Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
Now that Scott Walker’s in the race, with John Kasich on tap for next week, the GOP’s 2016 field soon will total 16 presidential candidates. We can rank them, 1-16. Or go by tiers. Or pick names out of a hat. My choice: divide the field into four brackets, four candidates apiece, which I’ve done in
The Non-Conformists
I’d prefer “resolute,” but the brackets look good.
Might I make a suggestion: choose one of the many powerful voting systems developed over the years instead of the bracket approach (aka, Sequential pair-wise voting). In fact, what would be fun would be to try out different voting schemes each week:
http://illuminations.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Content/Lessons/Resources/9-12/Voting-Sheet1.pdf.
Range voting is a good choice: it uses a ratings ballot where each voter rates each candidate with a number within a specified range, such as 0 to 10…The scores for each candidate are summed, and the candidate with highest sum is the winner.
Range voting allows voters to express preferences of varying strengths.
Range voting satisfies the monotonicity criterion, i.e. raising your vote’s score for a candidate can never hurt their chances of winning, and lowering it can never help their chances. Also, range voting satisfies the participation criterion, i.e. casting a sincere vote can never result in a worse election winner (from your point of view) than if you had simply abstained from voting.
Range voting is independent of clones in the sense that if there is a set of candidates such that every voter gives the same rating to every candidate in this set, then the probability that the winner is in this set is independent of how many candidates are in the set.
In summary, range voting satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the participation criterion, the consistency criterion, independence of irrelevant alternatives, resolvability criterion, reversal symmetry etc …
Bracket 3 — The Right Stuff ???? Lindsey Graham ????
I would vote for Hillary Clinton before I would vote for Lindsey Graham; and I would never vote for Hillary Clinton.
Need to a create a Losers bracket.
I’m holding out for Thad McCotter.
I do not see how to vote, so I will vote in public.
Round One
Bracket One:
Ben Carson (4 seed) (or any sentient life form) over Donald Trump (1)
Carly Florina (3) over Ted Crus (2)
Bracket Two:
Jeb Bush (1) over Chris Christie (4)
Marco Rubio (2) over John Kasich (3)
Bracket Three:
Scott Walker (1) over Rick Santorum (4)
Lindsey Graham (3) over Rick Perry (2)
Bracket Four
George Pataki (4) over Mike Huckabee (1)
Bobby Jindal (3) over Rand Paul (2)
Round Two
Bracket One
Carly Florina (3) over Ben Carson (4)
Bracket Two
Marco Rubio (2) over Jeb Bush (1)
Bracket Three
Scott Walker (1) over Lindsey Graham (3)
Bracket Four
Bobby Jindal (3) over George Pataki (4)
Final Four
Since I do know know how the brackets will be arranged, I will put them in order:
1. Marco Rubio
2. Carly Florina (#1 Veep choice, or Secretary of Treasury)
3. Scott Walker (#2 Veep choice, or Secretary of Labor)
4. Bobby Jindal (Secretary of HHS)
PS I’d love to see a Dream Cabinet. My nominations:
Secretary of State: Jeb Bush
Secretary of Defense: Lindsey Graham
Attorney General: Ted Cruz
Secretary of Treasury: Carly Fiorina
Secretary of Agriculture: Mike Huckabee
Secretary of Interior: Rand Paul
Secretary of Labor: Scott Walker
Secretary of Commerce: Carly Fiorina or Jeb Bush
Secretary of HHS: Bobby Jindal
Secretary of Education: Chris Christie or Ben Carson
Secretary of HUD: George Pataki
U.S. Supreme Court: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham
Surgeon General: Ben Carson
There needs to be a vertical line in the middle of the bracket where Mitt swoops in at the convention to save the day ;)
Re #5.
Fun stuff, really fun. It will spur a lot of discussion, making public choices and then weathering the criticism for some of them. However…
If you really want to gauge who will end up the victor in the nomination process, this doesn’t do more than give you each respondent’s favorite pick. You can process those statistics to discover who is picked most frequently, but that “winner” will only have ~10-15% of vote….So how much do we really learn then. We need a better voting scheme, one that accounts for members 2nd and 3rd picks, along with the relative strength of those attachments, in order to aggregate with more confidence.
I will try and explain better what I mean here soon.
Still, great fun so far…
(At the risk of hijacking a thread) If anyone wants to try the Range Voting System, to provide a generally well respected scheme by which to ‘best’ select a single candidate from a list, you would resubmit the list below with 10 votes apportioned (in front of the name) in any way you want among the candidates. I would undertake to sum these up and provide a running account of who is leading the pack, how the field looks in comparison:
Here is my offering to start the voting off:
(remember total of 10 votes – apportioned freely)
#Votes_Candidate Name (alphabetical order)
Manfred Arcane, have you noticed that box at the top right of the page labeled Start A Conversation? Just saying…
Where do we vote to take Big Bird off of welfare?
Sorry. Shall I take this elsewhere?
As an alternative, we could institute a crash program to resume construction of the superconducting supercollider around Waxahatchie, TX, and then accelerate pairs of candidates in opposite directions around the ring.
Democrats go on the linear accelerator.
Santorum and Jindal should be switched. Santorum is a non-starter. Jindal really has the “right stuff.”