be an awful idea. The Chinese have learned over 2000 years how to restrain an emperor through a bureaucracy, and Singapore is tiny; we'd turn into a Latin America-like mess of ethnic conflict and incompetence.
Why care about non-swing states?
For non-presidential elections
What a great idea!
On voting your conscience: Within days of the election, and often before even taking office, elected officials begin positioning themselves for the next election. Even term-limited politicians will do this (positioning themselves for their next office run ). Election results and exit polls provide politicians an important data set to work from. They can observe who voted for whom across many different races, and intuit which votes they might sway in the next election based on how they behave while in office. In this way, a sufficiently committed movement/coalition can influence governance, even if they're unable to get a specific official elected, as the winning candidate will be incentivized to govern in such a way as to earn their votes in the next election.
Against strategic voting: While it does matter who the named elected official eventually becomes, in the sense that they're more likely to be influenced while if office by the financial interests that helped them get elected and to the extent they follow party-line votes, they're not incentivized to be directly responsive to the desires/concerns of someone who is only voting for them because of the letter after their name or because they're "not [other candidate]". They're free to ignore the preferences of strategic voters who will vote for them again regardless of how they govern, suggesting that strategic voting may be counterproductive. Indeed, if a voter prioritizes the name/party at the top of the ticket over ideals/principles, they should expect to 'get what they paid for', enhancing the influence a principled voter or a special interest has over the actions of the elected official.
Meaningless campaign promises: Strategic voters aren't swayed by campaign promises. "I'm voting for X because they [party/not Y]" is not a voter who will change their vote in the next election because a campaign promise was broken. As such, a candidate who makes these promises is not incentivized by strategic voters to keep promises after the election, and therefore should not be expected to do so by a strategic voter.
"They're free to ignore the preferences of strategic voters who will vote for them again regardless of how they govern, suggesting that strategic voting may be counterproductive."
I think it's difficult to impossible to get strategic voting to work well in the USA, since there are two giant parties and then everyone else is Party Of oddballs, small local interest, or 'will row in with big party A or B if elected'.
Where it does work is if there is a credible third party as competition, or small but effective parties where "oh crap if the voters vote for Sean McSnoddy of the Living On The Ceiling Party instead of Our Guy, McSnoddy may well get elected and we'll be down a warm body for the numbers to form a government with" is something the voters can hold over the heads of the big parties. In the US, it's "yeah who are you gonna vote for, the other lot? Don't make me laugh".
I think we're needing about five parties, and a 'ranked choice' system. Ranked choice sounds like it worked well in Alaska, and the two-party charade is bankrupt.
A choice between and idiot and a fool is no choice at all. To pretend the two clowns running are anything but stand-ins is denial of the highest order.
I'd just like to know who -- collectively -- will be in charge. I don't need their personal information; that's none of my business. I want their vita, their track record, qualifications, achievements, etc.
Italy's system seems to be working well.
A lot of US elections are surprisingly close - whether at the general or primary level - giving principled voters a lot more potential sway. If you jettison the idea that politicians are duty-bound to adhere to whatever they say on the campaign trail (something that's often empirically supported), a lot more options become available to the principled voter over the strategic voter.
Hypothetical example: Representative Stevens just won her race 50%-48%, a 2% point spread, or about 20,000 voters. She perceives herself as vulnerable in the next election in 2026. Her team gets together and determines they need to either raise $1.5M, pick up another 1.5% of voters, or some combination of these factors to be 'safe' in the next election. Since they're looking to find or buy about 15,000 votes, each vote they can secure without fundraising represents $100 of campaign fundraising they don't have to pull in.
(You might think, "or vice-versa", but this is probably not true. If they can get a comfortable enough lead in the polls, Stevens will donate the excess she's able to raise to the party's national fund. After all, she wants to get on the Committee of Important Decisions. Being incumbent in a safe district that contributes to the party's general election campaign fund will help her get better appointments.)
