The 2016 American presidential election will boil down to one simple question:
Who do we want to be as Americans?
The language used by the leading presidential candidates reveals that both candidates want to appeal to what it means to be American – though this may mean different things for each of them.
On Tuesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said:
Making Donald Trump our president would undo much of the progress we’ve made and put our economy at risk and beyond that, this election will say something about who we are as a people.
What often distinguishes their rhetoric is that Trump talks more about non-American groups and “who they are,” which has the potential to create sharp divides and even animosity between “us” and “them.”
For example, Trump said in a speech attacking Hillary:
Under her plan, we would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from the most dangerous countries on Earth – with no way to screen who they are or what they believe.
As a social psychologist, I study how leaders communicate about identity. My colleague, Michelle Bligh, and I analyzed the rhetoric of 20th-century American presidents and found that charismatic presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan followed a clear and compelling pattern of communication that distinguished them from less charismatic presidents. Charismatic presidents painted a vivid picture of American identity in their speeches.
The power of identity
Why is talking about American identity so powerful?
Group memberships, like being American, tap into our basic human need to feel like we belong. Groups can reduce our uncertainties about ourselves, and provide us with identity or a script of “who I am.” Group identity can have a profound influence on how we think, feel and act, and we are susceptible to influence from other fellow group members.
We take cues about what being American entails from our leaders. That means that if a leader is able to redefine what it means to be American, he or she is able to influence how you think, feel and act.
For example, in a speech earlier this month, Hillary Clinton said:
And I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country … We are not a country that cowers behind walls. We lead with purpose, and we prevail.
Politicians adjust their language to send a message about “who we are” as a group and “what it means” to be a group member. In many cases, they articulate an appealing vision of the future and try to align “who we are” with their vision.
This technique is called “social identity framing.” When done right, it can profoundly influence people and help leaders gain support for their visions.
Using ‘we’ language
A key marker of using identity to captivate an audience is the use of “we” language. This language includes words like “we,“ “us” and “our.” It also references the group (“American”), the people in the group (“Democrats” “Republicans”) and a general emphasis on the collective (“nation”) in communication.
One of the best examples of “we” language is in President Obama’s remarks at the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches in 2015. President Obama’s speech helps clearly define how he sees “who we are” as Americans and “what it means” to be American.
My research shows that leaders who use high levels of “we” language are seen as more persuasive, effective, charismatic, representative of the group, likable and trustworthy than leaders who don’t. This language also provokes more positive emotions about the leader’s vision, and increases support for the vision and confidence that the group can make the vision into a reality.
Who will Americans be in 2016?
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump express “who we are” and “what we should stand for” and “where we are going” as Americans, while simultaneously projecting themselves as an embodiment of their own version of American identity.
Each candidate communicates a very different version of what it means to be American. People will likely vote for the candidate that most closely typifies the version of American identity that resonates with them.
The election will reflect who we believe we are as Americans. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
This requires projecting an American identity that is broad and inclusive enough to appeal to our diverse political and demographic population. This is not an easy task.
As we head to the polls in November, we are not just voting for a leader’s personal characteristics and qualifications. We are voting for a vision of what it means to be an American.
The election will determine who we are as Americans for years to come.
Having outlasted all his opponents, Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton is closing in on locking up the Democratic nomination.
Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last.
So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting.
This is a strong statement. But as mathematicians who have spent the last dozen years studying voting systems, we are going to show you why it’s justified and how this problem can be fixed.
The problem with majority voting
With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives and governors.
But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority.
In 2000, for example, George W. Bush was elected president because of Ralph Nader’s candidacy. In the contested state of Florida, Bush had 2,912,790 votes, Al Gore 2,912,253 (a mere 537 fewer) and Nader 97,488. There is little doubt that the large majority of those who voted for Nader, and so preferred him to the others, much preferred Gore to Bush. Had they been able to express this preference, Gore would have been elected with 291 Electoral College votes to Bush’s 246. Similar dysfunctions have also occurred in France.
Imagine how different the U.S. and the world might be today if Gore had won.
The 2016 primaries
A quick glance at the U.S. presidential primaries and caucuses held on or before March 1 shows that when Trump was the “winner,” he typically garnered some 40 percent of the votes. However, nothing in that result factors in the opinions of the 60 percent of voters who cast ballots for someone else.
