1. When I was a kid my Dad was into horse-racing. (This is an election thread - really). He taught me how to read the racing form. Because I had a newspaper route, I could afford to make small (two dollar) bets, which he would place for me.
2. For a while I lost every time we went. Then I came to understand the betting system. Race tracks use something called parimutuel betting. The odds (and therefore the payoff) aren't set in advance. Instead the pool of all money bet is shared out to all winning bettors.
3. In other words the more people who bet on the winner, the smaller the payoff for each bettor. Further, in the lead up to the race the current payout calculations are shown on a big board called a tote board.
4. I realized I wasn't betting on horses, but betting against all the other bettors. I started to work out what were reasonable odds for each horse then watch the tote board and bet the horses who were getting bigger payouts than they "deserved". I started making money
5. Something like this is happening in elections. We are inculcated with daily tracking polls, aggregators, seat projections, and regional vote efficiencies. More and more election coverage is about the"horse-race". Think of all this as the tote board.
6. Add "strategic voting" to this and we get a toxic mix. I canvass a fair bit during elections. Over the years the conversations have changed. Nowadays more people ask about polls, or who is ahead locally, than ask about policy. This is especially true in the final week.
7. I believe we are being conditioned to think of elections as something we are supposed to game. We are told over and over that we should all be trying to outsmart the rest of the electorate.
8. It feels to me that this just leads to us outsmarting ourselves. Instead of getting governments who deliver the things we want we are increasingly thinking of "winning" as getting the "spread" right when we vote strategically.
9. This more than anything else makes us cynical about government, makes us feel hopeless about our future, makes us feel alienated from public policy, makes us feel powerless about the big challenges we face, and, makes us feel everyone else is our political enemy.
10. We are all terrified that someone might hack our election. In fact, we are willingly and knowingly hacking it ourselves.
11. Vote your values.
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