While reviewing the results of the 2024 election, Stevens' team notices there's a Save the Squirrels Coalition, whose chief policy aim is squirrel preservation. In 2024, they endorsed a third-party candidate who only got 1,000 votes, and whose sole policy aim was to push the SSC agenda. Stevens realizes that by sponsoring minor amendments to bills that push the SSC agenda she can hope to capture a large percentage of these single-issue voters. Since most voters don't care about or think about squirrel preservation, they're unlikely to know or care about what she does legislatively on this topic. But the SSC people REALLY care about it, so pushing this policy agenda is worth up to $100,000 dollars to Stevens. She can literally earn these votes using her incumbent advantage - power to push legislation on behalf of her constituents - without having to spend money to do so.
Even better would be if the SSC community reached out to Stevens after the election themselves, instead of relying on Stevens' team to figure out what their policy proposals are. They could work with Stevens' team to draft the amendments they prefer, with the promise to endorse Stevens in the next election. In this way, despite not having voted for Stevens in 2024, SSC gets their policy preferences prioritized in the administration that DID win the election ... proportional to their demonstrated voting power in the last election.
I just want to say that I was nodding along the entire time, and only later figured out why you were so interested in squirrel preservation. This feels like exactly the kind of thing Some Guy's Trust Assembly project could be useful for: https://open.substack.com/pub/extelligence/p/how-to-make-an-information-super?r=f8e4g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Interesting. The acronym was meant to hearken back to the old days of SlateStarCodex, which I figured ACX readers would find mildly amusing.
Absolutely, I am dense enough that I didn't pick up on that at first, so when I finally did, I got to chuckle along with with my nodding agreement.
Even if (most) US general elections are R vs D, there's a lot of room for strategic voting in primaries. The Republicans have lot a lot of very winnable elections because of weirdos winning primaries that would have been plausibly won by BoringRepublican McSuitBusiness. This is about to happen again in North Carolina, where the 2020 election was reasonably close (51 to 47) but now they have Mark Robinson who is going to underperform.
Strategic voting is often relevant in California's nonpartisan jungle primaries.
E.g. Schiff supporters voting for Garvey in the primary in order to keep Porter out of the race.
Does anyone live in or near Redwood City?
Can someone do Montana for me? I need to know if I should vote for Shady Sheehy or Two-Faced Tester.
Are there really people here who haven't made up their mind on R vs D already?
In Montana for Sheehy vs Tester?
I'd be more than a little disappointed if ACX's readership turned out to be composed entirely of partisans.
Genuinely I haven't decided yet. Granted I'm in VA (not a swing state -- probably) so there's little urgency about e.g. Harris vs Trump -- if Trump somehow has chance of winning Virginia then he's probably already won the EC. But it feels like every week I go back and forth, between "come on, you're not seriously gonna vote for Trump are you?" and "wait am I seriously underestimating how bad a Harris presidency could be?".
As far as down-ballot I'm probably voting Republican for both the senate and house races. I think Hung Cao has a healthy conservative perspective on immigration (as a Vietnamese immigrant). Though those are both very solidly D races so there's no chance that will actually happen.
Brad was asking about the Montana Senate race, which is the tipping point race that will likely decide control of the senate.
Looking forward to this! I want to do my part as a citizen but doing all the research myself is very costly.
Baltimore City Voting Suggestions Part 1:
Question 1: Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment
Vote: no
Reason: Abortion is a difficult issue, as protecting the rights of the baby restricts the rights of the mother, and vice versa.
This likely necessitates some sort of balance, mostly revolving around point of gestation.
However, Maryland already allows abortion throughout the entire pregnancy, and on top of that, in 2022, the state already voted to enshrine a broad right to abortion access into the state constitution
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Maryland)
So, it doesn’t seem that the balance requires further protection of abortion – if anything, the opposite might be more reasonable.
Question A: Affordable Housing Bond
Vote: no
Reason: “Bond measure” is a nice way of saying a tax. If the government sells bonds to pay for something, it will need to then raise taxes at some point to pay for that.
Additionally, these bonds are going to fund “affordable housing costs.” Government involvement in housing often just makes issues worse. E.g. by giving people extra money to pay for housing, that just raises demand for housing, without increasing supply – so prices just rise.
As with markets in general, the main thing we need to bring down prices, is market competition that can increase supply. The text of this ballot question actually references a goal of “lessening density”
(Question A is for the purpose of authorizing the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to borrow up to $20,000,000 to be used for ... and making operative the Affordable Housing Program of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, including, but not limited to, ... support the Affordable Housing Trust Fund; support the elimination of unhealthful, unsanitary or unsafe conditions, lessening density…).
