What units are used to measure "concern"?
Clique could probably be answered pretty well through analysis of her social graph, so there's an API call right there.
Then you'd just have to define the positions of the clique.
or with a series of API calls
I suspect you can actually find out quite a lot about politics with some calls to the American Petroleum Institute.
I assume coding camp must have been a great success. The whole "here's a long-standing problem that used to be solved by complex institutions since weakened but now we can fix it with a website" thing came in just fine.
I've become so convinced that the only solution to America's political problems is for many more people to become deeply engaged in institutional (mostly party) development and maintenance that I'm starting to feel terrible that I will never do any of those things.
The lady I'm seeing is closely involved in one of the local Democratic "clubs" (not the party per se I think, but closely linked) and it's making me want to get more involved in my local equivalents.
I've been thinking that the least I could do is to not mock those who do that kind of work, but I sort of doubt I'll manage that.
America's political problems is for many more people to become deeply engaged in institutional (mostly party) development and maintenance that I'm starting to feel terrible that I will never do any of those things.
God, there are so many things I'd rather become deeply engaged in, many of which are far more beneficial to the world than zero-sum political organizing.
11: my town Meeting members are like a club. you can vote for no more than 35 of them for 35 slots, and there's a slate of 35. I hear that they're all friends.
I would like to be more involved, but I have no idea where I could be most useful.
...many of which are far more beneficial to the world than zero-sum political organizing.
I'm probably not doing those either.
Minivet, "the lady I'm seeing" is a step up from a couple dates and good company. You can't just slip that by us all tactfully.
OK, I'm sort of bragging, but to be clear I'm not sure I've actually stepped up past good company yet.
There's probably an app that could tell you if you entered the right data.
8: I'm as fond of Asian & Pacific Islanders as the next fellow, heck, some of my best friends are API, but I think it is a misconception that they have some kind of special insight into US politics.
Heh,my dad is running for state Rep again. He's in a cherry red location and is a dem, so I don't expect that'll go any better than last rodeo.
one of the local Democratic "clubs"
I offered to help with shaving the guys with beards so they could caucus twice last week, but nobody called me back.
Maybe theirs beards liked them with facial hair.
I've always thought that any of these could be easily gamed to tell you to vote for whichever candidate the sites' makers favor.
Worried about first amendment rights? Cleary, Ted Cruz is the man for you. Do you have sincere concerns about the environment? So does Ted Cruz. Do you worry about the economic future of the nation? Damn, Ted Cruz is batting a thousand!
20:
I was listening to local NPR talk about local election choices a few weeks ago. Apparently it was one Republican running against an even more conservative Republican.
14
That sounds like a representative town meeting, which combines all the faults of an open town meeting and a city council.
My cousin is on an RTM. In the past she's been voted in and out of office depending on how the national Democrats did that year, although I think she somehow managed to hang on in 2014.
That's interesting! Is she in MA or somewhere else in New England? As far as I've ever experienced RTM's are non-partisan, as are local town elections for things like School Committee or Select Board (formerly known as "Board of Selectmen").
She's in CT. Her RTM seems pretty highly partisan, as her town has a rather vocal Tea Party contingent.
My uncle's girlfriend is a selectman in her NE college town. My sense of the politics is that it's basically old rich people who are all mobbed up with one another, versus the occasional hippie reformer who plugs away at trying to change things until they burn out and drop out of politics entirely or turn into the town crank.
I have two friends running for city commissioner plus two incumbents I know running who could make up the other two spots. Another friend is running for mayor, but he's so young I'm not sure he's a better idea than the current mayor, though he's related to people who've run the city for ages. I'm putting off a school board run but I think a friend in the neighborhood is going to run and I'll probably vote for him because he'll be okay though I would be better. I don't think I want to do more direct politics than school stuff. I had been planning to take a year off everything but am now tempted to run for school council at the school Mara and Nia will attend next year.
Peer pressure is how stuff like this starts.
And then next thing you know you're saying "wide stance" to a Hennepin County judge.
I can't he,p but read 13 in light of the myriad ways in which Republicans, who are doing more to advance global warming than any other force on earth, succeed because they actually focus on local elections.
For a good chunk of my childhood my father was involved in a lot of local Democratic Party stuff - county supervisors, etc., and I did a fair bit of door-to-door flyering and similar campaigning stuff with him, for various candidates. It always failed miserably, and I have no sense if something could have been done or if it was overdetermined by other trends. But the fact that it kept failing has definitely dampened what desire I have to get involved again (Also the fact that whatever my currently-local politics needs, "more Democrats" probably isn't it).
