Hmm, I still don’t think this response quite addresses the intuition. Various groups yield outsized political influence owing to their higher rates of voting—seniors, a lot of religious groups, post-grad degree ppl, etc. Nonetheless, they vote in a lot of uncompetitive races where it would seem their vote doesn’t matter. It seems wrong that an individual vote of theirs has much EV in an uncompetitive race. On the other hand, it seems basically impossible to mediate strategy such that there is still a really strong norm of voting in competitive races but not in uncompetitive races (and besides it’s not clear that that would even suffice given that uncompetitive races would become competitive in the absence of a very large group). I think all the empirical evidence shows that groups that turn out more in competitive races also do so in uncompetitive races.
Hmm, I still don’t think this response quite addresses the intuition. Various groups yield outsized political influence owing to their higher rates of voting—seniors, a lot of religious groups, post-grad degree ppl, etc. Nonetheless, they vote in a lot of uncompetitive races where it would seem their vote doesn’t matter. It seems wrong that an individual vote of theirs has much EV in an uncompetitive race. On the other hand, it seems basically impossible to mediate strategy such that there is still a really strong norm of voting in competitive races but not in uncompetitive races (and besides it’s not clear that that would even suffice given that uncompetitive races would become competitive in the absence of a very large group). I think all the empirical evidence shows that groups that turn out more in competitive races also do so in uncompetitive races.