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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> With a 75% of Californians being pro-right to repair, and with bipartisan support - you'd think this would be an easy case to argue

“Bipartisan support“ is, since we are well out of the pre-1990s realignment period, mostly a sign of low political salience, an issue that doesn't have much relevance to voting behavior to most of the public. Breadth (%) of support or opposition is far less important than depth (impact on voting, volunteering, and donating behavior), and this is an issue where the depth of support in the general public is near 0, where the depth of opposition from entrenched industry interests is high.

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Part of the problem is that all of our depth in political support gets black-holed into advertising for simple polarizing issues like abortion, guns, and high vs. low taxes. This gets largely negated by the other side advertising for the opposite position, so in the end very little gets done.

The real issue is actually partisan primaries that push both sides further to the edge.

See what Alaska did recently for an example of how to fix this

I agree with you that it is a problem, but I don't think it's the primaries as much as it is the two-party system. If we are going to have political parties, then they should be allowed some semblance of self-governance. Otherwise, what's the point? There could just be one state controlled party that does everything. The more we control individual parties, the more pointless it is to even have different parties.

Personally, I see political parties as potentially important to a well-functioning democracy. The main problem I think is lack of competition. I would love to see at least a third party, maybe half a dozen or more, emerge in the United States. Obviously people have been trying to make that happen for decades, without success. I wonder what type of solutions there are to increase the number of viable parties? The one that seems most plausible to me is ranked choice voting, for one of the many minor variations of the idea. Are there other things?

> The real issue is actually partisan primaries that push both sides further to the edge.

No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.

The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.

CA is a one party state, for all practical purposes, however it was accomplished.

> CA is a one party state, for all practical purposes

This is much less true than it seems superficially; its true that the state-level government is dominated by Democrats (including many offices that are nominally nonpartisan), but important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans. This was particularly significant during the height of the COVID pandemic, because enforcement of public health orders is, under the State Constitution and laws, almost entirely entrusted to county Sheriffs, and every single county Sheriff in the State publicly announced one form or another of non-enforcement.

If you are a one party state minus Sheriffs then you are a one party state. Covid aside, 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement. And all the prosecutors are dems

> If you are a one party state minus Sheriffs

Which is not what I said, Sheriffs were an example, not an exhaustive list of exceptions.

> 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement.

That’s strange, because law enforcement, corrections, and criminal legal system is about 10% of California’s budget.

> And all the prosecutors are dems

No, they aren’t. Like all local offices, it’s a formally nonpartisan office, but its fairly common for Republicans or (especially in Dem-leaning areas), “independents” who were Republicans before running for the office and whose stances on policy issues are indistinguishable from Republicans to be DA’s, though DA’s are less consistently hard-right than Sheriffs.

>important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans

Name any three blue counties with Republican county sheriffs.

Yes, and this is by design. Divide and conquer.

This is a good point for other issues as well. Support for legal recreational marijuana nationally has been at a decently strong majority level for a while now, but that hasn't resulted in any action at the federal level. It hasn't even been rescheduled when Democrats hold the presidency, and support within the Democratic party in particular is extremely high. That, too, is an issue of depth. Yeah, most Democrats and even Americans support it at this point, but for most it's not a major issue.

That's part of why it's been so common to pass as a state-level initiative. If you actually get it to a popular vote, it'll pass because people are at least lightly in favor, but legislatures are slow to pass it themselves because it has little impact on their re-election chances.

> Support for legal recreational marijuana nationally has been at a decently strong majority level for a while now, but that hasn't resulted in any action at the federal level.

While it is technically still federally prohibited, and there is some danger of reach-back prosecutions if policy changes, since 2014 state law has effectively controlled because of the enforcement restrictions in the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment, which has been continuously renewed as part of funding bills, and is a substantive federal action.

You explained very well something that I have struggled to put into words about all these tech bills. Thank you.

This. I wish more polls had an importance/salience correction factor applied. It would significantly tilt most polls.

What would be the best way to gauge that?

My naive take on this would be to have poll questions like:

> Are you in favor of consumers' right to repair? ...How strong is your position? (1–5)

Of course this is vulnerable to strategic answering, where people just slam on ‘5’ for each question. Like how star ratings are inflated on Amazon.

My next strategy would be pairwise contests. So:

> Alice supports right-to-repair (RTR) and raising property taxes. Bob is opposed to RTR and wants to lower property taxes. Who would you vote for?

> Carol supports RTR and applying the death penalty to a wider range of felonies. David opposes RTR and wants to eliminate capital punishment altogether. Who would you vote for?

But too much of that and you'd start to lose people. How many questions can you pose before you're only getting answers from serial poll-takers?

Salience is pretty hard to measure by means other than substantive political behavior.

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