“Voters look to their neighbours to determine their decision. John Allen Paulos explains why a few swing states of borderline electors will settle the US presidency”
In recent years the US electorate has become highly polarised. Large contiguous regions of the country (the red states) favour the Republicans, other large contiguous regions favour the Democrats (the blue states), and relatively small regions in between (which we might label purple) constitute the so-called battleground states.There are many reasons for this dichotomy, but some light may be shed by an abstract model introduced in 1999 by Joshua Epstein of the Brookings Institution (Learning to be Thoughtless: Social Norms and Individual Computation).
Imagine that around a big circle are millions of people who are asked daily whether they intend to vote for George Bush or John Kerry. Assume that they have an initial favourite, randomly choosing Bush or Kerry, but that they are very conformist and decide daily to consult some of their immediate neighbours. After polling those on either side of them, they adjust their vote to conform with that of the majority of their neighbours.
How many people each voter consults varies from day to day and is determined by the fact that they are “lazy statisticians”. They expand their samples of adjacent voters only as much as necessary, wishing always to conform with minimum exertion. MORE
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