Hacker News Reader

Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.

View on HN

That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".

I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically

1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;

2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;

3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and

4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.

And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.

But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".

This is what I've been saying to the people who blame the voters for Trump's win in 2024. Democrats knew how dangerous he was and how weak of a candidate he should have been and they still decided to skip the primary and run an unpopular candidate so late in the race after it became clear that Biden wasn't going to make it after the first debate. They met a serious and decisive moment with incompetence and the public is facing the consequences of that. They should be taking this all more seriously and doing introspection on the loss rather than blaming the voters.

Oh I agree she ran a better campaign given that there isnt ranked chocie voting. Im just stating that I am very unhappy that 25% of the dem electorate are looking for clown meme candidates. Thats by far the biggest lesson from her campaign, 25% of primary voters do not care about anything other than memeage. I cant say thats a good way to get competent politicians but it is now the world we live in.

> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".

I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.

Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them

She had exactly the same policy profile on China and Taiwan as every other Democrat in congress and didn't change that until a bunch of tankies on Twitter jumped her about it, because she is susceptible to Twitter tankies, which is something you can't say about Fine or Biss, and is a small part of why Biss won.

Nobody in her district cares about her Taiwan position. It's not a real issue. But she made it one because Ryan Grim or Hasan Piker (I forget which) got mad about it. Because she's terminally online, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants a terminally online congressperson.

Kat did not in fact come close to winning. She mobilized exactly the people she was expected to mobilize, and the only surprising thing about the election is that Bushra Amiwala --- a locally engaged and active elected with exactly Kat's profile --- didn't pull more votes from her. That sucks. But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.

People are looking at the vote spread in isolation and not the whole breakdown of the election. Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender, and that was to pull votes from Biss and Fine in north suburban Cook County. She failed to do so, and Biss, who basically everyone thought was going to win, won.

I mean we can be honest here about how she performed. I just dont believe that you dont find it surprising that a carpetbagger with no experience and zero ground game got 26% of the vote and the winner only got 29%.

> Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender

All she needed to do was convince Simmons or Bushra to drop out and she wins. She didnt need any of the Biss or Fine votes

> But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.

If she got every of Amiwala's votes she literally wins by more than 1%

Fair enough. If she had taken every one of Amiwala's votes, she'd have won by ~2000 votes.

>imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed

Ranked choice still succumbs to a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

Approval voting works better and simpler, and STAR voting works even better though with more complexity. https://www.equal.vote/beyond_rcv_zine

Approval makes the game theory too complicated imo. Too easy to think of cases where a voter leaves off someone because they want their favorite to win but then ends up with neither winning. STAR is the best but voters might be too stupid to figure it out. Really multi district is the best but unfortunately no chance of that happening it seems

I think the threat of unapproved candidates winning would lower a voter's approval threshold to include other candidates. Increasing the approval threshold happens when the voter likes all of the candidates, in which case there isn't too much of a problem.

I really want to believe that ordinary people can handle STAR voting. Not too far from product reviews: most will initially vote 5, 4, or 0. As long as the system encourages more honest voting (instead of lesser-evil voting), it can help fix our corrupt political system.

Full agreement with multi district/proportional, but I don't know how to sell it to normal people (they want THEIR representative).

> Ranked choice still succumbs to a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22

That website presents an unconvincing argument and uses it to arrive at a conclusion that is at odds with the extensive academic research on this topic.

Academic research concludes that ranked-choice and vote-for-one both result in a center-squeeze spoiler effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze

> Academic research concludes that ranked-choice and vote-for-one both result in a center-squeeze spoiler effect.

No, it's more complicated than that.

All voting systems have the potential for spoiler effects (in the broadest sense of the term). That's a core and long-proven theorem in social choice theory. What's more relevant is how those actually play out under the conditions in which they're used. And it turns out that, while pathological cases are still mathematically possible, in practice, under the conditions that typically apply to our elections, RCV is actually less likely to produce these effects than other systems.

The idea that approval voting, STAR voting, or Condorcet voting is superior to RCV for this reason is a misconception based on decades-old research that is no longer current.

(Also, the website linked above is not a correct demonstration of the effect you linked, although I can see how the confusion happened).

Can you share some actual evidence for your case? I really don't believe it. The anti-RCV story about Alaska 2022 holds that Palin spoiled round 1 of the instant runoff by splitting the vote with Begich, causing Begich to drop out. RCV only beats vote-for-one, unless you can make a convincing case otherwise.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04764v3 (Yes, I agree with the conclusion of this paper, but I argue that we can do better with Approval or STAR.)

Basic modelling on a 2D political compass gives a Yee diagram, demonstrating RCV's counterintuitive results. Yeah, that's theory, but Alaska 2022 demonstrates a real case of it. And the list of center-squeeze cases on the Wikipedia page, too.

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Yee_diagram

> That's a core and long-proven theorem in social choice theory.

Do you mean Arrow's theorem? Doesn't apply to STAR or Approval.

> The idea that approval voting, STAR voting, or Condorcet voting is superior to RCV for this reason is a misconception based on decades-old research that is no longer current.

Share the research, please!

Here's some recent research, obviously biased for STAR and against RCV. https://www.equal.vote/peer_review

I'll also add this argument against RCV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1UzTeelguY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com