Question B: School Bond
Vote: no
Reason: It’s more taxes to give more money to public schools. Public schools are already over-funded and Baltimore ones are under-performing (https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore). There have been scandals involving Baltimore City Public Schools stealing money and committing various forms of fraud (e.g. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2021/09/02/this-baltimore-high-schools-administrators-schemed-to-inflate-enrollment-change-grades-report-finds/).
It’s not clear how much education matters, (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education) or to what extent additional funding could increase performance in lower performing populations, but more competition for schooling might at lead to fewer assaults and murders at Baltimore schools (https://www.wbaltv.com/article/patterson-high-school-student-killed-izaiah-carter-friend/43248899, https://www.wmar2news.com/news/local-news/mayor-on-scene-of-shooting-at-mervo-high-school, by, for example, not allowing convicted rapists to attend: https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/maryland-law-allows-convicted-rapist-to-attend-baltimore-high-school-public-not-informed).
This ballot question does nothing to increase school choice.
Baltimore schools are already particularly over-funded. By 2022, Baltimore city schools were already spending $21,000 per year per student, which at the time made it the fourth most expensive in the country (https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-spending-per-student-2022-enrollment-performance-kirwan-new-york-boston-washington).
And that’s likely gone up recently, as the budget for the 2023-4 year is 1.7 billion, and the last enrollment number I see, from the year before is 75,995 (https://www.baltimorecityschools.org/o/bcps/page/data), which would come out to over $22,000 per student if enrollment remained unchanged from last year. But enrollment has dropped (ibid) so, it’s likely already higher.
Question C: Community and Economic Development Bond Issue
Vote: no
Reason: It’s more tax and there’s no reason to think the government would use it well. In fact, the ballot question once again authorizes them to use the money to decrease density.
Question D: Public Infrastructure Bond Issue
Vote: no
Reason: It’s more taxes. As always, I don’t trust them to use it well. Notably, Baltimore is already tied for the highest income tax in the state (https://www.marylandtaxes.gov/individual/credits-deductions/local-countytax-rates.php), and has the highest property tax in the state (https://www.propertytax101.org/maryland/propertytaxbycounty).
Question E: Police Department Charter Amendment
Vote: no
Reason: If I understand this correctly, it would give a little control of the police department to the local Baltimore city, rather than to the state. Since Baltimore is the least functional part of the state, that seems like a bad idea. (Note for example the many Baltimore politicians who have been convicted of crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Mosby#Federal_indictment_and_conviction, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pugh#Sentencing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Dixon#Resignation_and_probation, etc.).
Question F: Inner Harbor Park Charter Amendment
Vote: yes
Reason: It would amend the city charter to use public park land around Inner Harbor Park to be used for commercial uses, multifamily residential development, and off-street parking.
In general, I think that as much government owned land as possible should be auctioned to private buyers.
The buyers are then incentivized to make as much money as possible from those. Typically, this is by using them to produce as many desirable goods and services, as possible.
Government has no such incentive when using its land.
In particular, this would allow those areas to be used for housing. In general, housing is expensive since it’s illegal to build enough of it, creating an artificial shortage. Allowing more housing to be built, is generally good, and leads to lower prices.
Question G: Community Reinvestment and Reparations Fund Charter Amendment
Vote: no
Reason: It “establishes a Community Reinvestment and Reparations Fund.” Sounds bad. That sounds like the sort of thing where any money spent would likely be counterproductive.
Baltimore City Voting Suggestions Part 2:
President of the United States:
Vote: Leave blank.
Reason: Maryland isn’t a swing state, so the main purpose of a vote is in making a statement. However, none of the candidates are good, and they’re bad in different ways so it’s not clear that a vote for any would be a positive statement. And leaving a field blank is also a statement.
The ways in which Trump is bad are well known and self-evident (some of the worse ones, like his systematic attempts to overthrow American democracy through the fake elector scheme and phone call to Georgia demanding more votes probably receive too little attention relative to more minor transgressions).
But while Trump is more volatile and unpredictable, the expected value of Harris is arguably worse (see for example the arguments here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/hating-conservatism-while-voting).
Since the issues with those candidates are well known, I’ll focus on writing about the other candidates.
