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Notes -
I would love to see a work of fiction where each side conspires among themselves in hushed tones about how, even though their candidate is garbage, they have to pretend to be strong enthusiastic unqualified supporters, lest they express any honest reservations and thereby let the even-worse candidate win instead. In the climax of the story, everybody discovers that this is what everybody is doing, and for once they break the hysteresis of plurality voting and elect a decent third-party candidate instead.
But back to non-fiction, obviously that's not what's consciously happening, because people just aren't that good at deliberately lying to each other and keeping it a secret; we have to do it unconsciously. That's probably why we evolved half of our cognitive biases: to help us accomplish useful deception of others via the intermediate step of lying to ourselves first. "Gosh, it's a good thing my candidate is so great, because otherwise we'd be mostly screwed either way", is the sort of thing people actually come to believe. In the climax of reality, we all just keep lobotomizing ourselves in such fashion to a greater and greater extent, because to reverse course would require reducing our present persuasiveness and admitting the magnitude of our past mistakes, and none of that is something we can easily do when we've evolved to try to impress others.
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