Eight of the many GOP presidential contenders. Jim Young/Reuters
As Trump is a particularly divisive candidate, it is safe to suppose that most – or at least many – of them strongly opposed him. The media, however, focused on the person who got the largest number of votes – which means Trump. On the Democratic side of the ledger, the media similarly poured its attention on Hillary Clinton, ignoring Bernie Sanders until widespread enthusiastic support forced a change.
The source of the problem
An election is nothing but an invented device that measures the electorate’s support of the candidates, ranks them according to their support and declares the winner to be the first in the ranking.
The fact is that majority voting does this very badly.
With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running.
Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates.
The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.
MJ asks voters to express their opinions much more accurately than simply voting for one candidate. The ballot offers a spectrum of choices and charges voters with a solemn task:
To be the President of the United States of America, having taken into account all relevant considerations, I judge that this candidate as president would be a: Great President | Good President | Average President | Poor President | Terrible President
To see exactly how MJ ranks the candidates, let’s look at specific numbers.
We were lucky to find on the web that the above question was actually posed in a March Pew Research Center poll of 1,787 registered voters of all political stripes. (It should be noted that neither the respondents nor the pollsters were aware that the answers could be the basis for a method of election.) The Pew poll also included the option of answering “Never Heard Of” which here is interpreted as worse than “Terrible” since it amounts to the voter saying the candidate doesn’t exist.
As is clear in the table below, people’s opinions are much more detailed than can be expressed with majority voting. Note in particular the relatively high percentages of voters who believe Clinton and especially Trump would make terrible presidents (Pew reports that Trump’s “Terrible” score increased by 6 percent since January.)
Using majority judgment to calculate the ranked order of the candidates from these evaluations or grades is straightforward. Start from each end of the spectrum and add percentages until a majority of voters’ opinions are included.
Taking John Kasich as an example, 5 percent believe he is “Great,” 5+28=33 percent that he is “Good” or better, and 33+39=72 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or better. Looked at from the other end, 9 percent “Never Heard” of him, 9+7=16 percent believe he is “Terrible” or worse, 16+13=29 percent that he is “Poor” or worse, and 29+39= 68 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or worse.
Both calculations end on majorities for “Average,” so Kasich’s majority-grade is “Average President.” (Mathematically, the calculations from both directions for a given candidate will always reach majorities at the same grade.)
Similarly calculated, Sanders, Clinton and Cruz all have the same majority-grade, “Average President.” Trump’s is “Poor President,” ranking him last.
To determine the MJ ranking among the four who all are rated “Average,” two more calculations are necessary.
The first looks at the percentage of voters who rate a candidate more highly than his or her majority-grade, the second at the percentage who rate the candidate lower than his or her majority-grade. This delivers a number called the “gauge.” Think of it as a scale where in some cases the majority grade leans more heavily toward a higher ranking and in others more heavily toward a lower ranking.
In Kasich’s case, 5+28=33 percent evaluated him higher than “Average,” and 13+7+9=29 percent rated him below “Average.” Because the larger share is on the positive side, his gauge is +33 percent. For Sanders, 36 percent evaluated him above and 39 percent below his majority-grade. With the larger share on the negative side, his gauge is -39 percent.
A candidate is ranked above another when his or her majority-grade is better or, if both have the same majority-grade, according to their gauges (see below). This rule is the logical result of majorities deciding on candidates’ grades instead of the usual rule that ranks candidates by the numbers of votes they get.
When voters are able to express their evaluations of every candidate – the good and the bad – the results are turned upside-down from those with majority voting.
According to majority judgment, the front-runners in the collective opinion are actually Kasich and Sanders. Clinton and Trump are the trailers. From this perspective the dominant media gave far too much attention to the true trailers and far too little to the true leaders.
Tellingly, MJ also shows society’s relatively low esteem for politicians. All five candidates are evaluated as “Average” presidents or worse, and none as “Good” presidents or better.
Majority voting’s failure with two candidates
But, you may object, how can majority voting on just two candidates go wrong? This seems to go against everything you learned since grade school where you raised your hand for or against a classroom choice.
The reason MV can go wrong even with only two candidates is because it does not obtain sufficient information about a voter’s intensity of support.
