Monday, February 1, 2016

3-Way Races

A statistical study at one point determined that the most likely outcome of a 3-way electoral race was a victory by the least popular candidate. This happens when the 2 most popular candidates split their party majority into pieces individually smaller that the least popular candidate. This applies to larger races as well.

So here we go again, only this time in the primaries in Iowa with Cruz and Rubio splitting their 38% of the vote against Trumps 28% and giving the win to Trump. One more chapter in the ongoing policy of the Republicans letting the New York Times select their candidates.

A republican party ruthlessly intent on occupying the White House would be leaning on the remaining dwarfs to drop out and throw their support to either Rubio or Cruz in an effort to get an electable candidate to lead the party but internal politics intervenes and none of the wannabes is willing to admit that he or she really has no chance at this point.

There was a song on the Simpsons once:

Most people won't never shoot off their toes
but then again some folks'll
Meet the man with just 3 toes
It's Cletus the slack-jawed yokel.

Cletus is a close adviser to Reince Priebus.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"A statistical study at one point determined that the most likely outcome of a 3-way electoral race was a victory by the least popular candidate."

So you're saying that

(1) too many choices are bad, and

(2) an optimal outcome is not achieved if everybody behaves in a purely selfish manner.

Billll said...

Not that many choices are bad, but there needs to be a secondary filtering mechanism to bolster the more popular candidates. Louisiana has such a mechanism in which a candidate wins a multi choice race if he pulls 51% of the vote on the first go around, otherwise the two top vote getters are entered into a run-off. Thus something like an optimal outcome is eventually achieved. This can result in two candidates from the same party running against each other in the runoff.