"I’m going to vote for one person in each office.... Truthfully, in my lifetime, I’ve only liked two mayors: I liked Lindsay, and I liked Dinkins. Even Dinkins was far away. Lindsay, no one even knows — some kid asked me this and then she looked up Lindsay. She said, 'How could you have liked him? He’s a Republican.' Today, he’d practically be a socialist. To me, Andrew Yang is a kind of a Trump figure. I’m not saying he’s bad in that way, morally bad. But it’s ridiculous: The reason he was leading in the polls is because everyone knew who he was. The reason everyone knew who he was is that he ran for president. To me, Andrew Yang — he’s qualified for nothing. He couldn’t be the president of my condo board. I assure you, he could not deal with this. If New York City were a high-school football team, he could be the cheerleader — not a college football team but a high-school football team. In a small town."
Said Fran Lebowitz, quoted in "A Ranked Choice Cheat Sheet/We asked New Yorkers about their ranked-choice-voting strategies" (NY Magazine).
Notice how she avoided the complicated question of how to use ranked-choice voting strategically. Her plan is to just pretend there is no ranked-choice and vote for one. That might actually be the best strategy, though, and I don't just mean to avoid having to think about it. It might actually be the best strategy if you think it through at a high level of math and psychology. But asking a lot of notable New Yorkers is NOT a way to get good answers about the strategy, because there's strategy to talking about strategy. If you reveal a smart strategy, you'll cause other strategists to devise counter-strategies. Plus, these notable New Yorkers all want to use their space in the magazine to say why they like the candidates they support.
Here, Chelsea Manning offered a little bit about actually ranking strategy:
With ranked-choice voting, you have to think more strategically as a voter than you would with winner-takes-all. You can have an extremely popular candidate such as Andrew Yang — by popular I don’t mean ‘well liked’; I mean ‘has an enormous amount of name recognition’ — and whenever people go down the list, they’ll be like, Oh, okay, I’ll put him at the bottom. But being at the bottom still makes that a vote. So it’s about who you put in and who you keep out. And that’s the logic that I have here.
Yeah, people might not realize that because there are more candidates than ranked positions on the ballot, putting Yang last isn't a way to sort of vote against him. What if he wins by collecting a ridiculous number of 5th-place votes from people who regard him as their least favorite?!
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10 comments:
Jeff Gee writes:
"There was a brief period almost 50 years ago when I voted for the science fiction Hugo Awards. (You had to purchase a World Science Fiction Convention membership to get a ballot). It was ranked voting. You were instructed to vote for your top three choices. But nearly everyone I knew simply voted for their top choice in every category. It was called "shotgunning." Harlan Ellison told a room full of fans, "If you vote for me to win, DO NOT VOTE AGAINST ME to place and show! You'll kill me!""
I had trouble understanding that. Is he saying don't put anyone in the place and show positions if you put me in first? Or is he saying if you must put someone else in first, don't put me in place or show, because that's worse than not being on your ballot at all? If the latter, why?
Temujin writes:
This is not a good answer to the question of ranked choice. Rather, my question would be why is it that New Yorkers in general, and Liberal to Progressive New Yorkers specifically make every damned thing in this world far more difficult that it has to be?
Voting is not that tricky. Electing quality people begins with getting quality people to run for office. And we've pretty much scared the quality out of our politics. So you're left- in the case of New York City- with a bevy of horrible candidates and you come up with some cockamamie process to elect the least worst of the bad. Nice going.
If you thought DeBlasio was the worst it could get, I'm thinking you ain't seen nothing yet. Oh...and I know that when I need a political opinion, my go-to is always Fran Lebowitz.
Nancy writes: "A few months ago I heard Fran Lebowitz say that everyone hates deBlasio and now she finds the most deBlasio-like candidate, Maya Wiley, to be interesting. My daughter lives in the city, voted twice for deBlasio and deeply regrets it. She will be voting for Eric Adams as he is promoting policies quite different from the current mayor."
MikeR writes:
"For me it'd be a no-brainer. Yang really is a lot like Trump: someone who is willing to think outside the box. All the other candidates are garden-variety big-city progressive losers who will keep things decaying. If you actually want to save the city you need to try something new.
Vote for Yang alone on the list."
