If you’ve never seen the Oscar-winning 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind about the real life mathematician John Nash, I encourage you to. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 and his Nash Equilibrium has had a major impact on how solutions are determined for everything from labor disputes and traffic flows to analyzing hostile situations like wars and arms races.
I do not pretend to be an expert on the topic, but I understand it enough to see that if it were applied to our political situation in America that our democracy would be far better off.
To sum up how I believe it should be applied to politics, instead of every voter thinking purely about what they want, and every politician thinking solely about what they want, if both voters and candidates also thought about what all the other voters want and about what all the other candidates want, and really took time to view the overall forest, we would all get better outcomes in terms of the quality of our candidates, and the quality of our elected leaders.
Here is a video clip from the movie explaining it.
Now, that’s all great, but how do we implement it? We, you and I, need to keep educating and informing our fellow citizens about the nonpartisan voters first movement and all of the many good nonpartisan election reforms that will change the incentive structure for candidates and parties so that they have more interest in working together in good faith and trying to solve problems once and for all.
Until that happens, and until those kinds of reforms are in place, like ranked choice voting, open primaries, final five voting, campaign finance reform, ending gerrymandering, etc, as much as I and many others would love to see third parties and independents run and win elections, they have to be VERY careful and pick their spots where they run, otherwise they will do more harm than good to the cause of creating real competition for the duopoly.
While in principle I do not believe you can spoil a rotten system, in reality every time an independent or third party candidate runs for office, especially for President, the perception is that they are spoilers who take votes away from one of the two parties. And politics perceived is politics achieved.
The best path forward for independents and third party candidates for the time being is to only run in races that are two way races. Are you listening Joe Manchin and No Labels?
Perry Waag 