RFK Jr. represents the aggregation of the worst elements of all political factions in the US. For decades he’s perhaps been best known for his opposition to vaccines – one of humanity’s greatest achievements, skepticism of which has led to mass death.
As far as Jill Stein, if Harris’s economic policies would be bad, Stein’s more Progressive ones would be that much worse. She also quite soft on dictators, supposedly opposing foreign intervention, but calling for the US to prop of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and seeming to blame the US for protest against him (https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-jill-stein-resorts-odd-conspiracy-theories).
Chase Oliver (Libertarian) has some stances I like, but he also seems bad in unique ways, so a vote for him isn’t merely a harmless statement against the other candidates. To achieve that, one can simply leave the field blank.
The issues with Chase Oliver include the following:
He seems kind of dumb. I only looked at a few of his tweets, and I saw a number of typos.
E.g. he tweeted (https://x.com/ChaseForLiberty/status/1776999473291362489):
“Israel has a right to defend itself
It doesn't have the right to commit hundreds of airstrikes that indiscriminately kill innocent people, including aide workers.”
Evidently, he doesn’t know the difference between “aid” and “aide.”
And 10 days after the October 7 massacre (before Israel had even entered Gaza), he tweeted (https://x.com/ChaseForLiberty/status/1714288528446918800) “All of the violence we have seen in both Israel and Palistine has been heartbreaking.”
Besides for the issues with the contents of his Tweet, he can’t even spell ‘Palestine’ correctly.
He also struggles to articulate cogent defenses of positions, even when stronger defenses could be made.
For example, when it comes to the issue of transitioning children, including surgically, kids, he says "it's a healthcare." When the interviewer notes that it's dubious that it has any medical benefit, he repeats "it's a healthcare issue." (https://youtu.be/usmh1DSzwdc?t=815).
But that's obviously not a sufficient response. If your kid has cancer, so you whack him on the head with a mallet, to kill the cancer, instead of taking him to the hospital, one can definitely imagine the state getting involved, even if "it's healthcare."
Just as the state can get involved if e.g. a doctor gives a patient 100 times the appropriate dose of a drug and it kills them.
The fact that something involves health hardly precludes rights being violated or the state having a say in it.
He also states unequivocally that the US shouldn’t support Ukraine against the Russian invasion (https://youtu.be/jogYKbGEQjM?t=3458).
He also took a concerning stance on the execution of Marcellus Williams. Williams was a convicted murderer who was obviously guilty (see e.g. this thread: https://x.com/tedfrank/status/1838758678075150719). But Oliver wishes he rest in peace, while wishing that those who allowed the execution never get a night’s rest (https://x.com/ChaseForLiberty/status/1838922810284003724).
It’s one thing to oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle. But Oliver implies (here and elsewhere) that Williams was innocent and wishes him well.
Even if there were some parallel universe that were identical, with the exception of Williams not having committed this murder, he would still be a brutal monster, with 15 prior convictions.
There’s no reason to wish this guy peace, while wishing ill on decent law abiding people who oversaw the execution of a monster.
This is part of a larger trend of Oliver adopting Lefty views on criminal justice, as distinct from principled libertarian ones.
His campaign website (https://votechaseoliver.com/platform/) states:
“America imprisons a quarter of the world’s inmates—an injustice in a nation that prides itself on freedom. We must dismantle the prison-industrial complex.”
The reality is that you can't just whine about America having many prisoners compared to other countries, instead of looking at whether the people in the prisons deserve to be there.
US has 4% of the world's population. If the there are 11 million people incarcerated worldwide, that would mean that he wants the US to incarcerate just 4% of that or 440,000 people.
Even if we released from prison everyone except those convicted of murder, manslaughter, assault, and sexual assault, we'd have way more than that (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html).
So even the most rudimentary law enforcement, that didn't do anything about robbery and other property crimes would be too much for him.
The truth is that we have a much higher crime rate, which could be substantially lowered, if we incarcerated more people.
While you can think that some people are unjustly incarcerated, overall we clearly have an underincarceration problem (even homicides only have like a 50% clearance rate, with the clearance rate for other crimes being much lower: https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/).
His website also states there “Let’s shift from punishment to rehabilitation and make our justice system a true beacon of freedom.”
