The tit-for-tat election

Tomorrow we vote (well, those of us in the USA).  I said recently that the polls are no helpful this election.  Everyone uses models to predict the outcome, but who has a model that knows what's happening when early voting is running twice the rate it was in 2014?  So we'll have to wait until tomorrow evening to find out what happened.

I find it really interesting that pollsters have backed WAY off their earlier "Blue Wave" predictions - even Nate Silver even admits that he just doesn't know what's going on.  And like I said in my post last week, the interesting races are in the House, and as Tip O'Neill said all politics is local.  My sense is general, not specific, and national not local.  But I think that the Democrats are going to be majorly disappointed.  The reason is that I think that the decades of Progressive pushing against the middle class - and the increasingly unhinged behavior of Progressives doing it - have led to a tit-for-tat response.

While this is a common term, there's a specific meaning that actually gives me hope for the Republic. I covered what the specifics mean almost 3 years ago in a post Game Theory and the rise of Donald Trump:

Game Theory is a field of mathematics originally developed to try to mathematically derive optimum solutions for card games in the 18th century.  It has developed into a major field of analysis used in computer science and even the design of crypto systems.  Any of you who saw the film "A Beautiful Mind" have at least a passing familiarity with the subject.

You probably even know the most famous example of Game Theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma.  Two prisoners are (separately) offered a deal - rat out the other guy or keep silent.  If they rat and the other guy doesn't, they go free and he gets a long sentence.  If neither of them rat, they both get short sentences.  If they both rat, they both get long sentences.  And most importantly to the prisoner, if he doesn't rat but the other guy does, he gets a long sentence while the other guy walks.

It's a one-time deal, which makes the math simpler.  Real world situations are not so simple, and a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma has incorporated this.  Tit For Tat is a sequential set of prisoner's dilemma events where the strategy is to play what your opponent played in the previous round.  If your opponent was cooperative, you will be cooperative; if he screwed you, you will screw him back.

What's interesting about Tit For Tat is that mathematical proofs have shown that it leads to the outcome with maximum combined utility.  If your opponent always screws you, you're no worse off playing Tit For Tat, but if your opponent is always cooperative or also plays Tit For Tat then both of you derive the maximum benefit.

The Middle Class has been playing cooperatively for decades, as the Progressives have been pushing and taking advantage of that cooperation.  It's worked very well for Progressives, and very badly for the Middle Class.  As I said in that post (almost a year before the 2016 election) it led to the rise of Donald Trump.

The last two years has been a series of Trump victories where he has shown the Middle Class that you can push back against the Progressives and win.  I believe that this is a fundamental shift in American politics, as the "deplorables" have not only had enough, but have seen that they can win.

Sure, the hard core Democrats hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns and will turn out heavily to vote against Republicans.  But the rest of their party doesn't seem to feel that way: Blue Collar/Union Democrats are making more money now, Blacks and Hispanics are making more money now, everyone has better employment prospects, Trump's favorability numbers are up.

There's a split between the core of the party and the rest of the party.

At the same time the Republican base has been energized and united - the Kavanaugh hearings in particular seem to have been a huge blunder for the Democrats.  Sure, it energized the Democratic base, but it seems to have united the GOP base against them.

And so we're seeing big turnouts in early voting, and Republicans out voting Democrats pretty much everywhere.  I don't think that any of the election models predicted or planned for this, and so none of the polls or predictions carry any weight.  Like I said, we'll see tomorrow but I think it will be a glum evening for the Democrats.

But I said earlier that this gives me hope for the Republic.  The reason is that tit-for-tat results in a game theory stable outcome.  If Republicans stick to push back, but also keep the Middle Class "we're all  in this together" spirit from the last few decades, game theory suggests that the Democrats may have to adjust to a less confrontational style of politics (if for nothing other than preventing the evaporation of the non-rabid part of their party).  We'll have to see how that plays out.  As I said in my post 3 years ago:

Tit For Tat is essentially a reputational game - get a bad reputation by screwing your opponent and you pay the price.  The mathematics is unmistakeable on that.

The Middle Class finally has an option to play against their opponent.  An opponent who has a deservedly poor reputation.

No wonder Trump's support seems rock solid.  The mathematics is unshakeable.

If the Blue Wave disappears in the face of an enraged GOP base, then the Democrats will have to change their tactics - or keep losing elections.