Take, as an example, the choice between Clinton and Trump, whose evaluations in the Pew poll are given in the first table above.
Lining up their grades from highest to lowest, every one of Clinton’s is either above or the same as Trump’s. Eleven percent, for example, believe Clinton would make a “Great” president to 10 percent for Trump. Trump’s percentages lead Clinton’s only for the Terrible’s and Never Heard Of’s. Given these opinions, in other words, it’s clear that any decent voting method must rank Clinton above Trump.
However, majority voting could fail to do so.
To see why, suppose the “ballots” of the Pew poll were in a pile. Each could be looked at separately. Some would rate Clinton “Average” and Trump “Poor,” some would rate her “Good” and him “Great,” others would assign them any of the 36 possible couples of grades. We can, therefore, find the percentage of occurrence of every couple of grades assigned to Trump and Clinton.
We do not have access to the Pew poll “ballots.” However, one could come up with many different scenarios where the individual ballot percentages are in exact agreement with the overall grades each received in the first table.
Among the various scenarios possible, we have chosen one that could, in theory, be the true one. Indeed, you can check for yourself that it does assign the candidates the grades each received: reading from left to right, Clinton, for example, had 10+12=22 percent “Good,” 16+4=20 percent “Average,” and so on; and the same holds for Trump.
So what does this hypothetical distribution of the ballots concerning the two tell us?
The first column on the left says 10 percent of the voters rated Clinton “Good” and Trump “Great.” In a majority vote they would go for Trump. And moving to the tenth column, 4 percent rated Clinton “Poor” and Trump “Terrible.” In a majority vote this group would opt for Clinton. And so on.
If you add up the votes in each of these 11 columns, Trump receives the votes of the people whose opinions are reflected in four columns: 10+16+12+15=53 percent; Clinton is backed by the voters with the opinions of columns with 33 percent support; and 14 percent are undecided. Even if the undecided all voted for Clinton, Trump would carry the day.
This shows that majority voting can give a very wrong result: a triumphant victory for Trump when Clinton’s grades are consistently above his!
A bird’s-eye view
Voting has been the subject of intense mathematical research since 1950, when the economist Kenneth Arrow published his famous “impossibility theorem,” one of the two major contributions for which he was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize.
Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a French philosopher and mathematician.
This theorem showed that if voters have to rank candidates – to say, in other words, who comes first, second and so forth – there will inevitably be one of two major potential failures. Either there may be no clear winner at all, the so-called “Condorcet paradox” occurs, or what has come to be called the “Arrow paradox” may occur.
The Arrow paradox is familiar to Americans because of what happened in the 2000 election. Bush beat Gore because Nader was in the running. Had Nader not run, Gore would have won. Surely, it is absurd for the choice between two candidates to depend on whether or not some minor candidate is on the ballot!
Majority judgment resolves the conundrum of Arrow’s theorem: neither the Condorcet nor the Arrow paradox can occur. It does so because voters are asked for more accurate information, to evaluate candidates rather than to rank them.
MJ’s rules, based on the majority principle, meet the basic democratic goals of voting systems. With it:
Voters are able to express themselves more fully, so the results depend on much more information than a single vote.
The process of voting has proven to be natural, easy and quick: we all know about grading from school (as the Pew poll implicitly realized).
Candidates with similar political profiles can run without impinging on each other’s chances: a voter can give high (or low) evaluations to all.
The candidate who is evaluated best by the majority wins.
MJ is the most difficult system to manipulate: blocs of voters who exaggerate the grades they give beyond their true opinions can only have a limited influence on the results.
By asking more of voters, by showing more respect for their opinions, participation is encouraged. Even a voter who evaluates all candidates identically (e.g., all are “Terrible”) has an effect on the outcome.
Final grades – majority-grades – enable candidates and the public to understand where each stands in the eyes of the electorate.
If the majority decides that no candidate is judged an “Average President” or better, the results of the election may be rescinded, and a new slate of candidates demanded.
It should come as no surprise that in answer to a recent Pew poll’s question “Do you think the primaries have been a good way of determining who the best qualified nominees are or not?” only 35 percent of respondents said yes.
Democracies everywhere are suffering. Voters protest. Citizens don’t vote. Support for the political extremes are increasing. One of the underlying causes, we argue, is majority voting as it is now practiced, and its influence on the media.
