An intermission from the presidential horse race

For all the problems with US presidential elections, US congressional elections are arguably worse. The US president is at least usually in line with the popular vote; the US congress never is.

The two chambers of congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, suffer from opposite problems. The House of Representatives has one member elected by each district, but the district lines are redrawn every ten years by politicians. Thus politicians can control their own reelection by the process called gerrymandering.

The Senate, on the other hand, never redraws its district lines. Instead, each state elects two senators. The state lines are the result of gerrymandering from a long time ago, but at least aren’t under the power of current politicians. Unfortunately, that means that the Senate is never proportional to the population sizes of the states, and heavily favors rural regions.

Although the Senate is blatantly unrepresentative of the US, the House arguably has it worse. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you can tell by how Republican the House is. Although Hillary is winning the popular vote and Democrats are likely to win Senate majority, the House will comfortably remain under Republican control.
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In a voting system like we have in the US (“plurality voting”), we may apply something called the median voter theorem. The median voter theorem says that in a face-off between two candidates, the candidate closer to the median voter wins. Here we’re assuming a one-dimensional preference scale (e.g. left to right) and that voters choose the candidate who is closest to them on the scale. The winning strategy for each candidate is to move closer to the median until they are nearly indistinguishable, and each has about 50% of the vote.

As a result, you can see many politicians shifting their views over time, carefully tracking the median view. In the US, voters seem to be uncomfortable with this optimal strategy, and thus they demand that politicians put on a show of having believed in their current views all along. And then when politicians visibly contradict their previous views it’s used as a gotcha. This is incredibly tedious.

Of course, it does not really seem like the major candidates follow the median. Trump and Clinton, are, after all, very far apart! In fact, I’m puzzled why US presidential elections don’t hew more closely to the median voter theorem. I imagine this is a subject of study for political scientists, but I only have baseless speculation to offer. And of course I’m ultimately trying to say something about the current election cycle.
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