Points, Actions, and Marginal Votes - The Game of Elections - Extra Politics - #1

Politics affects lives and politics are complicated but politics also behave very much like games you have winners and losers rules and conventions Designers and players and though politics may not be our primary expertise games are something we know very well So in this little miniseries, we are going to use gaming terminology and concepts to help break down and explain the game Welcome to extra politics When a particular topic or issue is very important to us We naturally want to spend more time talking about it. But in the world of politics, that's not always the best strategy and today I'm gonna explain why using two gaming terms Points and actions In games, points are frequently used to determine a winner Whoever has the most points wins in politics and more specifically in Elections the points come from you and me in the form of our votes in presidential elections It gets a little bit squishier because of state electors and whatnot But basically it still comes down to our votes now in game design points come in two different flavors There are gimmies and there are marginal points Jimmies are points that you can't help but get they just happen as you play for example in Ticket to Ride Scoring fewer than 50 points would actually take focused effort. It's quite hard to do so in this case we could say that Ticket to Ride gives roughly fifty gimme points and the rest are marginal points and Since all of the players are going to be getting those gimme points That means that games are won and lost on marginal points score the most marginal points and you win in our highly politicized American system The majority of votes are actually guineas at least 80% Of regular GOP voters are going to vote for whoever the GOP candidate is as will the regular Democrat voters So those votes are guineas your vote might be a gimme as well This means that to win elections candidates must focus their efforts on the marginal points meaning the people who haven't decided who they want to vote for yet or who might not bother to vote at all and the way Candidates fight for these marginal points is by spending time addressing those particular voters you can think of it like taking actions in a game in many games players have a list of Possible actions they can take but they must choose how to spend those actions each turn. For example Imagine a game where on your turn you can trade goods collect resources build new buildings or fight a battle But you only get two action points You can do any one of those things, but you won't be able to do all of those things in a single turn You're gonna have to make some choices this exact same dynamic applies in politics a candidate might choose to spend their action points making calls to Influential businesses or going on a tour of schools in their district or preparing for a debate But which to choose in US politics winning the game is priority number one After all, if a candidate loses the election, they're not going to be able to achieve any of the goals or changes They have planned and when you look at politics from that perspective a lot of politicians actions start to make a lot more sense Everything hinges on winning elections. There is no higher priority It may not be very inspirational but it is practical and so the real challenge as a politician becomes figuring out which path to victory will allow you to achieve at least some of the good things you want to accomplish Losing is losing but in politics there are degrees of victory For example, you could win by taking huge amounts of lobbyist money to dramatically out spend your opponent But that might leave you trapped for an entire term doing the bidding of those Lobbyists who helped you win while your own agenda collects dust in a corner politics is a tricky game Let's run through an example scenario involving a specific political issue It could be any but let's say Civil rights civil rights is the fight for equal treatment under the law and in daily life Sometimes it's a defensive battle to ensure that people keep the rights they have and sometimes it's a proactive Battle like fighting for people who do not currently enjoy equal status Proactive civil rights movements in the u.s Started by addressing large populations such as the fights to get women and African Americans the right to vote more recent movements have largely addressed smaller populations the long struggle for gay marriage rights led to a victory that directly affected a lot of people But a smaller number then was impacted by the suffragette movement For example now obviously just because a smaller percentage of the population is suffering an injustice does not make the fight for those civil rights any less important or morally right Civil Rights is an issue. That is very important to us here But for the specific purposes of this video and to better understand the political game Let's put the morality aside for just a moment and look at civil rights purely in the context of winning elections Let's look at this graph. Let's say that this circle represents a single issue and the colours represent all the voters Who care about that issue the red chunk represents conservative voters the blue represents liberals and the orange chunk surrounding it Represents all the marginal voters as you probably have already guessed those red and the blue votes in the middle. Those are the guineas They are important votes, but in terms of political strategy those votes might as well not even be in play They're pretty much unchangeable So let's just remove those from the board for now that delectable orange circle remaining Those are the marginal votes the undecided the might not vote at all These are the votes that each candidate stands to win if they invest actions addressing this