FearlessFreep
Senior Master
Stop Voting For Nincompoops
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In a recent special election for California governor, the usual lock of the party structure broke down - they neglected to block that special case, and so you could get in with 65 signatures and $3500. As a result there were 135 candidates.
With 135 candidates, one might have thought there would be an opportunity for some genuine voter choice - a lower barrier to entry, which would create a chance to elect an exceptionally competent governor. However, the media immediately swung into action and decided that only a tiny fraction of these candidates would be allowed to get any publicity. Which ones? Why, the ones who already had name recognition! Those, after all, were the candidates who were likely to win, so those were the ones which the media reported on.
Amazingly, the media collectively exerted such tremendous power, in nearly perfect coordination, without deliberate intention (conspiracies are generally much less necessary than believed). They genuinely thought, I think, that they were reporting the news rather than making it. Did it even occur to them that the entire business was self-referential? Did anyone write about that aspect? With a coordinated action, the media could have chosen any not-completely-pathetic candidate to report as the "front-runner", and their reporting would thereby have been correct.
The technical term for this is Keynesian beauty contest, wherein everyone tries to vote for whoever they think most people will vote for.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger (4,206,284 votes) had been as unable to get publicity as Logan Clements (274 votes), perhaps because the media believed (in uncoordinated unison) that no action-movie hero could be taken seriously as a candidate, then Arnold Schwarzenegger would not have been a "serious candidate".
In effect, Arnold Schwarzenegger was appointed Governor of California by the media. The case is notable because usually it's the party structure that excludes candidates, and the party structure's power has a formal basis that does not require voter complicity. The power of the media to appoint Arnold Schwarzenegger governor derived strictly from voters following what someone told them was the trend. If the voters had ignored the media telling them who the front-runner was, and decided their initial pick of "serious candidates" based on, say, the answers to a questionnaire, then the media would have had no power.
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