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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

I think both sides are competent. Electors at getting elected and voters at voting against what they don't want. We're pretty efficient at voting people out of office when they mess up egregiously.

The two parties and winner take all system probably create what we see now where you want to have extreme positions to get elected, but only extreme enough to still win 50% + 1.

It's like we're optimizing for agreement among the smallest majority possible.

There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote.

If your power as an elected official somehow increased in proportion to what % of the vote you got I think we'd see a lot more unique solutions to common problems rather than blaming the other side.

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> There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote.

There is also no path to get 90% of the vote across the entire US population. As soon as a politician takes a stance on a polarizing issue, and they're not allowed to not take a stance, they lose half the vote.

One could try and blend the tribes by choosing stances evenly-ish across them but it's practically impossible because you need tribal backing to have a successful run and that backing comes with a promise of loyalty. It probably wouldn't really work anyway -- people don't really tally positive stances, they vote for whoever has the fewest bad checks so everyone would end up hating you.

Our electorate is, sans cheating, a reflection of ourselves. As long as we are divided about issues that are important to us so too will Capitol Hill.

If there were a best solution there would be nothing to argue about unfortunately.

So according to your idea, a politician who would not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner?

Unfortunately, this is not what we see. We get politics playing to respective power bases and not the actual electorate as an aggregate, and politicians that are a reflection of these power bases and not electorate.

> not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner

Easier said than done when you have to take a stance on a bunch of polarizing issues, and any choice you make will be a bad check for half the population.

Not messing up the issues people generally agree on is the easy part.

Sorry, 90% was a bit of an exaggeration, but 60-70% might not be unrealistic if someone came out and said they respect both sides of a controversial issue and want to find common ground.

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