Biden seems to be losing. What should his campaign be doing about this? Submit your own answers, and you'll get trader bonuses when others trade on them.
This market will resolve after the election based on my opinion of what the Biden campaign should have been doing in March onwards to make a dem win more likely. Even if a democrat does win, this market will resolve based on what I think they could have been doing now to make that win more likely.
Advice I wouldn't send back in time resolves NO, advice I would send back in time resolves YES. If it's a really tough call I may resolve an option to N/A, but more likely I would opt to resolve to NO if I'm not sure.
Please submit only a single piece of advice per answer, ideally one sentence.
Try to keep advice strongly worded, like telling Biden to do a lot more or a lot less of something instead of slightly more or slightly less. Don't submit "keep doing what you're doing", I've got one option to cover that already.
Be aware of trade-offs in your advice. If you tell the campaign to focus more on one thing, it means they'll focus less on other things.
Keep the advice unambiguous, requiring no clarification in the comments. All the information should be in the option itself.
Please try to avoid duplicating other submissions. I may N/A submissions for quality control.
While this does resolve to my opinion, I will probably take a very outside view approach to resolution. If respectable political analysts like Nate Cohn and David Shor all say that "Biden should have done X" then I will probably resolve the option "Do X" to YES. If you want a model of my own biases nonetheless, imagine that I am Barack Obama.
Note that any advice to the Biden campaign would also be counted as advice to anyone else who hypothetically replaced Biden as the nominee.
I'm setting the resolution date for December, but may postpone if I still want to wait for more thorough postmortems, like this one.
These rules should be considered to be in Draft Form until this disclaimer is removed. I may update the exact resolution rules if anyone has suggestions for improvements within the spirit of the market.
I will not trade on this market.
See also:
1,000
3.00Suggestion: making all metropolitan statistical areas of >1M people independent states, to harness the electoral college bias towards small states
This also has the advantage of preventing left leaning cities from being forced to live under right wing policies for issues that fall under state jurisdiction such as abortion
@TheAllMemeingEye Will that have much effect in practice? It seems that only public employees would actually get this day off this year. Every employer I've had set their holidays before the year started. And every employer I've had already allowed us to take time off work to vote.
@TheAllMemeingEye I will endorse this as a good option for the prediction market, as we will be able to verify after the election which groups underperformed in the turnout.
I'm ambivalent as to whether this is a good idea. On the one hand, it would increase the turnout of employed people, whose votes are probably wiser than unemployed people. On the other hand, we'd lose a whole day of productivity. It wouldn't even be a fun day off: a random Tuesday in November, the week after Halloween and three weeks before Thanksgiving, on a day when partisan bickering is at its worst...not a good vacation day.
In terms of helping the Democrats, I think this plan would backfire. Early-voters lean Democrat, while election day voters learn Trump. And I don't have data for this, but I feel like the general motivation of GOP voters has decreased since the collapse of the religious right, while Democrats have become more disciplined.
@Dynd Because the market is specifically asking "What should the Biden campaign be doing right now to increase their chances of winning the election?"
@Dynd I would go further and restrict voting to just married people and raise the minimum voting age to 25.
@AlQuinn Why only to married people? Also, how many people will get married on paper do that they can vote, making the institution meaningless in the long run?
Edit: it's also important to keep in mind that the true value of democracy isn't its incredible decision making but the transfer of power without violence. That's the true value and why we need it. If you exclude portions of the population from the process, especially military-age ones you undermine this value and increase the likelihood of a violent revolution that destroys everything.
@Enlil Well, that's just a luxury belief of mine; I agree there are practical problems with it. But regarding the age thing, my experience has been people who are very young adults tend to not have properly developed brains and have especially bad instincts wrt political choices. The marriage thing is just a way of filtering out additional people who are non-serious people, even though that is not anything like a perfect heuristic. I would also favor allowing those in the military to vote as well.
And yes, the point of this is to make better decisions rather than kill ourselves on the singular blind pursuit of "inclusivity" or whatever. I mean, look at what we have now with the current system: a president well on the path towards dementia, a ridiculously vapid candidate for POTUS, another ridiculous candidate for POTUS who is nearly 80, a VP candidate who has sex with sofas. Can we really do much worse? As a cat dad, I am terrified of Haitians these days and keep the blinds drawn.
@AlQuinn I gotta say, claiming your political opponents don't have properly developed brains is an odd stance for you to take, one might even say hypocritical, given the unhinged nature of your proposals that seem picked to specifically increase right wing representation
@AlQuinn if you're convinced that the young aren't able to vote smartly, and you also dislike that Biden and Trump are senile, then at the very least you could be consistent and remove right wing bias by proposing a corresponding maximum voting age as well
@AlQuinn you could probably calibrate it to have a symmetrical cutoff of age group median IQ or something if you're worried about leftist bias
@TheAllMemeingEye Wisdom has a decisively right-wing bias, it's true. I'm fine with a max age cutoff as well.
@AlQuinn given the following data
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence
where "crystallised intelligence" seems to roughly mean accumulated knowledge, and "fluid intelligence" seems to roughly mean problem solving ability, would you be comfortable with a maximum voting age of around 55, the approximate halfway point between the ages at which crystal and fluid intelligence decline below that of 25 year olds?
@TheAllMemeingEye I would go to 65-70 because crystalized intelligence is more important for political judgement
@AlQuinn Obviously the current issues aren't caused by an particular age group. The issues we are seeing aren't limited to young or old, but IMO are clearly caused by a) our broken election system that drives towards to parties and extremism and b) our broken information systems and media (both social and legacy).
Instead of disenfranchising and aggravating large groups of the populace from the process together with anyone sharing their lived experience, we should adopt a better election system than first past the post. IMO, our best options are approval or STAR which would advantage compromise options.
A large part of the issue is though that most voters are shockingly low-information voters. To some degree this is reasonable, since sufficiently understanding most areas we discuss in politics takes substantial effort. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to spent huge portions of their time catching up on those. Instead we might adopt election by jury where a random sample of the population gets to request education by experts and then choses the representative (see https://www.electionbyjury.org/ for a better explanation).
Now, what to do about our unhealthy information infrastructure, is an issue I have no decent answer to. Clearly Harari is right though when he says in Nexus that the truth does not rise to the top. I am also concerned about the vulnerability of liberal democracies to external propaganda. Again all age groups seem vulnerable to this and all that excluding large parts of the population from decision making will do is drive us closer to civil war, especially in the current atmosphere.