But it’s not clear why that would be a libertarian position at all. Under libertarianism, the state maintains a monopoly on violence, which includes incarcerating criminals. But why would it be the state’s prerogative to spend more money on trying to rehabilitate them? That’s just social services, which libertarians don’t support the government engaging in.
And the reality is that there’s little to no evidence for any system that actually significantly reduces recidivism.
The only measures that effectively end recidivism are execution and to a lesser extent, incarceration, both of which he opposes.
US Senate Maryland
Vote: Larry Hogan (Republican)
Reason: Hogan is a moderate Republican, which seems like the best case scenario for Maryland. That is, he’s probably already about as “libertarian”-ish as the state could allow with chance of winning. Given that he’s there, I don’t know that there’s as much utility in trying to vote for a Libertarian to shift the overton window, in this case.
Additionally, since, as I noted, he has a small chance of actually winning, that makes me less inclined to vote for the Libertarian.
Notably, the Libertarian candidate isn’t perfect himself, either, as he opposed Ukraine funding, and he takes an even more anti-Israel stance than Chase Oliver.
U.S. House Maryland District 7
Vote: Leave blank.
Reason: They all seem really bad, and it isn’t a close race, so the vote makes no difference anyway.
In more detail, since this isn’t a close race, at all, and the Democrat will certainly win, there’s no incentive for a normal person to run against him. So the only people running against him seem to be random cranks.
I wouldn't vote for the Libertarian, as he seems less competent, doesn’t have a website, and seems more likely to be a crank, having previously tried to run for office representing other third parties, like Green. (https://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=22198).
I wouldn’t vote for the Republican, as he seems to represent the dumb dregs of the Republican party.
E.g. his campaign website (http://scottcollier.org/scott-collier-for-congress-the-issues/) includes the following Q & A:
“Will you accept the presidential election result once the totals have been certified by the states and any legal challenges adjudicated?
After watching the 2020 election results, do you seriously expect me to believe the Manufactured Media and Democratic Communist Jackass Party of America’s insane narratives? Get real!
Jacob Chansley dropped the dime on everything the Deep Fake State has been up to on Tucker’s show. Another Tucker interview with Mike Benz explained what the Deep State has been doing the past few years and also went back to 1947 to paint a vivid picture of the origins of today’s deep state.”
If it were a close race, it might be necessary to look closer at him and see if it’s necessary to hold your nose and vote for him.
But since it’s not a close race, I see no reason to.
The Democrat seems bad as well, having voted, for example, for the massive spending that led to America’s inflation spike.
Baltimore City Voting Suggestions Part 3:
Mayor of Baltimore:
Vote: leave blank
Reason: The incumbent Democratic mayor will certainly win reelection, since Baltimore is something like 10-1 Democrat.
So the vote won’t make a difference. The only reason to vote would be to make a statement, or shift the Overton window.
But not only is the incumbent bad, his Republican opponent seems far from great, herself.
While it’s good that murder came down under the current mayor, Brandon Scott, it’s not clear to what extent he’s responsible for that.
After all, he became mayor in the end of 2020 and homicides didn’t really start coming down until 2023. And there are other factors that could explain that, such as a new State’s Attorney, Ivan Bates, assuming office, and taking a tougher approach on crime than his predecessor (who is a convicted criminal herself, currently serving time).
And while murder is down, other crime remains unacceptably high.
The solution to crime is more toughness at every level, more police, more policing, more arrests, more prosecution, tougher prosecution, longer sentences.
But Brandon Scott hasn’t consistently espoused those. In the era of the Black Lives Matter riots, for example, he defended the slogan “Defund the Police,” explaining that it doesn’t mean to abolish the police, but rather to reduce their budget (https://www.baltimoresun.com/2020/06/19/qa-brandon-scott-on-defunding-police-the-blm-protests-and-his-victory-in-baltimores-mayoral-primary/).
His opponent, Shannon Wright, also mentions (https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/04/11/shannon-wright-2/) “restorative justice,” (“a city-wide restorative justice initiative with all stakeholders at the table”), and is a NIMBY, stating:
“I do not support a high-rise plan for Harbor Place or the unethical way it given for us to swallow under current so called leadership. I would like to see redevelopment height at or about where it is which is 2 stories for the 2 pavilions. To build high-rises in that foot print would be a slap in the face of those that have invested their dollars both commercial and residential for the view. It would also change the aesthetic feel of the inner harbor” (ibid).