Misled by the results of primaries and polls, the media concentrates its attention on candidates who seem to be the leaders, but who are often far from being deemed acceptable by a majority of the electorate. Majority judgment would correct these failings.
Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 shared another generous excerpt from their treasure trove of stolen government server documents on Thursday.
Last week, a free and anonymous WordPress blog set up by someone calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 was widely shared on social media purporting to contain documents the hacker stole from the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton. While that blog post only contained a little less than 10 documents, today the hacker shared yet another much larger load of documents, including some regarding The Clinton Foundation, and gave an interview to VICE magazine’s technology division Motherboard.
This release, Guccifer 2.0 says, is making good on his promise from a week ago, but it is still unclear as to whether it proves any criminal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or the DNC. However, it does show some major donors (presumably Super PAC donors) including Steven Spielberg, Bill Maher, Chelsea Handler and others, along with a list of Hillary’s speeches (no transcripts, unfortunately).
Despite the hacker claiming to be Romanian and hating “being attributed to Russia,” an official from the DNC, Motherboard reports, said in an emailed statement,
“our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that the subsequent release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians.”
All of the files contained in the zip file, now being widely spread online, are dated in April of 2016, so it does correlate at least to the time frame of the suspected hack of the DNC earlier this year.
Bill Maher proved he pretended to be a Bernie Sanders supporter for the past few months when he called Bernie’s brand of socialism ‘Santaism’, saying Hillary won “fair and square”
I don’t watch Bill Maher all that often, mostly because he’s an all out dickhead and that’s funny sometimes but other times he just makes me angry because he’s wrong but smugly acts like he’s right. This was one of those times.
After saying Hillary Clinton won the candidacy “fair and square”, Maher started the last portion of his ‘New Rules’ segment by stating “Even though Bernie didn’t win the nomination, he’s already won the future.” Yet, he went on to say that Bernie Sander’s plan was not socialism but “Santaism”, saying millennials have “gotten a little too used to getting shit for free.”
The problem with all of this, of course, is that Hillary did not officially win the nomination, yet, for starters. But more importantly, it’s not Bernie’s followers that want things for free, it’s Bernie’s plan itself that taxes the wealthy heavily in order to help the poor. It’s not “Santaism”, it’s more like “Robin-Hoodism”, and it actually makes sense, considering most of the developed world is already doing it.
We all know why Maher thinks this: because he’s a multi-millionaire that doesn’t want to share his money.
Watch the segment below:
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, often blamed for ignoring Democrats in historically Republican leaning states and leaving the Democratic Party virtually bankrupt going into the 2016 election cycle, is set to leave her post as head of the DNC.
Her replacement, Brandon Davis, is a union leader for the Service Employees International Union, reports multiple news outlets, including CNN, despite no official announcement being made. Schultz will still be the chairwoman, but Davis will be the official General Election Chief of Staff, which makes him the official leader of the Democratic Party throughout the general election.
After a meeting between presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, the Clinton campaign has made it clear they are listening to the voices of the Sanders campaign who are outraged by Schultz’s actions throughout the 2015-2016 presidential race, and the DNC in general.
Sanders, who spoke through a live televised speech through the medium of The Young Turks on Thursday, explained that he was not conceding and was continuing the fight to change the Democratic party through to the convention on July 25th and beyond. He did not explain whether he would endorse Clinton, despite the change in leadership in the party.
Bernie Sanders apparently does not agree with most of his hardcore supporters who feel the Democratic Primary has been rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor.
Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited his home town of Burlington, VT to discuss the state of the campaign with his top advisers today, concluding with an appearance to give a statement to the media regarding his plans and briefly send his condolences to the families of those who perished in the Orlando mass shooting last night.
While Sanders reiterated his plan to carry the campaign through to the bitter end at the Democratic National Convention on July 25th, he emphasized an important tenet of his platform: this is a “political revolution” that “does not stop on election day.”
This point was further supported with his call to young Americans to get involved in politics on the local level by showing up to meetings, campaigning for political positions, and continuing to vote after November.
One major aspect of Sanders’ campaign that marks the stark contrast between him and the two presidential front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is his continued emphasis on young people becoming more politically aware and sticking to their convictions until they see the change they are looking for.