I basically agree with the OP and have had more or less the same thought. You read these stories that outline some political maneuvers that are clearly shadow plays, and you know damn well the reporters could tell you every bit of the real story. ISTM that that's a journalistic model that could catch on--essentially gossip, but about important stuff.
Thing is, when it comes to the Senate and Presidency, that sort of thing isn't that important, because there's enough attention and spotlight that voters who care can know what's going on, which toughly forces the pols to be responsive. But at more or less every level below that, absolute scum can persist indefinitely, because coverage is too shitty and only the obsessive can tease out who is and who isn't worthless. And it's at the lowest level where this sort of insider knowledge would be most useful, as there's basically zero public record, but if voters knew who was who, the worst of the worst would be cut down early*.
*I always note that Santorum lasted as long as he did by keeping a fairly low profile through his first term. His votes were certainly to the right of what the PA electorate wanted, but all the insane culture warrior stuff was on the DL. After his reelection he let his freak flag fly, and he got his ass kicked. But there's no question that when he ran for reelection and won, the average voter thought of him as a conservative but decent guy, and that was entirely a failing of the press.
What would the answers be for someone we should know pretty well, say, Barack Obama?
1. Chicago liberals, CIA, Harvard? Silicon Valley?
2. policing? Constitutional law?
3. This one's an easy "no".
4. This one's also an easy "no".
5. The Senate was, but did it hurt anything?
If the answers aren't all that enlightening, are the questions really as good as they sound?
I think it's least useful for president, as JRoth notes. But when I brought up the site linked in the OP, it listed three candidates for Cook County State's Attorney. This happens to be getting some press, because one of the candidates was part of the effort to bury the Laquan McDonald video. But in a typical election, what I want to know is, does this candidate belong to Rahm, or to Madigan, or is she some freelancer backed by some other constituency? That's just about all the information I need, plus some notice if she's a nut or a crook. I could read every word of their position papers and not find this out, but one sentence is all it would take.
Even for senator or congressman you could do a sentence or two and be very helpful. I don't have time at the moment to do some samples, but I'm sure other people can. Is this guy a tea partier, is he one of the evangelicals, one of the few real liberals, etc.
I'm going to try asking your questions on my local subreddit the next time I see somebody I want to know about.
I have no idea how to evaluate that site since it looks like everything I try to click on launches a form asking me for my zipcode. Fuck that, their funding should be pulled just for that. I'm 100% serious.
Anyway, there have been various attempts to make this kind of site but leaving aside questions of objectivity and so on, all of the ones I'm familiar with depended on low or unpaid labor - volunteers and interns - to gather a lot of their data. I don't know if any of them got much in the way of updates or traffic.
I don't think any of the ones from 2008* that I saw would have told you someone was in the back pocket of some other politician, but also, how would that help if you didn't know if you could trust the site's judgment? Maybe look the site up on a site for sites telling you if a site was in the back pocket of a politician or other site?
* I only remember the OpenCongress Wiki, which was basically dead in the water when it existed, and now OpenCongress itself has been shutdown.
What does "zero-sum political organizing" mean? No matter what you do, there will be the same number of people elected to office?
This really is like watching the post-apocalyptic tribes move in and someone says maybe if we stretched the skin of one of the giant mutant cows between those strange wall fragments it would ... keep the purple hail off, and then the walls could keep the wind out and we'd have someone to shelter. And someone else shoots the idea down because then the smoke from the fire would have nowhere to go.
What you're describing is so exactly the job that local newspapers are supposed to do and once did, certainly in this country. But of course when you peel away the advertising, it turns out that it's not one of the jobs anyone is prepared to pay them to do.
The gossip model is, from what I understand, the American Politico. The European version is different, as these things often are. Gossip would be tricky anyway, because of libel, and because outside the world of show biz there's probably not enough traffic to support sites.
The structural difficulty is that staying in the game is more important to most reporters than informing readers of any individual article. How many people do we know who would say, "I'm going to irretrievably piss off a large share of my professional contacts, and maybe make it impossible to do my job, for the sake of an amorphous group, most of whom will never have any idea what I did, and who probably wouldn't care much even if they did?" How many people would do that on a regular basis? And that's a best-case scenario, where the newspaper is willing to back up the reporter, where its owners are not in bed with (or even one and the same as) the people the reporter is calling out. In many small and medium-sized location, that's not a given at all.
That said, there usually are media that will answer those questions and more. The problem, from the average voter's point of view, is that this is the kind of information that wants to be expensive, rather than the kind that wants to be free.