Jeff Gee writes back: "I see I completely effed up my original email. That should be 'don't vote somebody else to place & show. You'll kill me.'"
Now, it's easy to understand.
Tom T. writes:
The theory behind ranked choice is that it's better to elect someone who is the second choice of a majority than someone who is the first choice of a plurality. It tends to be promoted by people with radical views, because they know that their ideas will never be popular with a lot of people, but they hope to cobble together a lot of "well, that's still better than the opposing party" half-votes. It's also going to be favored by Democrats in a place like New York City, where there are likely to be several liberal Democrats on the ballot and maybe one conservative, because ranked-choice effectively covers over any splintering among the liberals that might allow the conservative to achieve a plurality.
To answer Jeff Gee's question, Ellison was definitely saying, "vote for me at the top and leave the second and third slots blank." Doing that awards one vote to Ellison and none to anyone else. If you fill in a second choice, you're giving one vote to Ellison and half a vote to someone else. You're diluting your own vote for Ellison, and helping someone who isn't your first choice.
Tina writes:
If you want a taste of real New York, watch the film about eccentric diner owner Kenny Shopson, I Like Killing Flies. If you like anything about being an American or an American businessman, watch it. It is haunting, tragic, triumphant, and weird in ways John Waters could merely imitate.
If you like obnoxious elite women too old and urban to wear jeans pontificating incoherent garbage ideas, listen to Fran Leibowitz. Sure, she’s tart and amusing. Or, listen to Madonna. She’s just a tart, though less dishonest because she earned her wealth. Lebowitz’s guiding idea is that people like her — who inherit their wealth and therefore may just wander around seeming interesting — are not culpable for gentrification whereas the Madonnas of the world are because they’re relative upstarts — says everything about the ways the entitled classes in this country view their status as a victim group while kulacking the striving middle and working classes.
I'd love to watch that movie, but it doesn't seem to be streamable in any of the usual places and the DVD costs $89 at Amazon.
Ozymandias writes:
That the mayors Fran Lebowitz remembers fondly are Lindsay and Dinkins reveals the basic masochism in the hearts of most New Yorkers.
John Lindsay was elected mayor after serving as a House member from the affluent Upper East Side—known then as “the Silk Stocking District.” It was Lindsay for whom the term “limousine liberal” was originally coined, and whose characterization of New York as “a fun city” during a transit strike was to become a sarcastic catch-phrase—a rancid reminder of the city’s decline into chaos and insolvency. The public-employee union strikes cascaded. Mountainous ranges of garbage bags lined the sidewalks during a prolonged sanitation strike. After a disastrous first term, he lost the Republican party’s nomination for reelection and only slithered into a second term as the nominee of the Liberal Party of New York.
David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York, was a decent man, but a one-term mayor, and something of a bumbler, who was swept out by Rudy Giuliani on the basis of chronic racial turmoil, including a Black-led, city-wide boycott of Korean-owned grocery stores, the Crown Heights Riot of 1991, and a city murder rate at an all-time high.
Fran: I was there. Those were not the good old days!
Some New Yorkers preferred the grittier, pre-Giuliani days. I've seen Lebowitz talking about New York in the 70s. That's when I lived in NYC too. It had a depth and reality that artists like. Times Square cleaned up into theme park is, in this view, disturbing.
MikeR writes:
@Ozymandias Me too. I lived in Brooklyn during Giuliani's run. People told me, Don't vote for Giuliani: Dinkins is a decent guy, Giuliani is a pure SOB who never did a kindness for anyone in his life.
We all voted for Giuliani anyhow, because things were falling about at the seams. And they took a big upturn under Giuliani, to the point where he was a believable candidate for President.
No one I knew remembers the days of Dinkins with fondness. Classic liberal blunder: if your heart's in the right place, it doesn't matter if it works.
John writes: "This is in reply to the claims of Tina in the post below about Fran being born wealthy. I realize that for many people a little Fran goes a long way, but it's not accurate to imply she's the way she is because of inheriting money. She gave herself that Manhattan-centricity! She was born middle-class in New Jersey (her parents owned a furniture store), and was a taxi driver for a time along with other jobs. I've also remembered her saying things about the importance of putting money aside if you're an artist or freelancer-type, which is good but boring advice."
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