A couple weeks ago, Sanders told CBS news that he didn’t feel the election was rigged against him, but that the entire process was very “dumb” and has a lot of problems, especially the issue of superdelegates:
“I wouldn’t use the word rigged, because we knew what the words were – but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York state, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton’s campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast. That’s not rigged. I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.”
Many of his supporters feel that this is either wrong or basically the same thing as being “rigged”. Those who feel he is wrong to say this are most likely some who experienced one of the many effects of voter suppression, such as voter registrations being purged from databases, party affiliations being mysteriously switched and the obvious discrepancy between exit polls and vote tallies. California, especially, seemed to carry some of the strangest problems, such as how certain voters needed to know a password to get a ballot and a massive difference in the number of registered voters vs. the number of votes tallied.
Those who feel the system is set up against them are pretty much in agreement with Bernie and have vowed to continue the struggle, as he suggests, and carry the revolution beyond the convention in July.
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
An official lawsuit that is being filed against the DNC regarding the discrepancy with exit polls versus electronic voting machine tallies has now morphed into including the cancellation of exit polls for California and New Jersey shortly before the primaries were held last Tuesday.
If you haven’t already noticed, there has been quite the outrage from the Bernie Sanders campaign and supporters regarding voter disenfranchisement and election fraud. For instance, California is in the midst of its own debacle over why so many voters had their party affiliation switched or were removed from registration altogether.
On RT America’s Redacted Tonight, featuring comedian and social commentator Lee Camp, author and professor of political science Bob Fitrakis and lawyer Cliff Arnebeck from the Institute for american democracy and election integrity were featured in a video showing Arnebeck’s assertion that they have enough evidence that Hillary Clinton benefited from election fraud that they will be filing an official lawsuit against her campaign for election fraud and racketeering.
Cliff Arnebeck is the chair of the Legal Affairs Committee of Common Cause Ohio and a national co-chair and attorney for the Alliance of Democracy, which gives him a bit more push than just your random Bernie Sanders activist from the millennial generation.
Watch the video below for Lee Camp’s take on how voters can take action against voter fraud this year:
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest had a slip of the tongue yesterday at a press conference when he referred to the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email probe as a “criminal investigation”.
This gaffe, which directly conflicts with the Hillary campaign’s insistence that this investigation is administrative and not criminal, is likely to be met with criticism as mainstream media’s bias towards the former Secretary of State is extremely high lately.
If you can remember back a year ago, the Hillary camp even pressured the New York Times to retract a statement referring to the investigation as “criminal”, a move that has haunted her ever since. The question remains what Hillary’s campaign, along with her supporters, are going to say when they see video evidence that the White House views the investigation as criminal, which means, at the very least, that a *possible* criminal is running for president, though most of her opponents would not use that terminology.
Watch the video below:
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
Bernie or Bust vow-takers may not be so happy to learn today that Bernie Sanders plans on working together with Hillary Clinton to “beat Donald Trump and create a government that works for the people, not just the 1%”.
This announcement comes after Sanders met with President Barack Obama to discuss the state of affairs surrounding the hot-headed campaigns of both Sanders and Clinton over the course of the Democratic Primary.
Sanders says he plans to meet with Clinton next Tuesday, June 14th.
Watch the video from ABC news below:
Bernie Sanders says he looks forward to meeting with Clinton to see how they can work together to defeat Trump. https://t.co/CHPiJ1RB1S
Multiple news outlets reported that two anonymous advisers to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said she is planning an announcement very soon regarding an endorsement of presidential candidate and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
While the advisers’ claim comes under the condition of anonymity, it’s not clear if this is really what Warren plans as she has said that she struggles with the idea of being Clinton’s Vice President, despite calls from other Democrats like Harry Reid et al to accept the position if and when it was offered to her. Her position in the Senate, after all, is very important to balancing out against the Republican majority in Congress.
Over the weekend, Warren tweeted that Trump needs to “get ready” for the Democratic party because, “we’re coming.” Her support for the party, however, has been criticized by Bernie Sanders followers as not being loyal to the populace. Many members of Bernie Sanders groups on social media have expressed disappointment and, in some cases, outright disgust that she hasn’t endorsed him.
No news yet on when the supposed announcement from Warren will take place.