Most states have some sort of newsletter that is a must-read for political types. A quick look confirms that the Tennessee Journal, which was the go-to medium when I had a little legislative involvement back in 19mumblety-mumble, still holds that post. It's $419 a year.
What does "zero-sum political organizing" mean?
What I mean is that politics is a case of one team wins and the other team loses. So its a constant battle between those teams, and sometimes you win, and sometimes the other guy wins. Ultimately, no matter how much effort goes into contesting a two-way election, about 50% of it is going to be wasted.
If there were multiple parties, even more effort would be wasted.
You could think of it as effort spent locating the general will instead of wasted.
I'm not saying its not worthy, I'm just saying its not my preferred means of working for change. There are so many other areas beyond politics that also demand attention, which don't feature us-against-them as the organizing principal. And those are the areas in which I would prefer to spend my energy.
I was thinking of starting a group to feed abandoned kittens, but the first meeting broke up as soon as I raised the "to whom" question.
I've been wanting to start a "Puppies for the Homeless" charity.
More seriously, stuff like research to advance the state of human knowledge, or institutional capacity building, or creating software and administrative tools to solve real-world problems. I'm lucky enough that I get to get to do stuff like that in my job, though lately I've been wondering if I could potentially take it freelance.
Advancing the state of human knowledge is great, but you have to work out how to publish the advance in the most beneficial way to your own career.
Yeah, publication through my employer is reasonably effective in that regard. But if I go freelance I lose my publisher.
I've been wanting to start a "Puppies for the Homeless" charity.
Not a bad idea. I get tired of hearing comfortable people carrying on about how if you're destitute you shouldn't waste money feeding a dog, without considering that if you're on the street a dog is just about all the personal security you've got.
What you're describing is so exactly the job that local newspapers are supposed to do and once did,
To be fair, if you read the local papers pretty carefully, you'd know the answers to these questions for a lot of (but not all) candidates. But most people don't do that, and the one-stop "inform yourself" sites don't give you that info.
everything I try to click on launches a form asking me for my zipcode
It's a site for telling you about your local races, so they need to know where you are.
They really don't. You can have another way of accessing the information for non-residents who are just curious about local politics.
It's not like you have to swear under penalty of perjury that you are giving a correct zip code.
Clicking on a specific candidate's name launches a form instead of information about the candidate. Seriously, fuck that.
I didn't mind the zip code. The required street address squiked me out.
Making it so you need to figure out a false address just to get a particular candidate's views does seem unnecessarily awkward.
As far as they know, I live at "1 Main Street."
Zip code boundaries don't always match district boundaries, do they? Force people to enter data and you're stuck with asking for a lot.
38: Our AG isn't running for reëlection, and I have no idea how to judge the candidates to replace her. One of them, from the other side of the state, called me to tell me that, even though he's a tough prosecutor blahblahblah, he thinks we incarcerate too many people, so that's a point in his favor. OTOH, I heard him talk shit about the current AG the other day, and I'm 95% certain that she's been ratfucked by the old boys' network that she's relentlessly (and almost certainly overzealously) attacked since entering office.
FWIW, what Ogged is asking for is really what endorsements are for: mainstream Dem A is endorsed by the FOP, the Carpenters, and the DLC, while mainstream Dem B is endorsed by BLM, SEIU, and Warren. That's an easy one, of course, and it still requires reading tea leaves (is C endorsed by Obama because they're awesome, or because of something transactional?), but it's probably more useful than reading position papers.
An endorsement tracking database sounds like it could be useful. You could use the data to make a pretty neat graph of what the cliques are.
Dem A is endorsed by the FOP, the Carpenters, and the DLC,
That must be fraudulent, Karen died over 30 years ago.
Hey, they just called again! He wants to make the system more fair for low level drug defendants and the mentally disabled.
I also get calls from beyond the grave from the Carpenters, but not about policy issues.
69 That strikes me as exactly the way to go to eliminate any subjective bias.
It's just "Why do birds...?" before I can slam down the phone.
It should also include who they were endorsed by in the past.
You'd still have some potential for bias because you'd need to select a pool of eligible endorsers or the thing would be astro-turfed into uselessness.
72: Asking you to donate money to your local public broadcasting station, right?
There's a certain state senator who I wouldn't vote for* solely because his robots have called me while I was eating dinner like six times now. Asshole robots.
* If I ever got to vote in a contested election for state senate.
