In contemporary analytic philosophy an event or state of affairs is said to be overdetermined if there are more than one distinct, sufficient causes of it. Whereas there may unproblematically be recognised many different necessary conditions of the event's occurrence, no two distinct events may lay claim to be sufficient conditions, since this would lead to overdetermination. A much used example is that of firing squads, the members of which simultaneously firing at and 'killing' their targets. Apparently, no one member can be said to have caused the victims' deaths, since they would have been killed anyway. Overdetermination is problematic in particular from the viewpoint of a standard counterfactual understanding of causation, according to which an event is the cause of another event if and only if the latter would not have occurred, had the former not occurred. In order to employ this formula to actual complex situations, implicit or explicit conditions need to be accepted to be circumstantial, since the list of counterfactually acceptable causes would otherwise be impractically long (e.g. the earth's continued existence could be said to be the (necessary) cause of one drinking one's coffee). Unless a circumstance-clause is included, the putative cause to which one wishes to draw attention could never be considered sufficient, and hence not comply with the counterfactual analysis.  Wikipedia

 This website originated as a response to disgust over the nation's response to the 2006 mid-term elections. Even before 7 November, 2006, we had people all over print, broadcast and online media, appointed mandarins, Davids and gatecrashers, discussing what the reason for the results of the election would be and were. To make everyone live through that again, here are some of the highlights:

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION, FOLEYGATE, WE ABANDONED OUR CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES, IRAQ, BIASED LIBERAL MEDIA, REALIGNMENT ELECTION, MIDTERM REJECTION OF PRESIDENT, 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING.

No one has ever accused political science, much less, media driven partisan politics, of subtlety and sophistication in analysis, methodology and concept. This is the case to such a degree that the Wikipedia entry for overdetermination states that social scientists have different standards for truth than do philosophers and mathematicians:

There is, however, a strong division of views about the acceptability of representative sampling across different domains of study. To the philosopher, the representative sampling procedure has no justification whatsoever because it is not how truth is pursued in philosophy. "To the scientist, however, representative sampling is the only justified procedure for choosing individual objects for use as the basis of generalization, and is therefore usually the only acceptable basis for ascertaining truth." (Andrew A. Marino) [1]. It is important to understand this difference to steer clear of confusing prescriptions found in many web pages. - Wikipedia

Let's take a trip down the long, long avenue of what's wrong with the way that people talk about the 2006 midterm elections:

• In 2006, we had A races for the United States House of Representatives, B races for the United States Senate, C gubernatorial races, D state House races, E state senate races, F assorted state office races and E various, at-large ballots. To pretend that all of these discrete races can be boiled down to one and only one single factor is either demonstration of sufficient obtusity to disqualify one from public life or deliberate dishonesty. 

• To pretend that you can seamlessly combine any of the above F races as you would from a salad bar with no problems is not intellectually honest.

• There is this pervasive myth, born of a human need to simply, perhaps, that elections always turn on one single thing. It's not only a simple story, but it's a great one, fraught with excitement.

  • Michael Dukakis lost in 1988 because people thought he was a cold, bloodless liberal after he said he wouldn't seek the death penalty for someone who raped his wife.

  • Everything was going against Clinton in '92 till he turned around and rebuked an obscure rapper and demonstrated to America that he was willing to be tough on his own constituency.

  • The only problem that Dole had in '96 was that he was old and boring when running against a glamourous younger couple.

  • Gore lost in 2000 because he was a boring, establishment candidate running against a young and exciting governor.

• Pollsters and consultants have a vested interest in promoting this myth, as it serves as a practical demonstration of the value of their services.

• Journalists have a vested interest in promoting this myth, as it provides a practical demonstration of the degree of their skill.

• Parties and non-party actors in elections have a vested interest in promoting this myth, as it seemingly demonstrates the popularity and strength of their agendas.

Now, here are two seemingly contradictory points:

• Most of these statements aren't backed up by valid data or valid statistical analysis and

• Not everything is measurable as data.

So what, then, is this all about? Because of these two points, we postulate that it is likely that elections are overdetermined phenomena. Where they are not overdetermined, they are more complex than we are led to believe. Through development of content on this blog, we hope to test both parts of this hypothesis. We also hope to make public the knowledge that it takes to test this hypothesis