Mondale
Article
Mondale is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 08, 2022 and October 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Vice President Mondale seriously considers resigning”; “Even as recently as 1984, Reagan beat Mondale 59-41”. It most often appears alongside LBJ, Nixon, Reagan.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 08, 2022
- Last seen: October 23, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- LBJ (2 shared issues)
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- Nixon (2 shared issues)
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- Reagan (2 shared issues)
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- 1968 convention (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 Democratic (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 Democratic primary (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 primary (1 shared issues)
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- 1979 oil crisis (1 shared issues)
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- 1980 (1 shared issues)
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- Air Force One (1 shared issues)
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- Al Gore (1 shared issues)
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- American embassy (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
If the cure for stagflation isn’t readily apparent, neither is the cure for a nationwide spiritual crisis. To find it, Carter does one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard of a president doing: he invites a mishmash of politicians, intellectuals, and religious leaders to a two-week summit at Camp David where they can tell him what’s wrong with the country and, by extension, what’s wrong with him. For day after day, from 9am to as late as 1am the next morning, Carter sits taking notes on a yellow legal pad while this group critiques him, often in strikingly personal terms. It’s an exercise in self-flagellation reminiscent of cult indoctrination rituals and Maoist self-criticism, and one it’s impossible to imagine any other president voluntarily taking on. The whole scene is so wacky that Vice President Mondale seriously considers resigning.
In 1964, LBJ beat Goldwater 61-39. In 1972, Nixon beat McGovern 61-37. Even as recently as 1984, Reagan beat Mondale 59-41. But we already know that partisanship was weaker in those days. The Median Voter Theorem only works if you can reduce everything to a single straight line. If voters don’t care about the right-left spectrum, they might judge based on criteria like “Reagan is more charismatic”, and then if everyone agrees that he’s charismatic you can get 59-41 or 90-10 or whatever numbers you want. In the old days, partisanship was too weak for the Median Voter Theorem to hold. Now it’s strong enough to matter, but there’s enough primary effect and “collusion” that parties don’t race towards the center, instead only trying to maintain equal distance from the center. But we may still find this surprising. The parties - especially the Republican Party - don’t feel like masterminds executing a complicated dance where they determine the exact amount of extremism the voters can tolerate. And what about non-partisan factors? Do they figure in? If some people dislike Trump because he committed 10,000 felonies and an attempted coup, do the Democrats enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further left? If Biden is demented, do the Republicans enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further right? If so, how come when Biden was replaced with the less-demented Kamala and the Democrats’ betting odds went way up, Trump didn’t change any of his positions AFAICT? The stats show that the past few elections, adjusted for electoral vote advantage, have all been around 49-51. But it doesn’t seem like the parties are working as hard as they would have to be to do it on purpose. Is it just a coincidence? Is there some deeper thermostat independent of the platforms and candidates of the moment? I’m not sure. But I do think we can say with confidence that the reason elections are almost never 80-20 or 99-1 is something like Median Voter Theorem. III. Okay, so the parties have to be in the middle. But which part of the parties? In the middle of what? Do parties target the median popular voter, or the median electoral voter? It must be the latter. We saw above that elections get closer, rather than further, from 50-50 after you adjust for the GOP electoral advantage. Also, this is obviously what you would do if you were at all sensible. You even see evidence of parties doing this; for example, lots of people talk about how the “tipping point state” for this election is Pennsylvania, so both candidates are investing lots of resources there. That’s classic Median Voter Theorem! Here’s a harder question. If you want to control the Presidency, you should target the median electoral voter. If you want to control the House of Representatives, then to a first approximation you should target the median popular voter, since House Districts mostly reflect population. If you want to control the Senate, you should target a different median voter entirely, since the Senate gives small states even more of an advantage than the Electoral College does. Parties want to control all three of these things, so who should they target? Ideally, Presidential candidates would target the median Presidential voter, Senate candidates the median Senate voter, etc. But it may not be this easy. Voters may work off a gestalt impression of where “the party” stands. In theory, the Republican candidate for Governor in California could appeal to the median Californian; in practice, Republicans almost never win in California because Californians hate the national Republican Party. So parties may have to target one of these goals to the exclusion of the others. There’s rarely a united House/Senate platform (Gingrich’s Contract With America possibly excepted). So probably both parties target the Presidency. If we assume small states tend conservative, then the median House voter should be further left, and the median Senate voter further right, than the median Presidential voter. If parties have to run a unified platform, and they optimize this platform to win the Presidency, we should expect to see Democrats win the House and Republicans win the Senate more often than chance. Is this right? Add on the two recent Congresses not shown, and since the Clinton era, Democrats have controlled 4/13 Houses and 6/13 Senates, the opposite of my prediction. I think there’s not enough data for this to mean anything, and continue to think there might be a slight inherent Median Voter Theorem fueled tendency for Democrats to win the House (possibly counterbalanced by other things like who has gerrymandered more successfully). IV. Suppose something happens to give one party an advantage. Maybe DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam all become states, giving the Democrats six extra guaranteed Senators and some extra electoral votes. Which of these do we expect: It’s very hard to have 54 Senate seats. Therefore, Democrats would control the Senate almost all the time, with a somewhat lesser but still probably decisive permanent Presidential advantage.