Mostly we need fewer elections. The example I always use (including always here -- this blog is now old enough to be for me to be in the boring old man repeats his stories phase) is voting for local judges for LA County Superior Court. I'm a lawyer who routinely practices in local courts and with somewhat rare exceptions I don't know the judges at issue (there are hundreds throughout the county) or who to vote for in an election without a sitting judge. Why should anyone else know any more? Why are we electing people on a community college district? My guess is that most people who vote here barely know who their congressman is, let alone their state reps. And then city council, various city districts, county supervisors etc etc. Even if you wanted to, no one has the time at all to figure out what's going on in these elections. One party rule makes it even worse -- you're obviously not going to vote for the Republican, and voting among Democrats is almost exclusively done by looking at endorsements. But the breakup of machine politics makes even these harder to read.
Too many elections are totally anti-democratic. I'd much prefer some kind of party boss system -- at least that way you'd know who your rulers were and they'd have some accountability. Or less goddamn federalism and a parliamentary system. Or something.
I'm a lawyer who routinely practices in local courts and with somewhat rare exceptions I don't know the judges at issue (there are hundreds throughout the county) or who to vote for in an election without a sitting judge.
Yep. Me too.
I mean what I really want is personal dictatorship ruled solely by my capricious whims, but the fuckballs in the US military aren't making this happen -- yet.
The Missouri Plan seemed nice enough.
Probably patterns of donors would get you about as good information as endorsements. In addition to their own donors, it would be really valuable to see who a candidate has donated to in the past. PACs and whatnot complicate things, but not entirely.
In the vein of old men telling the same stories over and over, the problem you people have is insufficient democracy. Polities that are too big to be governed democratically should be divided up, representation should be expanded, or both. It is completely ridiculous that California has fewer legislators than Montana. It's also not our fault: our number is about right.
California should be about 5 states, each with at least 150 legislators. New York should be 3 or 4 states. You could divide them up in ways that make cultural and economic sense.
Electing minor officials is awful, but still better than most of the alternatives.
I don't like elected judges at all, but, again, I don't think the alternative is better for smaller polities.
84.2 The Silicon Valley venture capitalist plan to do that very thing seemed very self-serving.
79: You should see what it's like in MN where the lower level elections are non-partisan (by design), but when people sign up for a place on the ballot there's a space to indicate party affiliation. In the last mayoral election there were something like eleven different DFL candidates. People knew who the serious DFL candidates were and who the ones who were really just on the ballot for being there were because the news was actually covering that race seriously. But we're just lucky that the elections for the really low level stuff rarely have more than two or maybe three candidates, and they're usually one party challenging another.
I just want an API that will get me mosquito abatement district data and tell me which candidate is in the pocket of big DEET.
To the OP: how close is SF's League of Pissed-Off Voters' Voter Guide to what you want?
Sample:
Board of Supervisors District 3: Aaron Peskin This ain't Aaron Peskin's first rodeo. Aaron was on the Board 2000 to 2008, where he was a skilled legislator who pushed back on Gavin Newsom's bullshit, and he's proven to be a crafty negotiator. When the Mayor turned his back on the Flower Mart, Aaron stepped in and negotiated a deal that will preserve space for the flower dealers when the new owner redevelopments the place with office space upstairs. Aaron led the No Wall on the Waterfront campaign, which is why there'll be more affordable housing at Pier 70 and Mission Rock. Some people are trying to say he's "anti-development" and will oppose building new housing. But that's silly when you consider he was President of the Board that rezoned the Eastern half of the city, which led to all of the construction cranes we see around town.The current D3 Supervisor, Julie Christensen, was appointed by the Mayor and always votes the Mayor's way. She was the swing vote against a small pay raise for nonprofit workers who provide important services like health care, child care, veterans services! When the City is flush with cash from the economic boom, it's unconscionable to vote against a small bump in pay for those low-paid workers. She was also the swing vote against strengthening the City's short-term rental regulations. If she had voted for David Campos's proposal to make the City's regulation of Airbnb enforceable (or worked out a compromise between the proposals from Campos and the Mayor), Prop F would've never been on the ballot! :/
We need Aaron to stand up to Ed Lee!
Thing is, there's almost no voters who actually care about this kind of stuff (because most voters are deeply uninterested in politics full stop.) And the people who do know this stuff are either deeply untrustworthy and highly motivated to get outcomes they want (lobbyists, other politicians, obsessives), or else they want paid a lot of money to make up for the awful time they've had to put up with to get the info.
Alex H put together a thing for the European Politico that mapped lobbyist/UK Minister interactions in a somewhat similar manner to some of the suggestions upthread. It was pretty elegant, although it doesn't really answer the kind of soft question about who's mates with who. In fact, Alex H will have all sorts of ideas about this kind of civic app stuff.