She also just seems kind of nutty, saying for example: “Currently we are living under the second coming of slavery at hands of a master that looks like us” (ibid).
Baltimore City Council President
Vote: leave blank
Reason: Once again, it’s a Democrat against a Republican in Baltimore, so it presumably not a close race, and the only reason to vote is to shift the Overton window or make a statement.
The Republican candidate seems not too smart, and includes a picture of himself with people in Trump shirts, and a low-res picture of himself wearing a red cap that looks like a Make American Great Again cap (https://www.digmanforbaltimore.com/).
Furthermore, he seems somewhat inept, with his website containing default text in various fields, (see ‘Get in Touch’ section here: https://www.digmanforbaltimore.com/about-8) and a default stock photo (here: https://www.digmanforbaltimore.com/about), while his actual description of himself (https://www.digmanforbaltimore.com/about-8) seems to contain a typo (“Public Safety: Statically proven in other cities that LPT produced” which should presumably be “statistically proven).
On the other hand, the Democratic incumbent seems to mostly be into nonsense, rather than anything Baltimore actually needs. He introduced a wide ranging bill mandating that Baltimore establish a commission to make sure that everything in the city revolves around “trauma informed care,” which is probably nonsense and often goes hand in hand with soft-on-crime policies.
He sponsored the Gender-Inclusive Single-User Restroom bill, which helps ensure our city is safe and welcoming for all communities by requiring all single-user restrooms to have gender-inclusive signage. It was the first bill in Baltimore’s history to be signed at a Pride Parade. (Taken from here: https://www.baltimorecitycouncil.com/zeke-cohen).
So your options are the polished liberal who’s into nonsense instead of substance, and the unlettered Republican opponent.
I’d just leave it blank.
I disagree with several of your policy proscriptions and votes, but the reasoning was all solid and grokkable. Not that it matters since I never got a chance to vote in Maryland elections when I lived there, but I figured I would chime in that this is exactly the kind of thing I hope comes from the other meetups.
Thanks! I'm glad it was appreciated.
Incidentally, I think that it would be preferable for ACX groups who don't agree on all votes (which would presumably be the norm, rather than the exception) to explain their respective votes in a voting guide, rather than simply voting among themselves, as it lets readers more easily vote in accordance with their respective preferences and perspectives. Crowd-sourcing seems much more useful for clarifying descriptive matters, than determining normative matters; after all, if someone already knows that they hold a minority view, and hasn't jettisoned it spite of the contrary wisdom of crowds, they probably wouldn't dismiss it on the basis of the wisdom of an ACX group.
Presenting the reasoning for any potential votes seems much more useful for readers who aren't expected to compromise their normative positions.
Any Oakland folks interested in joining the Berkeley group for the statewide issues, and then splitting off to write something smaller for Oakland-specific races (with other folks there lending a hand on that research if they feel like it)?
If this is a success, consider marking your calendar to start earlier next year. In Boston/Cambridge, there are some interesting ballot questions, but almost all the meaningfully contested elections for office happened in the Democratic primary on September 3rd, and I imagine the same is true for many of the deep-blue cities on your list.
Huh? I thought primaries were always in spring, to correspond to the presidential primaries. I agree the primaries are when some of the interesting action happens, but I thought stretching this process out over six months would be too much.
Yea that's a crazy late primary in MA, we had ours back in May. But you might consider posting a couple weeks earlier next time, I already cast my mail-in ballot in MD last week and I'm guessing a lot of places are already sending out mail-in ballots.
ETA: I'm reading what I wrote and it sounds more sassy/judgmental in text than I want, fyi not trying to be a jerk just a general suggestion/comment.
No, that's totally reasonable and I was considering posting earlier, but I held off because in California they don't send out the voter information pamphlet until early October, and I thought people would want to have that. I asked in an open thread whether other states were the same, but I didn't get many responses.
Likewise for me here in Wisconsin, I just mailed in my ballot yesterday but it arrived a week or two earlier.
Some states have presidential and state primaries on the same day, but many don't. Presidential events are mostly Jan-May, state primaries mostly May-September.
