Elections in various countries

[mèþru]

I guess I'm switching back to Meretz
If Gantz gives me a reason post-elections to trust him more, than I'll check his positions and might support him. Right now, I don't want to support someone who was involved with Russian hacking into the US 2016 elecions or extended his house into public property (he can't claim the property was taken by the government from his family as many Arabs do, which is pretty much the only reason I'd accept for that crime). And I don't want to vote for a list that includes Moshe Ya'alon, as I think he's not that much better than Netanyahu when it comes to race baiting.

For now though, I want to know what are the stances of Gantz, the official stance of the party and the stances of list members on African immigration. I switched from Kulanu to Meretz because of African immigration and a lack of resistance to Bibi's policies on settlement expansion (I am not for abandoning them like Meretz is, but I don't believe that Meretz can actually make that big a shift).

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[mèþru]

I'm pretty sure Havoda and Meretz will give Gantz mandates. There will also be negotiations with Kulanu, Gesher, Yisrael Beitenu, UTJ, Shas and possibly even the New Right and the Arab parties; obviously they can't get all of them but the mandate process will be competitive.

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[mèþru]

The polling I've checked shows Meretz at about 4-7, Havodah at 5-11. A large faction if not a supermajority of Meretz voters are people who are too peacenik to vote for Havodah, much less for Blue & White. There's a greater chance of Meretz not joining a Blue & White coalition than it not getting seats.

There's no way any party is getting as much as 40 seats. No party is that popular. That Likud managed to consolidate more than 27 seats in 2015 was a huge upset.

I wouldn't be too sure about Shas and UTJ refusing. It all comes down to who can make the best offer. If Lapid were in charge a coalition would be out of the question, but Gantz and Lapid gives more room. The religious parties have joined leftist coalitions in the past even after promising in elections to not do so; they after all ostensibly hate each other too but keep running together. Otzmah Yehudit and its partners won't be invited though.

About the Arab parties, you are most likely right about a coalition. Havodah, Meretz and Odeh had talks about an electoral alliance before the Joint List split, but Odeh said all the parties in the Joint List must agree. Only Hadash and Ra'am voted in favour, and the Joint List split the wrong way for an attempt to renew talks. That said, it wouldn't be hard to see the parties giving mandates to Gantz without joining a Gantz-led government.

[mèþru]

I'm particularly interested in one demographic that probably won't have their own statistics for the election: LGBT
Likud has a large LGBT support base, but it has repeatedly pissed off the whole of the LGBT community throughout the current Knesset. Are LGBT Likud voters going to switch to Blue & White?

[Travis B.]

The question I have is why on Earth would LGBT people support Likud? That is like if LGBT people here in the US supported the Republicans.

[mèþru]

Likud is a secular party that has never taken an official position against LGBT rights. LGBT issues in Israel for most of its history was a secular vs religious thing rather than a left-right issue. That said, some individual MKs of Likud are staunch homophobes.

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[mèþru]

Meretz is much stronger than the US Greens. If Labour kept last election's list, I think Meretz could have overshadowed them.

[Linguoboy]

That was one of the weirdest ballots I've ever seen in a Chicago election: only four offices to vote for and one of them didn't matter. (There are still three names on the ballot but two of them have been disqualified.) On the other hand, the list of candidates for each office was long: five for alderman (i.e. local representative to the city council) and more than a dozen candidates for mayor. More interestingly--for the first time I can remember--both races are fairly wide open. Almost any of the aldermannic candidates and almost have the mayoral could make it to the second round. It's almost a certainty that, come tomorrow, we won't know who'll be occupying either office.

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[Salmoneus]

Open fields can actually depress turnout.

If there are two candidates, Your Guy and Their Guy, you may want to vote to support Your Guy and obstruct Their Guy.

If there are 20 viable candidates, you probably don't know much about any of them, none of them are really Your Guy, none of them are really Their Guy, you don't really care who wins and you just assume other people will sort it all out.

To put it another way, turnout comes from fervour, and fervour comes from partisanship, and partisanship comes from being sorted into groups that align with the options available, so that there is little overlap between group memberships. If there are too many viable candidates, supporters of the candidates are not fully sorted - there's usually a couple of other candidates you're OK with rather than just one - so partisanship is weak, so fervour is low, so turnout is low.

[Linguoboy]

To put it another way, turnout comes from fervour, and fervour comes from partisanship, and partisanship comes from being sorted into groups that align with the options available, so that there is little overlap between group memberships. If there are too many viable candidates, supporters of the candidates are not fully sorted - there's usually a couple of other candidates you're OK with rather than just one - so partisanship is weak, so fervour is low, so turnout is low.

If that's true, we may be in for low turnout in the second round as well. In a stunning turn of events, both mayoral candidates will be Black women with some establishment ties who are positioning themselves as reformers. One, Preckwinkle (my alderman for years when I lived on the South Side and current County Board President), is slightly more establishment, but I'm not sure how much enthusiasm the white guys who wanted to see another Daley or policemen's favourite Jerry Joyce elected will be able to scrape up for her.

White guy incumbents didn't do well in general. In the ward just east of mine (where everyone seems to think I live but don't because gerrymandering), seven-termer Joe Moore was swept from office in the first round by Maria Hadden, a Black lesbian, by a nearly 2-1 margin. In my ward, O'Connor has reigned for 36 years but barely managed to secure a third of the vote against a field of four challengers. Unless some unforeseen past scandal emerges to haunt Andre Vasquez, who took second place with 20%, he's toast in the next round.

It is genuinely the most exciting time in Chicago politics since the time of Harold Washington.

[alynnidalar]

This is completely beside the point, but I am delighted by the names of the two final candidates. Preckwinkle is marvelous on its own merits, and Lori Lightfoot sounds like a combination of a hobbit and one of Superman's exes. They're both great names.

[Linguoboy]

This is completely beside the point, but I am delighted by the names of the two final candidates. Preckwinkle is marvelous on its own merits, and Lori Lightfoot sounds like a combination of a hobbit and one of Superman's exes. They're both great names.

Honestly, they sound like they could both be hobbits.

My pick for local alderman was Ugo Ukere. The runoff in Pilsen, on the South Side, is between Sigcho-Lopez and Acevedo. The second-round matchup for Treasurer will be Pawar vs Conyears-Ervin with Gariepy eliminated from the running. We've come a long way from the days when white voters could just pick the most Irish-sounding name on the ballot.

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[Raphael]

This is completely beside the point, but I am delighted by the names of the two final candidates. Preckwinkle is marvelous on its own merits, and Lori Lightfoot sounds like a combination of a hobbit and one of Superman's exes. They're both great names.

Honestly, they sound like they could both be hobbits.

My pick for local alderman was Ugo Ukere. The runoff in Pilsen, on the South Side, is between Sigcho-Lopez and Acevedo. The second-round matchup for Treasurer will be Pawar vs Conyears-Ervin with Gariepy eliminated from the running. We've come a long way from the days when white voters could just pick the most Irish-sounding name on the ballot.

When it comes to interesting names in US elections, I'm not sure you can beat the 2018 Nevada Gubernatorial election, which was between Adam Laxalt and Steve Sisolak. When I heard that, I couldn't help thinking, "Which one of these should I take when I have an upset stomach?"