particular issue circle But that's just one issue one of many Let's bring the other issues in here and just the orange marginal voter chunks with all of the gimmies removed this right here This is the real game board as a politician in a democracy This is how you view an election granted in real life few voters fit entirely into just one circle But let's keep this simple for now as a politician you can spend an action to address one of those circles Telling that particular group of marginal voters where you stand on their issue and on a more esoteric level Acknowledging that their issue is important to you Even if you don't offer up a solution or a plan for that issue You are still showing those voters that you get them by acknowledging that their issue is important now Candidates would love to address each and every issue on this board, but action points are limited you've only got so many turns and so many resources so tough calls have to be made and while sometimes candidates invest action points on their gimmies in the hope that the gimmies start performing action points on their own the fact remains that Elections are won and lost on the margin voters. So that has to be the focus There are many common strategies for spending these action points in an election. For example Strategy number one target the largest marginal voter circles. This one's a classic is the economy lagging Well, then spend some action points addressing the economy I mean, hey, everybody's affected by the economy and that means a lot of marginal votes right for the picking Strategy number two grow one of the circles if there's an issue circle where you have a particularly Potent argument and a high chance of victory you could spend some points trying to make more people care about that issue adding more marginal votes to that circle in the 2016 election Donald Trump spent a lot of action points growing the previously tiny fear of Refugees circle because he felt that that was a circle he could easily win and that strategy turned out to be pretty effective But elections aren't single-player games You are playing against opponents and that leads to other potential strategies like strategy number three Force your opponents to spend their action points poorly So I mentioned civil rights before let's take a look at that civil rights circle and let's put the gimmies back in for a moment Hmm seems like most voters have their minds pretty well made up on that issue Not a lot of marginal votes to be won there If you are a liberal candidate and you look at this circle, you will most likely deduce that This is not a very smart place to spend your action points, of course civil rights may be incredibly important to you But you need to be pursuing marginal votes if you are going to win this thing and be able to do anything Okay But what if you're a conservative candidate at first you might look at this and think yikes Barely any marginal votes and the Liberals have this circle on lock not even worth trying But wait What if you were to spend a few action points here by say? taking an opposing stance to a current civil rights movement whether you do that directly by say supporting a bathroom bill or Indirectly through dog whistle tactics you might manage to shock the liberal majority of gimmies in that circle who will then? Demand a liberal response. Hey, they'll shout are you gonna let them get away with that? And this will pull in the liberal candidate and force them to spend some action points on a circle They already had in the bag the end result You spent one or two action points on this issue But the Liberal candidate was forced to spend dozens in response and all of that over a tiny sliver of marginal votes This strategy often looks pretty absurd from the outside But in the world of politics attacking where your opponent is strong can be surprisingly effective Of course, there are effective ways to spend action points actually addressing civil rights You could grow that circle by drawing more people's attention and sympathy to the issue But due to the shrinking number of people directly affected by modern civil rights movements Those strategies are more challenging than ever to pull off but that leaves us in a pretty tough position How do we reconcile the strategic imperative of winning elections? With the moral imperative of fighting for an equal world or whatever your personal pet issue might be well luckily elections aren't the only battlefield in politics. The United States of America isn't a sit down and shut up, you lost kind of democracy We are in this 24/7 even outside the election cycle a civil rights activist can always push whoever is in office to take action Exactly how to go about this will probably require a few more episodes to cover. I hope that you've enjoyed this Look at American politics through the lens of game design and I hope that you will join us for the rest of this little series Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time ♪ "Article 11" by Sean and Dean Kine ♪

Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 311,478

Rating: 4.8337722 out of 5

Keywords: extra politics, james portnow, daniel floyd, gamification of politics, elections 101, marginal votes, gimme votes, games in politics, political games, election games, extra credits, game design and politics, action points, why are elections important in a democracy, us elections, how do elections work

Id: Xm-L9cIRdmY

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ComedianTF2]

Love this episode, what a great analogy to games it is, would love to hear how this differs in other countries without first past the post, so in multi party systems

[u/bontrose]

9:22-9:25 liberal candidate has two ties

[u/[deleted]]

This really disappointed me that the last thing Dan did is something preachy I have no interest in watching more of.