Specifically from your list: CA and TX state primaries were March 5, IL was March 19, PA April 23, NY June 25, WA August 6, and MA September 3. https://apps.npr.org/primary-election-results-2024/
Then municipal primaries are usually on the same day as state primaries, at least where I've lived
Local US politics is on a (deliberately) pretty chaotic schedule.
* Washington & Seattle had a primary election in August.
* The New York State primary elections for the federal elections were June 25th, but their mayoral elections are 1 year after the presidential elections (Mayor Adams won his primary on June 22, 2021) and city council are elected every odd year (last primary was June 27th, 2023, last general was Nov 7, 2023).
* Chicago elected Mayor Johnson with a first round in February 2023, then runoff in April 2023.
My understanding is that at part of this is deliberately scheduling local elections for awkward times to keep less enfranchised voters out of the election. So eg school board elections will sometimes be scheduled on odd years because that concentrates the power of the more invested teachers & parents who are more likely to care enough to vote at unusual times, whereas if the election was at the same time as federal elections more people would tick extra boxes on ballots they're filling out anyway.
I think if you want to make a serious effort at federating & publishing local voting recommendations you'll want do something like let established local voting groups pass recommendations up to you and then put them in the "links for the month" posts
For what it's worth, the Democratic primary in the part of Cambridge where I live had no contested races this year, so this didn't matter. I hear there was an interesting one over in Harvard Square though.
Howdy, neighbor!
I agree the Decker-MacKay race would have been very interesting to do this for—there are a lot of ACX readers in the district, the final margin was only a few dozen votes, and I'd guess that a dedicated meetup discussion could have helped a lot of ACX readers make the tough choice between a socialist (but a very sensible one responsive to evidence-based concerns and pushing for good state governance practices) vs. an anti-transparency incumbent who misrepresents her activities to her constituents (but is more pro-business)
What I found interesting here in MA is this year there's something new in the voter info mailing about the ballot questions. They added a new "3rd" opinion piece for each one, written by a subgroup of legislators. Since ballot questions are intended to circumvent the inaction of legislators, it's no surprise they advised voting "no" on all 5 questions. I plan to vote "yes" on 4 of them.
I remember hearing the the first proposed "concepts of a plan" for this project awhile back, and being excited for it - nice to see the fruit is nearing fruition. It's a fun tradition every 2-4 years now to receive my several-hundred-pages(!) paper voting guide and wade through all the absurd crap on the SF CA ballot. Even the dogcatchers frequently have highly amusing characters running for them. Appreciate encouragement for the downballot focus, the topline very much mostly writes itself this year. It's often rather annoying trying to find information about e.g. state court judges or Board of Education prospectives - usually nobodies with minimal ad spend or discourse presence, but a huge outsize impact for a small-time politician...and applying appropriately vigorous Bounded Distrust to the classic endorsements of yore, like newspapers, just gets exhausting when offices and their candidates get into the dozens and dozens. (It does amuse me greatly to keep getting campaign ads from both the rightwing and leftwing local pols. That's not how horseshoe theory works!)
Does anyone want to do one for Arizona? My friend and I made a website that has all of the elections, including the likes of school boards and city councils, in one super long mega-ballot. After you fill it out you can share a link to it. When you put in your address to someone's ballot it only shows the elections relevant to where you live. This can take the voting guide from over 600 elections to around 70, depending on your address. Here's the link: ballotcheatsheet.com
Before anyone asks, yes we would like to do this for other states but this requires not only compiling all that election data but also sourcing district maps. This is also our first website so if it goes well for Arizona (and we somehow get a bunch of money/volunteers) we can expand it next election.
I'd be interested (and live in AZ) but don't particularly want to create an account. Is there an option to do it without an account that I'm not seeing?
You only have to make an account if you don’t already have a Google account, otherwise you can just sign in with your existing one. We can add other Oauth providers if there’s demand for it though. If you don’t have Google is there a particular one you prefer?
More that I'm hesitant to connect to an account at all. Maybe it's paranoia but I'm not crazy about using Oath frivolously.
We're the same with the opposite conclusion. We are paranoid about security due to being an obvious target for election interference, so rather than roll a simple account system we outsourced our account security to an Oauth provider since that system is no doubt more robust and well-audited than anything we could come up with in a short time frame.
On the local PHX ACX discord we've been talking about the various props and we were thinking about sharing that. But when it comes to politicians, we kinda felt our choices would be uninteresting and basically split down partisan lines.
What is the chance that out of those locales, the outcome won't be "vote 100% D"? OK, possibly excluding assistant dogcatchers. I guess in some locales there might be non-partisan low-level positions left? Or more than one D candidate maybe (does that happen post-primaries)? Also I guess there are ballot props - is there any chance to see daylight between D position and the group recommendation on those?
We'll see!
In Seattle, we have both kinds of politicians, leftist *and* liberals! This should be fun to attend.
I love this idea. I don't vote for many local positions because I have no clue about the differences between the candidates.
Some type of crowd-sourcing among like-minded folk makes so much sense.
I guess y'all want to stay nonpartisan, but focusing on swing states would make politicians actually care about making you happy. (That may not be considered a good thing around here.) I don't think any of these outside Philly is in a state that's in play.
If you simply want to encourage civic engagement, you could figure out what the #2-#5 countries are and do the same thing on their election day as well (if they have one).
From what I can see of the 2024 meetup list, using the current Nate Silver list of AZ, GA, MI, NV, NC, PA, WI, you have meetups in Phoenix, Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Reno, Asheville, Raleigh-Durham, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Madison, and Stone Lake. Perhaps raise the profile of these?
I'm from Michigan, and I believe Ann Arbor and Detroit are both liberal enough not to be swayed. Any populations from those areas would get together and declare 100% for Democrat candidates and policies, with few enough exceptions not to matter.
Yet the STATE is a swing state, as it appears on projections. The more urban the area, the more Democrat the voting.
Right, but when you have a swing state everyone's votes count because the totals are aggregated by state. Turning out an extra 1,000,000 people in New York doesn't help, but an extra 1,000,000 people in Philly does. If you raise Republican totals in Philly, you can increase the probability of a Republican victory by swaying PA, even if Philly overall swings Dem.
"If your meetup group covers many localities (like a city with many city council districts, or somewhere like Berkeley or Boston where many of the attendees will really be from Oakland or Cambridge), you can decide whether to do full ballots for all localities, the most important races from each, or just pick one and stick to it."
Is there any consensus on how far the spread is for different cities? I'm specifically asking about Seattle, because I'm from Snohomish County (just north of Seattle). I'll probably join either way but if there are enough people from my area to form subgroups that will definitely push me more towards joining.
I'd say feel free to tag along? It's standard practice to include a disclaimer to the effect that anyone in the area is welcome when advertising a meetup. (Personally, I've lived in Newton, Massachusetts, but I come to meetups in Cambridge even though that's ~6-7 miles away, and I don't think I'm an extreme outlier in that regard.)
Snohomish County, Washington is a harder sell, since the county's closest point to Seattle is ~10 miles away and its farthest point is ~75 miles away*. By the time you get to ~50 miles of separation, the concept of a metropolitan area stops making sense any more. However, if you live in the southwest corner of Snohomish County, then by all means, you can go to Seattle.
*I used the Google Maps measure distance tool to figure this out; it's really invaluable for this sort of stuff.
> If you’re in a non-US city that also has an election in the last few months of 2024, feel free to tag along, I guess.
This intrigued me enough that I actually went ahead and looked up which cities would plausibly also be eligible for this. Say that a city is "eligible" if its country has an election* between October 22, 2024 and December 31, 2024, AND it has ever hosted an ACX everywhere meetup**. This gave me 11 cities/towns (excluding the USA), which are as follows:
- Sofia, Bulgaria
- Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- Vilnius, Lithuania
- Bucharest, Romania
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Cairns, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Kuta, Indonesia***
- Tokyo, Japan
* I used listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_national_electoral_calendar or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_local_electoral_calendar for sources. I also imposed the condition that if the election is subnational, then the city has to be located in the appropriate region of the country.
** In practice, I actually only looked at the fall 2024, spring 2024, fall 2023, and spring 2023 iterations; there is very little variance between iterations, so I gave up.
*** One of the meetups was officially listed as "Seminyak, Indonesia", but upon further inspection it appears that Seminyak is actually the name of a beach (?!) in the town of Kuta, so I went with Kuta instead.